Throwback Thursday: The Undertaker’s House on College Street

This week’s Throwback Thursday story was inspired by the Landmark Association of Bowling
Green. As the association shared stories of the homes and businesses on its Christmas on
College Hill tour last weekend, one of the spaces mentioned is a familiar College Street
business. The Gerard-Bratcher building at 943 College Street is nearly two hundred years old,
and has also been featured for the past several years on the Unseen Bowling Green downtown
walking tour every Fall.

Built just after 1850 by John Claude Gerard, the structure on the corner of 10th and College Streets
has a storied past as a funeral home for over a century. John Claude Gerard was a furniture and
cabinet maker whose skills in coffin building became crucial to the city around the Civil War in
the 1860s. Anyone who’s taken the Unseen Bowling Green downtown walking tour over the past
five years may remember the macabre and ghostly stories told about the unique pulley system
the Gerards established on this building’s second floor that allowed coffins to easily be removed
from its second story window and laid into a funeral carriage sitting on the street at ground level.
The Unseen stories say staff has been known to hear what sounds like coffins or bodies being
moved across the second floor at the current Bratcher attorney office that inhabits the space.

According to the Landmark Association, John Claude Gerard opened his woodworking shop in
1843 as a furniture maker, but soon became the only undertaker operating in the city for many
years. The need for coffins became so critical during the Civil War that the city had to open
another cemetery, Fairview Cemetery. This building is just a couple blocks away from the
Presbyterian Church that we have shared stories about, which operated as a Civil War hospital.
The Gerards operated the undertaking business until selling it to J.C. Kirby and family in 1989,
having operated for over a century.

The Gerard name is associated with many buildings and even modern businesses in the
Fountain Square area, like the home of current-day Gerard’s 1907 Tavern restaurant and the
former Gerard Hotel on Park Row. The law offices of Pamela C. Bratcher currently operate in
the Gerard-Bratcher building.