Thank you. I have accomplished what I set out to do and learned a bit while doing it.
My WordPress is in /wp/, but in the settings, I set the blog URI to /, and then copied the index.php and .htaccess to /. Then I updated the contents of the index.php to point to the new relative location. Then I went back into the permalinks to reconfigure the mod-rewrite for .htaccess.
So right now my / folder only has two files and one directory that is relevant and necessary for WordPress (which is what I had wanted all along). This was all on a page in the Codex (which I can’t find again).