Rewind: About the grave digger’s desk in WL’s new history center
As a new season opens at the Caretaker’s Cottage, West Lafayette library’s new city history center, remembering the tale of the 121-year-old desk Gerald Rausch received for working there
This edition of Based in Lafayette is sponsored by Lafayette Area Parkinson’s Support, a nonprofit with the mission to help people impacted by Parkinson's live their best lives through exercise, education and awareness. Join us for our first ever Trivia Night from 4-7 p.m. Sunday, April 27, at Wea Creek Orchard. Tickets are $25 per person and tables of eight people will compete in 10 rounds of trivia. Get your tickets and learn more here.
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ABOUT TODAY’S EDITION: This is a throwback to a story told March 22, 2024, when the renovated Grand View Cemetery Caretaker’s Cottage opened as West Lafayette Public Library’s new city history center. The Caretaker’s Cottage reopened this week for its second season at 1496 Salisbury St., featuring the following exhibits:
“Home Away From Home: The History of the Purdue Black Cultural Center” offers insights into how the Black Cultural Center’s creation on the Purdue campus played a crucial role in establishing a place for Black identity at Purdue as well as in West Lafayette. The Caretaker’s Cottage will host docent-led tours for the exhibit’s opening from 3-5 p.m. Thursday, March 27.
“Race and History in West Lafayette” is an ongoing exhibit explaining the history and use of racial covenants in housing in areas of West Lafayette. Speaking of throwbacks, here’s more on that exhibit, via a June 20, 2024, story in BiL: “New research leads to West Lafayette apology for past racial covenants. Exhibit shows just how prevalent covenants of the 1920-‘50s were, keeping all but ‘pure white Caucasian race’ out of West Lafayette neighborhoods.”
“West Lafayette Sultans of Swing” is a curated collection of sports memorabilia from the Orlando Itin Local Sports History Collection housed at the West Lafayette Public Library. The collection features items and information about a number of West Side players in various sports. The exhibit at the Caretaker’s Cottage focuses on baseball players from West Lafayette High School and Harrison High School who eventually played Major League Baseball.
“Stewards of the Land: Environmental History topics from Greater Lafayette” is presented in partnership with NICHES Land Trust and includes a map of NICHES properties open to the public. It explores the legacy of environmental history topics such as the failed Lafayette Dam Project, and provides information about the creation of the Celery Bog and the West Lafayette Tree Friends organization.
If you go: Admission is free. Hours are 1-5 p.m. Friday, Saturday and Sunday. More information is at https://wlaf.lib.in.us/caretakerscottage/
And now for that throwback to a permanent piece of the Caretaker’s Cottage.
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.”
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.”
The wooden desk, built in 1903 at the time the cottage opened, came a little over a week ago, unloaded from a pickup truck bed of Kathy and Bob Clemence with certified provenance.
The desk had been in Kathy Clemence’s family since the 1930s, when it was given to her father, Gerald Rausch, when he worked part-time as a grave digger at Grand View Cemetery.
“I love that desk, but I wasn’t sure they’d want it,” Clemence said. “When they said it belonged there, I was so excited. It does belong there.”
Clemence said her father was the third of 12 children of Mike and Mary Rausch. The Rausch family farmed land a bit north of the cemetery, on acreage that includes what is now West Lafayette Intermediate School, near Salisbury Street and Lindberg Road.
She said Gerald Rausch took a job digging graves at the cemetery when he was 17. At one point, in 1929, his jobs stacked up and the cemetery got behind in paying him. (“This was early in the Depression, you know,” Clemence said.) To make things right, the caretaker offered Gerald Rausch the rolltop desk, Clemence said. He accepted and took the desk to his parents’ home.
Clemence said her father left it there when he got married and started G&L Rausch Construction, a company with his brother, Louie, that built scores of homes in West Lafayette. Clemence said her Aunt Jean, 15 years younger than her father, used the desk for decades after that, taking the rolltop off and leaving in an unfinished basement laundry.
Clemence said that in the ‘70s, her father told her the story about the Grand View Cemetery rolltop desk. She was intrigued, tracking down the top, covered with decades of dust in her grandparents’ laundry room. She said she persuaded her Aunt Jean to give her the old desk, with the promise of a newer model.
Bob Clemence reattached the top, cleaned it and applied a fresh walnut finish.
“For 46 years, up until three weeks ago, it was my major desk I used every day,” Kathy Clemence said. “I love it because it was my dad’s, but I loved that desk because it was a wonderful piece of furniture. …
“But when I saw on the news what they were doing with the cottage, I figured it had been in the Rausch family for 95 years,” Clemence said. “It seemed like it was time for it to go back to where it started.”
The cottage’s fate caught attention of local preservationists, and eventually city officials, in 2016. The owners of the cemetery at 1510 Salisbury St. had the property and its 12,000 plots on the market, looking to sell it. In that deal, they parceled off a third-of-an-acre surrounding the caretaker’s cottage, considering it too far gone to renovate and the ground ripe for a new house.
The Wabash Valley Trust for Historic Preservation perked up, putting the bungalow on a list of the most endangered structures in Greater Lafayette.
By 2017, pressed initially by Bev Shaw, then running point on the city’s greenspace and other quality of life projects, the West Lafayette Redevelopment Commission came up with a plan to shore up the collapsing floors, replace the roof and tuckpoint the stone. The idea was to make it the home to a West Lafayette History Research Center, giving a home to a collection that had been stored at the West Lafayette Public Library.
Mayor John Dennis said at the time that the project meant more than that, preserving a piece of West Lafayette’s yesterday at a time when the city was pouring resources and attention into a high-rise, dense-downtown feel in the Village/State Street area. Dennis put the cottage among some of the iconic structures in the city, given its location along the busy street.
The project wound up taking six years and an estimated $600,000, according to city figures. Larry Oates, redevelopment commission president, told a capacity crowd for this week’s ribbon cutting that the search for proper materials – including roof tiles – and other issues caused delays.
A lease signed in January by the West Lafayette Redevelopment Commission puts the caretaker’s cottage with the library for $1 a year for the next 20 years.
The library’s history center officially opened with regular hours Thursday, hosting a handful of rotating collections, including pieces from an extensive archive saved by the late Sonya Margerum, who served six terms as West Lafayette mayor.
Anchoring those glass cases and framed pieces on the wall is the desk that Honeywell is making sure is seen and understood.
Honeywell said the library is being selective in what it accepts for the history archives. But she said she’s encouraged people to come in and talk about what they have and are prepared to donate.
“People have been coming to us with this sense of humility: ‘I’m not sure if this is something you might be interested in …,’” Honeywell said. “But they’re often surprised when we get excited. We’re telling about the little things, a lot of times, that tell the story of West Lafayette.”
As for the desk? Honeywell is back to spinning the Stone Soup theme.
“This just absolutely fits here, in the Caretaker’s Cottage,” Honeywell said. “I get excited all over again whenever I tell anyone about it. This desk is why I get so excited about this project.”
Thanks for sponsorship of this edition to Lafayette Area Parkinson’s Support, a nonprofit with the mission to help people impacted by Parkinson's live their best lives through exercise, education and awareness. Join us for our first ever Trivia Night from 4-7 p.m. Sunday, April 27, at Wea Creek Orchard. Tickets are $25 per person and tables of eight people will compete in 10 rounds of trivia. Get your tickets and learn more here.
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Tips, story ideas? I’m at davebangert1@gmail.com.
Great reporting, DAVE, thanks