WEST LAFAYETTE — Long before 18 people squeezed themselves around John Dennis’ desk in the Morton Community Center to talk about how time was ticking on Morris School, a one-room schoolhouse last used a century ago, the West Lafayette mayor said he’d been fielding questions nearly every day.
“First question: ‘What is it?’” Dennis said. “Second question: ‘What are you going to do with it?’”
One of the 18 in the mayor’s office the morning of Sept. 19, Lynn Cason was ready to get deeply invested in the answer to that second question.
As for the first question, Cason’s known exactly what Morris School was his entire life.
Until Cason 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. As far as famous alumni go, Curtis Roebuck, co-founder of Sears, Roebuck & Co., grew up nearby and attended Morris School.
Through moments when it would have been easier to let the abandoned building go — including all those years when tenant farmers used it for storage by sending grain up an auger and through a chute in the roof, and after a wind storm peeled back a third of the roof five years ago — Cason said he kept the brick building dry.
“And if you can keep a building dry and you maintain the roof, a building will last forever,” Cason said. “That school is our heritage. I wanted to do what I could to keep it standing. Standing then, and standing from here on.”
The other 17 people in the mayor’s office, for their own reasons, wanted the same thing.
So when Cason announced to the room that he was ready to donate 13.6 acres right across the field, provided the community could raise the estimated $80,000 to move the school by April 2017, the city wound up with the makings of a new park, a hospital system was free of a potential public relations nightmare and a piece of public education history was on its way to a new home.
“We still have some work to do,” Dennis said. “But the more we talked about that place, it became apparent that this was a big deal. … How cool is it that it looks like we’re going to get this done and come away with a park in the process? So cool.”