Do you recognize any of those names? In 2019 the Weston Cemetery Walk featured Benjamin Harris and Mary Thompson, the mother of Delos Thompson. The year before it featured a wife of John Makeever. A goal of the Cemetery Walk is to tell the stories of past community residents who had a significant impact on the community or the wider world.
Some time in the future the Cemetery Walk will undoubtedly get around to featuring William Baden Austin. He has one of the largest monuments in Weston Cemetery. I have found two interesting stories about him. The first involved a New Years Party at the start of 1898. He invited some of the socially prominent men to his office and served them champagne, which at the time was illegal for some reason . Here is a very long, but fascinating, article about the case in The Indianapolis News of April 5, 1898 (page 5):
(See original here. If you go to the previous page of the paper, you can see that the newspaper thinks the judgement was mistaken.)
Austin appealed the conviction and fine and an appellate court ruled in his favor.
Notice that the judge in this case, Simon Parr Thompson, is also on the list of the richest Rensselaerians in 1902.
The other item was not a legal matter but a social one. By 1919 Austin had moved to Chicago and members of a country club he belonged to wanted him kicked out because he sold property to a Negro.
Who knows what other interesting stories there are about William Baden Austin.
Other names in the first article with very interesting stories are A. and Thomas J. McCoy but they will never be directly featured on the Cemetery Walk because they are not buried in Weston Cemetery. In 1904 their bank failed and Thomas ended up serving time in prison for embezzlement. After the bank failure, Alfred McCoy moved to Missouri to be close to his daughter and is buried at Queen City. Thomas moved further west and is buried in Portland, Oregon.
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