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In memory of Katherine Harbison
With its much anticipated parking lot project finally completed, the Putnam County Public Library (PCPL) officially put on the final touches with a memorial to the person who made it all possible: Katherine Harbison, avid cat lover, loyal library patron and next-door neighbor.
“We got to know her almost on a personal level,” PCPL Director Grier Carson said. “Because she was next door and she was here all the time, she was sort of like a fixture here. She would bring flowers on Valentine’s Day for staff.”
Harbison owned the property neighboring the library. When she had to move to an area nursing home and wanted to sell her house, she let the library know first.
“And we said, ‘Well, we’d love to have it. You do know what we would do?’” Director Carson said. “And I think at that point the house was in pretty poor shape, so we couldn’t turn it into an annex. We had a pretty serious need for improved parking here, so it just seemed like an obvious thing. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, or close to it anyway, because the sale of a house lasts for a while usually. We did not start the year planning to buy a house ... the finance committee kind of scrambled together .... We just had the money to pull this off.”
In September 2016 the library purchased the house for $78,000, and in October 2016 accepted a bid of about $8,500 from Spiker Excavating to demolish the house and lay down a temporary gravel lot.
Director Carson said the library had looked into the home’s historical value before deciding to demolish it, expecting public backlash, but found no historical value.
“We’ve had almost the reverse,” Director Carson said. “People have said, ‘The library looks huge. The block looks better.’ That’s a win-win. Not only do we solve a functional issue, but it also improves the appearance of the block, and I think that’s good for the community too.”
In January CECon, the engineering firm on the project, created a plan that would change traffic flow, add 16-18 parking spots, more lighting and better landscaping for $147,000, but Director Carson said this was “not feasible,” and in February CECon presented a second plan to redo the parking lines, add a softer 90-degree turn, improve drainage, pave the gravel lot to add 12-16 more spaces and add a new entrance on Walnut Street for $70,000.
In April the library accepted a bid (the only one submitted) from Spiker Excavating, and the work finally began in May. After the new entrance on Walnut Street opened in June and patrons kept going the wrong way on the street to reach it, the library decided to reverse traffic flow through the parking lot.
The library had hoped to finish the project by the end of summer, but in September the entire project was finally complete, except for one last thing.
“The whole time we were doing this project, the Friends of the Library (FOL) were talking about some way to honor Katherine,” Director Carson said. “‘Let’s do something with cats that isn’t ostentatious and distasteful, that will mean something to those of us who knew her’ and the idea was a small, good-looking cat statue with a plaque that just says, ‘In honor of...’. And then sometime over the summer she passed away, and it became ‘In memory of...’.”
In addition to the memorial, Harbison’s memory lives in the local history and geneaology department as a local author. So much in love with cats, she wrote two small stories titled, “A Tail of Jerry” and “A Tail of Jerry: Volume II” about her cat.
It also lives in the hearts of those who knew her. Angie Smock, a member of the FOL, related her experience with Katherine.
“My interest in honoring Katherine with the statue and plaque is personal and has to do with Katherine’s help in returning our cat, ‘Pumpkin,’ to us way back in 1982,” Smock said. “(Katherine) contacted us two weeks after Pumpkin left home and had wandered several miles across town to Katherine’s neighborhood. She reunited two ecstatic little girls with the cat, after we had given up hope of finding her. It made for a special day that we never forgot.”
The statue has been placed near the Walnut Street exit, facing where Harbison’s house once stood. Although no plans have been made, Director Carson said there is room to do more in the future.
“I think the spirit of it was that Katherine was, first and foremost, a tremendous library patron,” Director Carson said. “Secondly, she was our neighbor. We saw her every day, we interacted with her in ways that we don’t generally interact with other patrons. It’s her unique character that we really wanted to honor. ‘Cause she’s kind of one of a kind and anyone who knew her would say that.
“She was quite idiosyncratic. She was cantankerous, very colorful. And, for me, she was an exceptional individual, an exceptional personality who was kind enough to agree to sell the house to the library knowing what the library was going to do with it. And that to me says that she cared less about the house and more about the library, and that’s remarkable.
“So the least we can do is something like a cat statue honoring her memory.”