You might want to try going to your County Engineer and ask him if you can look at your counties original survey notes. Study the notes and find out if there were any old trails that passed by this tree. This tree might not be real old but if it was formed by man, it could have replaced another, older tree that died. If the tree was deformed by man, he was probably creating a landmark for some reason. Maybe to mark a trail by giving direction or maybe to show a junction of several trails. If you find the trail, you might want to look for similar markers. If you think, for some reason, it might be some type of marker connected to something of value, there's probably going to be something else there, maybe some stone markers. I've seen a treasure location marked by one marker before and the treasure was buried right under the marker. That was my grandma's slop bucket that my grampa buried a jar of silver coins under. If the tree grew like that naturally, it's really cool.
