Blue Monday: The Angel Tree in Bay St. Louis

While in Bay Saint Louis last week for the Great American Cleanup, my cousin Kathleen took Karen and I on a little tour of Bay St. Louis. One of the sites she showed us was this "Angel Tree" that is only a couple of blocks from the beach. The BLUE skies were partly cloudy and my picture didn't turn out as clear as I hoped, but you can see the details with which the angels were carved in this tree which did not survive the storm.

I found this excerpt from the archives of Mississippi Magazine that explains the Angel Tree:

During the worst part of the storm, several locals (including a retired hurricane hunter) sought "high ground" on the second floor of the Bay Town Inn, near Demontluzin Avenue. When the huge house began to crumble in the violent storm surge, three of them--Doug Niolet, Nikki Nicholson, and Kevan Guillry--swam to a nearby oak tree in a last-resort effort to survive the storm. All three individuals made it through safely by clinging to the limbs, but the tree did not survive.

When the tree, the very thing that stood strong to save their lives, faced imminent removal, they sought the help of an Indiana "chain saw sculptor" named Dayle Lewis with the Kat-Rita Wood Project, a non-profit organization that turns hurricane scrap wood into art. Lewis whittled the bare Live Oak down to its main trunk and created beautiful angels from some of its existing limbs. Now locals call the sculpture the "Demontluzin Angels" to commemorate their experience.

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