In 1973, Woodstock came close to being victimized by a nationwide architectural tragedy. The Old McHenry County Couthouse had lost its county government tenants, and with the US in the grip of the Urban Renewal movement – which erased landmarks like New York’s Pennsylvania Station across the country in the name of efficiency and cost savings – there was a very strong consideration to tear the historic structure down.
With spring finally arriving in full, the Woodstock Independent had begun last week by planning a piece on one of the town’s newest and most intriguing pieces of public art. It was grimly fitting that on that same day, April 15, lovers of human-made beauty in Woodstock and around the world were given a reminder: take nothing you have for granted.
For professional woodcarver Brent White, a Woodstock resident at 319 Calhoun St., it was a much more personal experience of loss that inspired him to put time and energy into a new creation. “I believe the most exquisite beauty is found in nature,” White said. When he and his wife Karen chose 319 Calhoun for their address, a great part of the decision had come from the 250 year old oak tree that stood at the front of the property. “We loved that tree,” he said. Then last year, in the middle of a spring storm, “we heard this big boom and we felt the earth shake… half the tree broke off.”
Since the tree was technically on a City of Woodstock right-of-way, White said, crews had cleared away the remains by noon the next day – but graciously, and at his request, they left him the stump. Visitors to the address can see what has replaced the Whites’ oak tree: a gigantic tortoise, curiously adorned with sea monsters and a full, vividly-colored world map.
The legend of the “world turtle,” in which the Earth is carried through the heavens on the shell of a turtle or tortoise, has made multiple appearances in mythology around the globe (or, perhaps, the Turtle). Native American mythology depicts the world – specifically North America – as an island built up on the back of an enormous sea turtle, while the East Indian cosmos (or a popular misconception of it, appearing in the film “Urusei Yatsura: Beautiful Dreamer” and in Terry Pratchett’s “Discworld” series) depicts a disc held up by elephants with a turtle underneath them.
White’s tortoise – which he affectionately calls “Humphrey,” after a real-life animal once kept by his wife – was inspired by this worldwide “mytheme.” With as much detail as a wood router could provide, White depicted islands, coastlines, ocean waves, and the mythical leviathans of Age-Of-Exploration cartography on its back. While the weather has been too gloomy for the last half-year to fully appreciate his colorful tribute to the living Earth, White said that he’s gotten admirers all the same. “People stop by and talk to me about it whenever they see me outside,” he said. “I’ve had a guy from New Zealand stop by, he said he was visiting and had to take a look at it.”
Like many around the world (French or not), White expressed a sense of regret at last week’s era-defining loss of the Notre Dame roof and spire. He counted himself among the lucky Americans to have seen the intact building in person – and while his own love of beauty leans more to the natural world, the burning of the structure’s 800-year-old woodwork, made up in some parts with trees that had started growing 1300 years ago, was a profound statement on the loss of that world as well.
“The building material’s just not there anymore,” White said. “If you ever go into the attic of the Opera House, you can see some big old timbers in there [that were cut down] 150 years ago. And you just don’t see that anymore.” In France, the marring of one of civilization’s great monuments comes with a cruel reminder of the cost of civilization itself: the country has no native, old-growth forests left with trees big enough to remake the cathedral just as it was.
Woodstock’s brush with architectural tragedy had a happier end: in November 1974, the Old Courthouse was saved when the National Park Service recognized it on the National Register of Historic Places. As the pessimists might have predicted, a headache-inducing struggle to find both tenants and maintenance funds for the building has continued to this day.
But its presence on the Woodstock Square, along with the Opera House and other historic structures, has guaranteed Woodstock’s reputation as a haven for Victorian architecture in the Midwest. For all of its 45-year reprieve from death, the Old Courthouse has been a pillar not just for Woodstock’s downtown economy, but for its common culture and its shared sense of community.
Brent White has done his part to add a win to that column of public beauty, which all too often seems to be marked with losses. While the human eye in 2019 is filled everywhere with commercial “big boxes,” formless, “guess-the-meaning” sculptures, and a rapidly decaying natural world, pedestrians reaching the far West end of Calhoun St. can take the time to appreciate something rare – a tortoise with the world on its back, and a work of art doing its best to pay tribute to an oak tree.
Willcockson Wordsmithing 