Lafayette couple renovating historic home discovers a family’s past stashed inside its walls

Lauren Kelley knew, when she and her husband decided to move into a 1920s-era house in Lafayette’s Old Town, that the structure was filled with history.

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She didn’t know how literal that would turn out to be.

The couple moved into the home on East Chester Street in 2021, shortly after having their first child, and “immediately started renovation,” she said.

When they pulled out the old floors, they found newspapers from as early as 1894 underneath.

“That started the collection,” Kelley said.

Then they started taking apart the walls, layer by layer — “five or six layers of wall,” Kelley said. When they got to the plaster, they found even more relics.

There were grocery receipts, candy boxes, Corn Nuts wrappers, license plates, a handkerchief, marbles, playing cards, a metal roller skate, old cigarettes “with lipstick still on them,” she said.

And there were letters — lots of them — mostly signed by the same name: Virginia Garcia.

Kelley said she ended up with a “gallon-sized Ziploc bag” of the letters.

Through online research, she learned that a couple, Stella and Dan Garcia, had once owned the home. Virginia, one of the Garcias’ 12 children, was in her teens when she wrote the letters, Kelley said. Many of those letters were dated in the early 1940s.

“She’s writing to soldiers, saying ‘come back safe,’ and some of it is to boys from the neighborhood,” Kelley said. “It’s just funny to see her talking about the dance at the Louisville high school, or referencing local people.”

Last month, members of the Garcia family were visiting Lafayette from out of town for a relative’s funeral, and they decided to drive by the old house on East Chester Street. Kelley’s husband was outside, grabbing something from his car, when he saw a group of women pointing at the house.

“My husband said, like, ‘Hey, can I help you?’ And they said, ‘Our grandparents used to live here.’ And he knows that I’ve been trying to find this family and am interested in their whole story, so he said, ‘Hold on, let me go get my wife,’” Kelley recalled.

The Garcia family members went inside to meet Kelley, who gave them the letters. Virginia’s niece, Pam Russell, was there that day.

“It was emotional,” said Russell, speaking by phone Wednesday from her home in Arizona.

Russell’s mother and Virginia’s younger sister, Marie Garcia Reynoso, is 88 now, but she says her memory is still “very good.”

“I remember all the neighbors. I could tell you, house for house, in all of Lafayette,” Reynoso said, before rattling off a list of family names — neighbors from her childhood.

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She said that when her parents bought the house in 1939, they did renovations of their own.

“They plastered up walls, they patched up everything,” Reynoso recalled. “My mother remodeled that whole house.”

She said she’s sure that the metal roller skate Kelley found in the house must be one of hers, though she isn’t so sure about how any of the objects — including Virginia’s letters — ended up behind the walls.

“Virginia was my favorite,” Reynoso said of her sister, who was 10 years her senior and died years ago.

“I slept in her room with her because I was kind of a scaredy cat,” she added. “She was a very kind, docile person. I remember after dinner, she’d take me for walks and we’d go all over Lafayette. We’d come back with big bouquets of flowers that the friends and neighbors would give to us.”

Now residing in Arizona, Reynoso spoke on the same call as her daughter.

She said that she moved from Lafayette in 1955 and has since lived in many places, but that “a lot of good memories” remain from her time growing up in the house on East Chester Street.

“I can remember the kids going out singing Christmas carols, I can remember Halloween, my mother would give out hot chocolate. If she had nothing to give out, we had an apple tree, and she put a big tub of water on the front porch so that the kids could bob for apples,” she said.

“On Christmas Eve we’d go to midnight Mass at St. Ida’s and we could each bring a friend home, and that was a lot of fun,” Reynoso added.

As for how Lafayette has changed since then, Reynoso said, the city is “not much different. … Just a little bit bigger.”

Kelley has lived in Lafayette since 2019 and serves on the city’s Historic Preservation Commission. She knew renovating the historic house would be a challenge — they’re still doing renovations today, more than five years after moving in — but to her, it’s all worth it.

“I was willing to put in the work,” she said. “… Other people might want to scrap it and rebuild something that’s new and modern and easy. But you won’t find these stories. You won’t find the spirit of everyone who’s lived here.”

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