Cemetery paid a grave digger with a desk. 95 years later, family returns it

Grand View Cemetery Caretaker’s Cottage, West Lafayette library’s new city history center, gets the 121-year-old desk Gerald Rausch received for working there

• Today’s edition is sponsored by the Center for C-SPAN Scholarship & Engagement (CCSE), which will host its spring Conversation with Brian Lamb April 2. Brian Lamb, C-SPAN founder, will interview Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and essayist. Schiff will share from her New York Times Bestselling book, “The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams,” exploring thought-provoking insights on early American history, the Revolutionary War and this forgotten revolutionary hero. For more information, visit https://bit.ly/BLConversations.

Click here for more details

---

Programming note: Based in Lafayette will be on some scheduled downtime into early next week. If you don’t see editions in your inbox in the next few days, that’s the reason. Thanks for reading. And thanks for the chance to step away for a bit.

---

CEMETERY PAID A GRAVE DIGGER WITH A DESK. 95 YEARS LATER, FAMILY RETURNS IT

“Have you seen the desk?”

Marra Honeywell, West Lafayette Public Library director, had been spinning a version of “Stone Soup” in the tight confines of a Grand View Cemetery Caretaker Cottage ribbon cutting this week, making connections instantly obvious between the library’s new history center venture and a community eager to feed it, by bit and by piece as in the classic tale.

Since the city buttoned up the stone cottage—spending six years retrofitting red roof tiles, finding suitable windows for circa-1903 construction and replacing a floor that had fallen away into a deep crawl space – and turned it over to the library in January, people have been coming to the library with letter jackets, menus from long-gone haunts and assorted memorabilia from parents’ and grandparents’ attics.

“It’s been overwhelming,” Honeywell said. “We want to tell the story of this community – really tell about its people and who we are – and everyone just gets it.”

Marra Honeywell, West Lafayette Public Library director, talks about a desk that once was used to pay a Grandview Cemetery grave digger. It’s back, part of the renovated Grand View Cemetery Caretaker’s Cottage, a new city history center. (Photo: Dave Bangert)

Again, Honeywell pulls a sleeve toward a rolltop desk stationed against a wall just across from the entrance of the cottage at the crest of Salisbury Street.

“This,” Honeywell said, “this is what I’m talking about. This is the story I’m talking about.”