How a tree trunk came to library
By James Card
In the basement of the Waupaca Area Public Library is the children’s department and the exhibit room. Down there is a giant, gnarled-yet-smooth tree trunk positioned atop a wooden platform. The trunk is hollowed out and split into two halves.
It is a cottonwood tree from the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point campus that was dying and turning into a hazard. As it was being removed in 1998, sculptor Bill McKee walked by and asked for a piece of it. He brought it back to his studio via a front-end loader.
He debarked the trunk and chiseled out the core.
The process took four weeks and the finished wood sculpture is upside down to the way the tree grew. Inside is a small bench and while McKee was working on it, he pictured someone inside of the trunk reading a book.
It found a home at Dragonwings Bookstore, an independent bookstore with a focus on young readers. The wood sculpture became known as the Dragon’s Reading Tree and was a focal point in the store for many years.
In 2014, owner Ellen Davis donated it to the children’s department of the Waupaca Area Public Library. She relocated Dragonwings across the street in The Bookcellar at 110 S. Main St., creating a bookstore within a bookstore – and a restaurant, too, as Little Fat Gretchen’s adjoins the bookstore and can be entered through an interior door.
“She wanted the kids of Waupaca to have it. It’s like that piano in your basement: it’s never leaving. It is the place of imaginative play. Every kid that comes in here is either running a restaurant or an ice cream shop or a post office,” said Sue Abrahamson, youth librarian.
The tree is reminiscent of a famous children’s adventure novel. In the Newbery Award-winning book, “My Side of the Mountain,” 12-year-old Sam Gribley runs away from home and survives in the Catskill Mountains by foraging plants, trapping and falconry. Sam takes shelter inside of a hollow tree that would be similare the one in the library.