MORNING STAR - The boot tree is no more.
A large oak tree in Garland County that once wore as many as 80 pairs of cowboy boots in its limbs has been toppled. Many of the boots still cling to the broken branches; others are scattered around the rotted stump like acorns.
The tree stood atop a hill in a pasture where horses and cows once grazed on the ranch of John Smith, at about 1200 Ridgeway Road just east of Hot Springs. The boot tree was a well-known landmark that had been photographed and visited by people from many states. It had worn the boots for about 20 years. The falling of the tree comes less than a year after the death of Smith’s wife, Pauline,who had the inspiration to create the novelty as an amusement for travelers passing through the Morning Star community.
In the late 1980s, Smith says, “my wife and I were driving about on a vacation visit to Eureka Springs. We came upon a long line of cars and a considerable traffic jam. We thought there was a wreck, but when we got there a tree alongside the road had 200 to 300 pairs of shoes, tied by their strings, hanging from the limbs. Those other cars were just slowing down and stopping to gawk at the shoe tree.”
Smith says his wife told him: “John, we ought to do that with all those old boots you have at home. We’ve got to do something to get them out of my way. ”
When the couple returned to their farm, he dug out about a dozen pairs of boots he no longer wore, tied each pair together by a copper wire and slung them as high as he could into the branches of an oak that grew beside the iron gate between his corral and Ridgeway Road. When his cowboy friends saw what he had done, they donated castoff boots. A couple of cobblers gave him a large number of boots they couldn’t repair. Soon the tree held “more boots than I could count,” Smith says.
Travelers would often stop to ask about it, particularly if he was outside mowing grass or working.
“It happened so often I could scarcely get my work done,” Smith says.
Many have photographed the tree. To see the boot tree before it fell, go to panoramio.com/photo/14536658 or flickr.com/photos/sunblurr/3127216036.
A few years ago the tree began to die and the large limbs that supported the boots began to break and crash to earth.
“I became afraid that the entire tree would fall across the road … and someone might get hurt.”
On Oct. 24, Smith had a bulldozer that was doing other work on his property push the boot tree over. When the tractor barely bumped it, it toppled. The trunk was rotten at its base; termites and woodpeckers had taken their toll on the old oak.
“It was as rotten as a tooth that just falls out of your head,” Smith says.
Inside one of the boots, a bluebird’s nest was found. The baby birds were long gone, since the season for fledging had passed.
Smith is a retired operator of Smith Brothers Grocery in Fountain Lake. After his retirement, he raised horses and cows on his 120 acre ranch and was in the feed business.
“My wife wanted me to get out of the cattle business because the fences kept breaking, so before her death, about a year ago, I sold the last of my cows.” The couple were married 61 years.
The boot tree may be gone, but Smith’s quaintly adorned frame house is worth a trip down Ridgeway Road if you are in the neighborhood. It has a wide, inviting front porch. The yard is decorated with wagon wheels, a windmill, yard swing, dinner bell, hand-operated water pump and iron silhouettes of a cowboy and his horse.
“Since the tree has fallen,” Smith says, “some of my neighbors have stopped by to tell me how much they and their children have enjoyed the boot tree through the years and how much they will miss it.”
But will Smith miss the boot tree?
“I won’t miss the tree so much as I will miss the people stopping to ask me about it, and getting to tell them about how Pauline started it all.”
Style, Pages 53 on 11/10/2013