Statehouse trees will become works of art

BOISE – The Statehouse lawn may have lost its trees as part of the Capitol remodel/wings project. But the state isn’t losing the wood, nor, hopefully, its history. Woodworkers from around the state are being asked to transform the salvaged lumber from the Northern red oak planted in 1971 by the Sons and Daughters of Idaho Pioneers, from the maple planted by Theodore Roosevelt in 1903 and all the other trees into objects for display in the remodeled Capitol.

The wood, which took about six weeks to cut into pieces, is drying in storage in Eagle, Boise GOP Rep. Max Black said.

He’s a legislator and a woodworker overseeing the salvage project. Close to 100 woodworkers from around the state proposed projects for the Statehouse wood.

There’s enough to go around, and even a little more, if more woodworkers have ideas to pitch.

Idahoans have proposed making a range of objects to donate to the state, including desks, walking sticks, Windsor chairs and pens, Black said.

He’s even contributing his own talents.

He plans to use pieces from the three trees planted by presidents, an Ohio buckeye planted in 1911 by William Howard Taft, a water oak planted by Benjamin Harrison in 1891 and the Roosevelt rock sugar maple, to make a miniature steam engine.

“All three of the presidents who planted trees on the grounds would have arrived in Idaho in such an engine,” he said.

Black expects all the wood to be dry and in the hands of woodworkers by the end of the year.

In certain cases, a long drying process wasn’t necessary. The Roosevelt tree blew down years ago and had been curing on its own in a closet under the Statehouse steps ever since.

The Taft tree was technically alive, but barely. Most of its limbs and trunk were hollow, Black said. The wood was dry even before the tree came down.

Paulette Shelledy, a woodworker in Rigby, is waiting for her wood to make walking sticks, one for Idaho and one for her daughter, Vhiana, 5.

“I’m using pieces from the Martin Luther King tree,” said Shelledy, about the tree planted in the 1980s on the Capitol grounds by the NAACP.

It means a lot to the family to have a piece of this tree because of Vhiana’s mixed-race heritage. Shelledy plans to decorate both walking sticks with hand-beaded African symbols.

Boisean Steve Young is one of the few woodworkers who started on his project already. He’s making an urn-shaped vessel out of the Taft tree – he likes the patterns on a buckeye.

In his fastidious home shop, the 26-year Army veteran is working on a lathe. The elegant urn he’s creating started out as a 35-pound hunk of wood.

“Turning” wood requires wood that’s still soft and green. Young will shape it into a rough form, dry it, then work and shape it until it’s smooth.

Sharon Becker, who works at Woodcraft in Boise, fell in love with an odd piece of wood, a natural, flat ring cut out of a piece of scrap wood, when Max Black brought it into the shop.

She liked the unusual grain of the wood. Black gave the piece to her when he saw how much she liked it. The wood is still “speaking” to her, she said, but so far her ideas include a carved trout jumping from the center of the ring.

Forty trees on the Statehouse grounds that had to come out because of the remodeling project were transplanted to other sites on the Capitol Mall.

The 11 trees that were too large or too sickly to move were cut into lumber.