How saving a one-room schoolhouse turned into WL’s Cason Family Park
West Lafayette’s $19M park on Cumberland Avenue opened Thursday with plenty of history built in.
Lynn Cason, standing in a new park bearing his family’s name on opening day Thursday, told the story a few times about a day in summer 2016, meeting a few hundred yards away near the corner of Cumberland Avenue and the new U.S. 231 with then-West Lafayette Mayor John Dennis.
On the table was the question about what to do with the Morris School, a one-room schoolhouse last used in the early 20th century and that had an expiration date coming after the land surrounding it had been sold to Franciscan Health.
Cason said he’d told Dennis that if the city could help find a way to move the schoolhouse a few hundred yards to the east, his family was prepared to donate a parcel that maybe could be used for a park.
“My vision at the time was to have a few trails and a few teeter-totters, a picnic shelter or two,” Cason said. “Well, look around. … It’s unimaginable to me what it’s become.”
West Lafayette opened the $19 million Cason Family Park during drizzly ceremonies Thursday morning. Touted as the first major park for the city in several decades, the 28-acre site along Cumberland Avenue includes several playgrounds, wooded trails, a stocked pond for fishing and kayaking, all centered on that one-room 19th century schoolhouse the city and volunteers worked to save, move and preserve nearly a decade ago.
“Cason Family Park has been a long time in the making,” Kathy Lozano, West Lafayette parks superintendent, told a crowd numbering in the hundreds Thursday. “And it represents the best of what a community can do when it works together.”
High on one the playgrounds overlooking the park, Jessica Barnes skipped the opening ceremony speeches outside the boathouse because her 4-year-old son, Ethan, insisted on checking things out right away.
“This really is amazing,” Barnes said. “It won’t be our last visit. Maybe not our last this week.”
The city got involved with schoolhouse and park plans in 2016, as the story Cason told Thursday goes. But things dated a few years earlier when the new U.S. 231 opened along the western edge of the city. That put Morris School in view of morning commutes in a way it hadn’t when it was tucked away on what had been a relatively secluded stretch of Cumberland Avenue, west of West Lafayette.
Cason had sold 23 acres at the corner of Cumberland Avenue and U.S. 231 to Franciscan Health in October 2014. Morris School had been part of his family’s property since it was built in 1879. His grandparents attended the school through eighth grade, before it closed in 1916. Curtis Roebuck, co-founder of Sears, Roebuck & Co., grew up nearby and attended Morris School.
Morris School was built as Wabash Township School No. 5, one of 13 in Wabash Township. At the time, Tippecanoe County had 108 one-room schoolhouses, according to records kept by the Tippecanoe County Historical Association.
Through the decades, after the school had closed, the brick building had been used for grain storage. Cason told the J&C at the time that he’d done his best to keep the brick building dry, maintaining the roof in hopes of holding onto what he considered a piece of the community’s heritage. But as Cason told the story in 2016, when the hospital started making plans for the corner, he and his family wanted to save the structure, even if that meant moving it.
Sue Eiler, a rural West Lafayette resident who had recently retired from Purdue University, was among the community members who’d taken an interest in Morris School. She and others worked to persuade Dennis to help find a spot to move the schoolhouse so it could be restored as a living history site. Several other options fell through, due to a combination of distance, utility lines, terrain and expense.
With land donated by Cason just to the east of the Franciscan property – a 44,000-square-foot orthopedic and sports medicine surgery center, a new collaboration between Franciscan Health and OrthoIndy, is going up there now – the city moved the schoolhouse in March 2017.
Eiler, Cason and a handful of volunteer carpenters and woodworkers spent the next several years renovating the one-room school, with donated desks, slate chalkboards, maps, bookcases, a potbelly stove and school-appropriate décor, along with an era-appropriate American flag hand-sewn by Kathy Atwell, former director of the Tippecanoe County Historical Association. (“You can’t buy an American flag with 38 stars in cotton, only in polyester,” Eiler said.) The schoolhouse has been the site for field trips and other visitors since then.
As for the park going around the relocated Morris School, Larry Oates, president of the West Lafayette Redevelopment Commission, said the initial conversations started with Lozano in early 2018, when the ground stood at the original 14 acres. Those came to a halt when COVID-19 hit and had the city pulling back out of caution, he said. Then, in a matter of months in 2021, the redevelopment commission hired and fired a contractor who’d been assigned to come up with just what the city could get done along Cumberland Avenue.
“The proposal that they put forth didn't embody the level of sophistication and class that the residents of West Lafayette and the Cason family deserved in a park that was going to be in our community,” Oates said. “We had no choice. We had to do it right.”
Mayor Erin Easter said pulling back at that moment worked out. The city worked with the Maier family, which owned an equal-sized tract next door, to add it to the acreage Lynn and Caroyn Cason had donated a few years earlier.
“Our original vision for this park and our budget were a little misaligned,” Easter said. “So taking that pause was fortuitous.”
Work to start moving dirt on flat fields that had hosted rows of beans and corn for ages started in earnest in summer 2023, with the city’s redevelopment commission committing up to $17.7 million toward construction. All in, Oates said, the park project cost just shy of $19 million.
“Our vision was to provide a park for West Lafayette that was like no other,” Oates said. “Adventurous but relaxing, beautifully refined but naturally native, challenging but accessible and welcoming. … I hope you are as proud of this park as I am.”
Among the features open to the public Thursday: Five playgrounds; a 4.2-acre pond for kayaks and stocked for fishing; nearly three miles of paved and unpaved trails; an outdoor pavilion for events; a boathouse and picnic shelters; and three acres of forest restoration areas throughout the park.
“The thing I love is the fact what the city came up with, after we went to them, is going to be lasting,” Eiler said. “It all seems so wonderful. … The thing about this project is that along the way, no one ever said ‘no.’ I guess it shows what you can do when you ask and find people who believe and are willing to do the work.”
THIS AND THAT …
Waking up to temperatures in the 40s Friday puts this dispatch from the Lafayette Parks Department in play: Opening day for Tropicanoe Cove, Castaway Bay and Vinton Pool – the city’s three aquatic facilities – has been pushed back from this weekend to Tuesday, May 27. The half-off specials scheduled for Saturday at Tropicanoe Cove as part of a host of Lafayette Bicentennial-themed events at Columbian Park will be rescheduled to Aug. 30, the Saturday heading into Labor Day weekend, the parks department announced.
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Thank you for this amazing contribution to West Lafayette! It will be cherished for generations!
I don’t think Cumberland Ave extended to where 231 is not until after 231 opened. The schoolhouse was on the section of McCormick Rd that existed there.