A Polk Street homeowner is lucky the 100-plus-year-old white oak tree in the front yard of his rental home didn’t damage the house or hurt the tenant.

Herman Chesney, who has owned the home across from Marietta’s Northcutt Stadium for 35 years, said he received a phone call around 7 a.m. Wednesday from the renter that the tree had fallen sometime around 1:30 a.m.

“(The renter) sleeps in the front bedroom of the house ... I told him he was lucky the tree didn’t fall towards the house,” Chesney said.

Within the last five years, Chesney said he had a tree crew come out and trim nearly 50 percent of the tree’s limbs to prevent any possible destruction, and recently he had two other older trees cut down.

Crews from the City of Marietta arrived on the scene around 2 a.m. and worked until noon Wednesday to clean up the debris that fell across Polk Street during the night.

The tree, which measures about 4 feet in diameter, looked healthy, according to Rich Deckman, an arborist with the city of Marietta, but there were some dead spots around the roots.

“If I would have come out in the last few weeks and walked around the base, I wouldn’t have seen anything wrong with it,” he said. “But now I see a few issues.”

Deckman said the fallen tree was one of the oldest trees in the city limits outside those in Glover Park on the Marietta Square.

“You don’t find too many this big,” he said.

Mulch from the cleanup will be taken to the Marietta Board of Lights and Water site off North Marietta Parkway, and the wood will be hauled to the county landfill, Deckman said.

Chesney will be left with a large, potentially expensive cleanup. He is responsible for the portion of the fallen tree not in the city’s right of way.

The tree was the third within a block of Chesney’s house that has been either removed or fallen in the last 18 months.

“All these trees along here we keep an eye on in relationship to the wires,” Deckman said about the Polk Street area.

Another tree fell Wednesday in front of West Side Elementary School less than a mile down from Chesney’s house.

The wire fence around the front playground was damaged, but it didn’t appear to cross the road when it fell.

Otherwise, Cobb and Marietta police say they didn’t receive other calls about downed trees or power outages since a storm whipped through the area Tuesday night, followed by wind gusts of up to 40 mph into Wednesday morning.

The only other report was a large limb that fell over a line near Still Elementary School on Casteel Road in west Cobb sometime before 9 a.m.

Cobb EMC, Cobb Fire and Cobb Police all responded to the scene to clean up the area quickly