Wooden Elephant

$60.00

There is evidence that “living memory” reaches backwards around three generations. Stories attached to family heirlooms can reach longer than that. My father’s great-grandfather served in the Philippines during the Spanish/American War (late 1890’s). At some point around that time—either in the Philippines or perhaps at a circus—he saw an elephant and was greatly impressed. Many decades later in the 1920s or ‘30s, while visiting one of his daughters at her husband’s dairy farm, he took a bag and a handsaw and liberated various exposed tree roots from the stump fences used to coral the cows.

The selective criteria for tree roots to be liberated was that they “looked like elephants,” or, at least, like there was an elephant within them. The tree roots were carved to make their elephant-ness more obvious to the rest of the world, resulting in 15–20 elephants. However they were originally given out, those elephants have been spread far and wide through that branch of my family.

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Wooden Elephant

Berea(2)

Church(6)

Family(20)

Handcrafts(10)

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Berea⁽²⁾

Church⁽⁶⁾

Family⁽²⁰⁾

Handcrafts⁽¹⁰⁾

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