photo by: Mike Yoder

Lawrence resident April Dwyer is pictured in November 2021 standing beneath the pin oak that her mom, Carol Francis, planted in 1976 in reaction to trees up the street having been bulldozed.

When April Dwyer drives down West Sixth Street she’s treated to a towering reminder of her late mother’s grit.

The enormous pin oak on the grounds of Pinckney Elementary School, planted by her mother, Carol Francis, nearly a half-century ago is something like her mother’s backbone: It has weathered a lot of storms.

Francis died six years ago at age 87, and the tree — which could easily live another 100 years — has become increasingly meaningful to Dwyer, who is now 66.

Dwyer vividly remembers the day in 1976 when her mom called her at her KU sorority and told her to get over to Pinckney on the double. It was Dwyer’s 21st birthday, and apparently her welcoming into official adulthood was going to be planting a tree with her mom, who was “furious” over developers having bulldozed some trees up the street at Sixth and Maine.

When Dwyer talks about her mother, phrases like “Oh, she was furious,” “She was up in arms” frequently come up as she affectionately recounts her mom’s countless stands against injustices both large and small — particularly wrongs against the natural world.

“She was all about nature and saving trees,” Dwyer says. “That was just one of her things.” Some of her other “things” were historic preservation, Girl Scouts and outdoor pursuits. Her obituary notes that she logged over 1,400 miles in a canoe with the Ozark Wilderness Waterways Club.

photo by: Journal-World

In this newspaper clipping from the mid-1970s, Lawrence resident Carol Francis is shown planting a tree for Arbor Day. Francis, who her daughter says “was all about trees,” also planted a pin oak at Pinckney Elementary School that now soars above the schoolyard.

“She was a go-getter,” Dwyer says, and not someone you’d be particularly eager to cross.

When her mom saw that the pretty “fall-coloring trees” on West Sixth, as Francis described them in a letter to the Journal-World editor, had been destroyed, “she was just incensed,” Dwyer said, and by Dec. 1 she had a young pin oak in hand to plant as a kind of defiant memorial to what had been lost.

Francis considered planting it at her family house about a mile northwest of Pinckney, but opted, as she said in the letter, for somewhere “with more than the minimal traffic in our lane.”

If she planted it at Pinckney, where practically her whole family had attended elementary school, “40,000 drivers” would go by it each day, as she noted in the letter. Most importantly, Dwyer says today, “That tree wasn’t going to be bull-dozed anytime soon if it was at the school.”

“I hope this pin oak grows to be a beauty,” Francis wrote to the newspaper, and 45 years later Dwyer is still excited to say, “It did, Mom! It did!”  

Dwyer hopes that the soaring oak that lends so much character — and shade — to Pinckney’s schoolyard can mean a little something to the kids who pass through her alma mater.

Teachers might want to take a class outside, she says, and tell the students, “Hey, here’s the story of this tree,” how it got here and why.

It’s just one tree in the grand scheme, Dwyer knows, and it’s just one tree among several at the school, but she thinks it holds some special lessons for kids, including how when they’re “furious” about a wrong they can try to right it in a beautiful and lasting way.

photo by: Mike Yoder

Lawrence resident April Dwyer stands across West Sixth Street from Pinckney Elementary School and the pin oak that her mom, Carol Francis, planted in 1976 in reaction to trees up the street having been bulldozed.