Bill Root

Brown County Carver

Bill Root has developed many skills. As the owner of Root Construction, he involves himself in every detail of the houses he builds, from gabled roof to arched brick doorway. Currently he spends much of his time in Tennessee, where he is helping a son construct an elaborate home.

But Mr. Root's leisure time is increasingly focused on his lifelong passion for carving animals out of wood, ceramics, and cold cast bronze (epoxy made with bronze dust). A buffalo, centaur, lion and several horses, with and without riders, adorn shelves throughout his winter studio in southern Brown County.

Most recently, Mr. Root has gained renown for his carousel horses. One of these life-sized creations graced the Christmas exhibit in the rotunda of the Indiana State Museum in 1998 and another won Best of Show in the 1999 Tennessee State Fair. The large prancing horse, now guarding the entrance to Root's studio, is embellished with ornate sculpted and painted flowers.

It takes 300 to 400 hours for Mr. Root to carve a carousel horse. After each detail meets his exacting standards, he applies one quarter inch thickness of a rubber mixture all over the carving, creating several removable sections. Over the rubber, he puts another mold of plaster and wood fiber to hold the pliable rubber's shape. The molded sections are then detached and arranged as forms for poured resin and layers of fiberglass cloth to create a new horse made from the hardened mixture.

"The first horse I did," Mr. Root recalled, "the more I worked on it the more I didn't like it. So I stopped working on it. And then it got in my way so I started moving it farther out of the workshop and closer and closer to the woodpile. Then one day my son came home with somebody and he wanted to buy it so I sold it to him for $600. Then a lady saw it (at the buyer's house) and wanted me to carve a carousel horse. I wanted to do this because when I was at the state fair one year I just kind of looked around and wondered what I could do to win this thing. And I thought of a carousel horse. But I didn't do it for five years until this lady asked me to."

Born and raised on a farm in Knox County, Bill Root's obsession with carving began at an early age. He remembers, "When I was in the first grade a guy came to school and he had a (carved) puppet. I immediately went home and made a puppet. I was never want for toys." He pointed out his original puppet head that features a moving jaw.

Among his more unusual carvings are an early wooden huckster truck, a Civil War horse and rider with a peg leg and a wooden pistol. "Joe Pinkston (the late founder of the Dillinger Museum) asked me to make this," Mr. Root explained. "Joe was able to buy the original gun that John Dillinger broke out of jail with. He had me carve several of them and one of them was featured in a National TV show about Dillinger. Dillinger carved the gun (the original) out of a washboard. He used razor blades to carve with and shoe polish to blacken it."

Another unusual figure on Mr. Root's studio shelf is a basketball player holding a book under one arm and a basketball under the other. "I carved these trophies for the Van Buren (Brown County) basketball team when I was their coach," he said. "I wanted them to understand that I wasn't one of those coaches that demanded sports and nothing else."

After years of carving animals and people, Bill Root has become quite accomplished. "I've always wanted to do the best I could but never wanted to try to hide my secrets," he declared. "A couple of years ago someone came and they were carving a carousel horse. He was from Indianapolis and I told him what to do. I was told later that he sold it (the horse) on TV for $15,000. Your ability to do something is only half of it. Your ability to market yourself is the other half. So I never try to get into this tug of war about whose stuff is best."

"In order to have success, you have to eliminate as many stumbling blocks as possible. You have to understand why you're not succeeding. It's kind of like a wood carving which starts out just a block of wood. Until you get that block down to where it's starting to look like something, that's the final process. Until you get to that process it looks like a piece of crap. Then all of a sudden it starts coming together."

A major stumbling block for Mr. Root these days is the amount of time he devotes to his construction company. One of his sons will soon take over the business and Bill Root plans to devote full time to his carving. "The wood (carousel) horse is kind of a white elephant. Nobody has room for it. I plan to create smaller pieces and have an agent who will place them in galleries," he said. Until that time, however, Bill Root's carvings can occasionally be found in Donna's Custom Framing at Salt Creek Plaza.