Story highlights Tree was featured in 1994's "The Shawshank Redemption"

High winds cause damaged oak tree to fall

(CNN) One of the most famous trees in cinematic history is gone. The white oak from the movie "The Shawshank Redemption" has fallen near Mansfield, Ohio.

The oak made its debut in 1994 near the movie's end when Morgan Freeman's character, the recently paroled prisoner Ellis Boyd "Red" Redding, follows clues to the tree's location. There he digs up and opens a box buried near the base containing a letter and cash to buy a bus ticket to see Andy Dufresne, an old friend who had escaped from prison and fled to Mexico.

The tree, Dufresne had told Redding, was where he had proposed to his wife. Dufresne, played by Tim Robbins, was unjustly sent to prison in her killing.

"Promise me, Red. If you ever get out... find that spot," Dufresne tells Redding one day in prison.

In Stephen King's manuscript, the tree occupied a field in Buxton, Maine, but in real life the scene was shot 810 miles away in Richland County, Ohio.

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