- Welcome to University Place Presents.
I'm Norman Gilliland.
If you're driving down I-94 or perhaps on Highway 14,
you might see a sign for a place called Cooksville
and if you slow down and make a turn,
you'll find a New England town
as it might have been 175 years ago.
But New England in Wisconsin, why would that be?
Well, we're going to get the story about Cooksville
and it's a long and colorful story,
from Larry Reid and he's the chair of
Historic Cooksville Trust, Incorporated.
Welcome to University Place Presents.
- Thank you, my pleasure to be here to talk
about old Cooksville.
- If you go to Cooksville, you see that it's laid out,
it's laid out like a New England village of the 1840s
and this is not something that's buried
under a lot contemporary architecture or zoning violations
and that kind of thing.
You see the village green and the houses, solid brick
and frame houses clustered around this village green
just as you might see in Massachusetts.
What's the connection?
- Yes, Cooksville's a wee bit of New England in Wisconsin
as it's been called or the little town that time forgot.
We'll get into that because the railroad never came there
and that's why it was preserved.
It is preserved.
We didn't get railroad, so we didn't grown.
Not that I was back in the 1840s or 50s.
- You didn't go away, either, which a lot of times
who didn't get a railroad did.
Still there. - That's right.
We had some people who were very interested
and proud of their heritage from New England
and the British Isles and Ireland and they took good care
of what they built out of brick and the local lumber
and the local brick yards and they styled
them in the Greek revival, sort of a country
simple Greek revival style and gothic revival as well,
and they were a fairly cultured bunch.
In fact, they were kidded by eventually
what Evansville grew up and Edgerton,
folks in Cooksville of being too cultured,
those New Englanders.
They took good care of the place,
especially when the railroad didn't come there
and the little village went asleep for 100 years,
until historic preservation came along
and said, "Wow these are great sturdy little houses.
"Let's take good care of them."
- Well, what was there first?
- Nothing was there except oak openings
and a wonderful prairie, rich prairie as is
all over Southern Wisconsin in the early 19th century
and mid-19th century.
And Senator Daniel Webster, a famous senator
in Massachusetts, after the surveys in the 1830s,
he bought up a lot of the land, as a speculator.
He wanted to make some money.
I understand he was in dire financial straits
at that time and so he bought a lot of land
from friends who'd gathered a purse together
for him to purchase it in 1837 for a dollar
and a quarter an acre and he sold it
to his friends in Massachusetts.
The Porter family came out to Cooksville in the 1840s
to look at the land they bought from Daniel Webster
and they platted a little village,
but before the Porters came there and before
Daniel Webster got involved, the Cook brothers from Ohio,
not from New England, also bought land in 1837
from the US government.
By then, it had been surveyed and the US government
was selling it for a dollar and a quarter an acre
and the Cook brothers came to Cooksville,
wasn't called Cooksville then, it was just a blank
spot next to the Bad Fish river, Bad Fish creek actually,
called Waucoma Creek originally, a nice native American name.
The Cook brothers founded Cooksville in 1842,
and that's why we're celebrating 175 years
of Cooksville because the Cook brothers platted it
175 years ago, very small little village.
But then the Porters came along with their
purchase from Daniel Webster and platted another village
right next to the Cook brothers and called it Waucoma
named after the little creek
that flowed through the village.
So we had two villages right next door to each other
in the 1840s, Cooksville and then Waucoma.
Now, it's all known as Cooksville
because that was where the last post office was situated--
- That always gets the name. - In Cooksville,
on the Cooksville side of the highway
as opposed to the Waucoma side of the highway.
But legally, I live in Waucoma, Wisconsin, for instance.
When I sell my house, the deeds are legally still Waucoma.
But it's all Cooksville as far as the world is concerned.
- Well, it's one thing to plat a village,
but it's another to actually have a reason for it
to be there so why that particular place?
- Well, it had clear water flowing through it.
Waucoma, which apparently means something like
clear water in some Indian language.
It had oak openings, in other words, lots of lumber
to burn, to build with, and the saw mill
was built in 1842, the same year as Cooksville was platted,
so they immediately started sawing the lumber
and a rich vein of clay, a wonderful pink-orange
vermilion colored clay,
so they immediately set about building, making bricks,
sawing lumber, building houses.
The oldest one is from 1842.
And it was fertile, they were farmers,
making lots of money on the fertile prairies
and they wanted to be merchants and farmers
and basically, for instance, the folks we're looking at now,
the Porters, came out in 1846
and they're the family that platted Waucoma,
so it was just a great, good place on a prairie.
There were other places like that in Wisconsin, of course,
the open prairies where there was water
and rich soil and trees to build houses from,
but Cooksville didn't grow and therefore didn't expand,
didn't demolish the old buildings to build new ones.
The public square is still there.
A wee bit of New England in the middle
of our little Cooksville.
- [Norman] Well, so there was not enough to make it grow
but there had to be enough to make it stay there
for all those years.
What kept it going? - And that's thanks to
not only the original settlers, who had picnics there
for about 50 years, they'd all return,
even some of them that went to the Dakotas,
further West, in other words,
the Western Migration was still going on,
and the California Gold Rush drew some people away,
but they always came back to their roots in Cooksville,
these families that settled there in the 1840s and 1850s,
and their descendants also hung around,
but the railroad didn't come in 1857,
so there really wasn't a lot going on in Cooksville.
We had at one time three blacksmith shops back then
and four sawmills along the creek
and then turned into grist mills.
And then there were the pottery shops and the tinsmiths
and mostly farmers, several general stores, of course, too,
furnished farmers and folks with material they needed
shipped in from Milwaukee or Chicago,
including barrels of oysters.
Oysters were a big thing on the menu back then.
- Oh, they were in the 19th century, all over the country.
Oysters were the big thing. - Yeah, oyster suppers.
And finally in 1879, they built the first church.
Those Puritans from New England,
those Yankees were not spendthrifts
so it took them awhile to build the church.
The Leedle Sawmill, the remnants are still there
of all the sawmills, but they're long gone,
as are all the commercial buildings
except for the general store,
which is the oldest general store in Wisconsin
still operating. - We'll have to have a
look at that in a minute. - Yeah.
And we've reconstructed one of the blacksmith shops
that fell down, so we also have an original blacksmith shop
that's been reconstructed.
But it's just the homes, those 35 historic houses,
barns, churches and school house that still remain.
A cemetery, the public square,
a couple of archeological sites.
And really, the preservation began about 1911.
Ralph Lorenzo Warner came over from Racine
and discovered this little charming village
and he fell in love with it with the houses
and he began, what we think, is probably
Wisconsin's first nationally known preservation project
in Cooksville beginning in 1911.
- A preservation project that early?
- Yes, that early.
He turned this charming Duncan house, a brick house,
into a, not a bed and breakfast,
although we might call it that now,
but just a place to have lunch and sometimes dinners.
And he would entertain guests there
and he had wonderful antique gardens
and a house full of antiques he'd buy
for a dime here and a quarter there
from the folks that lived in the area.
And the national magazines discovered that house
and wrote stories about Ralph Lorenzo Warner
and his House Next Door, that's what he called it,
the House Next Door, because when he came to Cooksville,
he wanted to buy a house and one of his friends,
Suzy Porter living in the village said,
"Well, there's one for sale next door."
So he called his house the House Next Door
and made national magazines and a number of people visited
and said, "Hey, this is kind of interesting
"to collect antiques, a bit of Americana,
"to restore a house in the 19 teens and 20s,"
so that set off some other people,
including Mineral Point and their preservation process.
- Certainly a lot of that now. - Yeah.
- So the railroad passed by. - Yeah.
- But what about roads, though?
I assume, then, that for a while, even roads
were not exactly coursing through town.
- No, in the early days, in fact,
people would walk from Cooksville to Milwaukee.
Walk. - Walk.
- To make their land claims, they'd go to the land agent
which was in Milwaukee or Green Bay at that time,
but Milwaukee was closest.
They would walk to Milwaukee if they
didn't have a horse and carriage,
but occasionally the settlers or squatters
would be competing with each other,
and, in fact, one guy from Cooksville, back in the 1840s,
beat the guy by walking from Cooksville, near Cooksville,
to Milwaukee, the other guy was driving horse and buggy,
but there were no roads, no trails, rivers.
Hard to cross rivers with a horse and buggy
and he beat the guy driving horse and carriage
and got the land out from under him.
So there were no roads really.
Indian trails that they followed, walked, or on horseback,
but no wide roads for carriages for quite a while.
But instead of paying property taxes,
you could work them off by road building back then,
that's how the roads got built.
Instead of paying property taxes,
you would be hired to work them off
by grading, building bridges, wooden bridges.
- That's an idea that might come back.
The time might have come.
- At the rate we're going, we may have to look backwards,
figure out how to do this ourselves.
- Let's have a look through the Cooksville photo album.
- Yes, there's one of our famous buildings,
long gone, unfortunately, Wisconsin's
first implement factory.
And it was claimed that, as you can see
by the newspaper headline, in 1928 when it was torn down,
it was claimed to be Wisconsin's first
farm implement factory.
They made gates and plows and potato planters
and things like that and had the reputation for having been
the first farm implementation factory in Wisconsin.
Cooksville was a thriving little community
even though it never grew, because there was
nothing else between Janesville and Madison, for instance.
Eventually, because of the railroad
that did eventually come through Rock County,
Stoughton, Edgerton, and nearby cities, Evansville,
came on the map because of the railroads, basically,
but Cooksville was it other than a little town called Union
which was a stage coach stop, also.
The stage coaches did come to Cooksville,
so there was transportation.
- Well, there had to have been, again,
a lot of towns that as the railroad passed them by,
they just sort of shriveled up and blew away,
but Cooksville, kind of like those house made of brick,
in the story of The Three Little Pigs (laughs).
Built to last. - They were sturdy.
I live in one of them.
They are limestone foundations from a nearby hill,
quarry hill, and even the frame houses were hand hewn,
post and beam, sturdy, sturdy houses.
And they took good care of them.
They really didn't have any money to tear them down
and build new or add too many additions to them,
so they remained pretty pristine.
Sometimes even abandoned in the 1920s and 30s,
in that Depression Era.
But as I said, they were discovered in the 19 teens and 20s.
- Still salvageable.
- And we've had a real preservation project going on,
really, for 100 years, and especially recently,
thanks to the national preservation program,
since 1966 that helped.
The Wisconsin Historical Society and vice got us going
and we're still working on it, too.
- You mentioned the general store.
- Yes, 1847, and we're claiming it
and no one has challenged our claim
as the oldest operating general store in Wisconsin.
It's been expanded.
It's presently owned by the Masonic Lodge,
which began in 1864 and bought the building.
But in 1847 a little store began in Cooksville
and that's it.
Expanded with the Masonic Lodge upstairs
and they still own the building.
So the lodge is pretty darn old, too.
But the store is still operating
under various proprietors over the years, of course,
but it's a wonderful, sort of,
and it's still full of wonderful, interesting foods.
No longer a general store, it's more of a whole foods,
good foods, natural foods store right now
with ice cream for sale.
- Oh, really?
- So it's worth coming to Cooksville just for that, frankly,
to see the old store.
- Speaking of Cooksville and its brothers
that gave it the name, they're among
the very first settlers, obviously,
so is there any trace of their house?
- Their house is still standing.
The Cook house, 1842, is still standing.
It's a lovely vernacular house.
Not particularly stylish, but a wonderful early house.
The Cook's didn't stay around very long.
They moved to Iowa within 10 years.
So they disappear about 1850,
further west, as many folks did.
Looking for a better place with open stores and maybe
cheaper land and maybe they had other relatives there.
They were lured further west by
all sorts of different reasons,
but the Cook house is still there
and we're very proud to have that early 1842
house still standing and in good shape, too.
- What about that other name you mentioned, Porter.
- The Porter family.
Their houses are still standing, too.
They came in 1846 with Waucoma, Wisconsin.
And there's one of them, the William Porter house
has been turned into the Cooksville Farmhouse Inn
and the folks who run the Cooksville Farmhouse Inn
adaptively reused the 1914 barn next door as their home.
So it's a wonderful adaptive reuse
of a barn there in Cooksville, too.
But William Porter's house is now a bed and breakfast.
Really it's an Inn.
You can rent it for the weekend
or the whole house at one time.
I guess it's a vacation rental now.
But it's a beautiful house.
It dates from the 1840s but it now has the appearance
of sort of a late Victorian because it has been
embellished with some fish scale shingles
and some bay windows and a little gingerbread on it.
People that had money did try to
upgrade their houses in the 1880s and 90s.
- Yeah, well, sure.
That's something, I assume, as a historical preservationist
or somebody who's interested in recreating history
that you have to go with, in other words,
what period are you trying to bring it back to?
The very earliest or the Victorian
or something later than that?
You have to pick your period, don't you?
- Yes, that can be a dilemma.
And I think our philosophy has been
if the changes are interesting
and show the growth of the village,
they are good changes, like going from
Greek revival, say, to the gingerbread of the 1880s and 90s,
that sort of Victorian look or Queen Ann look.
But that's part of the history
and we don't want to change that, frankly,
we want to keep it going from the 1840s.
Even now, we do have some new houses,
relatively new houses, from the 1950s, ranch houses,
basically, split-level, a couple, not many.
But enough that someday they might be historic, as well.
So we have to keep the thread going,
the continuity going, I think.
- You mentioned barns and barns are something
that have generated a resurgence of interest
in the past couple of generations.
Any noteworthy barns in the Cooksville area?
- Yes, we've got one that was built in 1914.
The Ericson Barn.
It's a regular gabled roof barn.
It's been restored and adaptively reused as a house, now.
It's a wonderful adaptive reuse of barns.
Which is really important.
Our dairy barns in Wisconsin aren't just used
as small family dairy barns any longer,
so we have to find different uses for them
and many people are turning them into homes.
- You can get very creative, can't you?
- Or shops or art studios. - Turning a barn into house.
- And this one is gorgeous.
And we have some smaller we call village barns.
I have one on my property and there are couple other
sort of one horse barns, you know,
just for the horse and maybe a cow, so they're fairly small.
And then we have another dairy barn,
again, not being used, unfortunately.
But we do have a number of historic barns
and we have two historic churches.
Eventually two churches did get built.
The Lutheran Church and the Congregational Church.
The Catholics built a Catholic Church,
St. Michael's, near Cooksville, not in Cooksville.
They sort of segregated themselves as it were,
down the road, the Irishmen came over during the
potato famine of the 1840s and 50s,
had a community on Caledonia Road near Cooksville.
They had a lovely church there and a cemetery
but all that's left is the cemetery, St. Michael's cemetery,
which is a lovely old cemetery nearby.
- That's another phenomenon you see in Wisconsin,
I'm sure other places, too, but in Wisconsin
it seems to be, if anything, a little easier to spot
these crossroads churches that may at one time
have been part of a village.
- Yes, and the churches tend to get maintained
even if the congregation is small,
they still manage to keep going,
as the Cooksville Lutheran Church has.
I own the Cooksville Congregational Church
because it was abandoned.
- You own it. - I own it.
To preserve it.
It was abandoned in 1939 by the Congregational Group
of America and it was no longer needed.
It became the town hall for a while in Cooksville.
The Town of Porter town hall in the 1940s and 50s and 60s
and then the town, when the schools were consolidated,
one room schools, the Town of Porter
bought a brick schoolhouse and abandoned
the Congregational church as their town hall,
so I bought it and saved it from being torn down.
- And what are you doing with this church?
- Well, I rent it out occasionally for weddings
and baptisms and funerals, music.
I don't charge for the music
but it's a wonderful space for music.
But I don't have it fully restored.
So it's just my private building
and I let folks use it now and then
and I try to maintain it.
And it's a really handsome brown late Victorian
1879 brown two-tone church and it's a wonderful space,
especially for music.
You have to come out there some time.
- Yes. - The stone chamber comes out
and sings in the spring and we have some other
ensembles occasionally, and sometimes meetings,
but it has limited use.
- Well, repurposed. - But it's still standing.
Repurposed, absolutely.
- Well, let's walk through Cooksville a little bit
and look at some of these house around town.
And get some other stories and their styles.
- Just about all of them were built in the 1840s or 1850s,
including the brick houses, so they are
early country Greek revival houses, small,
frame, post and beam, sometimes they had brick nogging,
soft brick in between the walls,
brick that couldn't survive on the exterior,
couldn't weather properly, but they would use a
soft brick in the walls as insulation and stabilization.
Great wide either pine boards or oak boards.
They were quite lovely inside.
And some of them were covered over with
the usual tin siding in the 1950s or 60s
or aluminum this and shingle that.
But, almost all have been restored
in terms of taking off the modern material
and revealing underneath perfectly good, sturdy clapboards.
Some might have to be replaced.
And getting back that shape of the Greek revival
with the corner pilasters, the returned eves,
and the symmetry and so on.
We've had a lot of success.
About 20 houses have been restored on the exterior.
- Wow, that is a lot.
That house that we were just looking at.
What's the story with it?
- That's the Betsy Curtis house.
Named after her because she was one of the owners.
And that was restored.
It had aluminum siding on it and the pilasters
and the eves and so on were disappeared
under the modern siding and some of them
might have been removed, actually.
But we were able to restore them
because we have some good photographic documentation, too.
Once you start taking the material off, that modern material
you'll discover the hidden details
and what's missing and what can be replaced.
- Do you have a sense at all, Larry,
that these latter day incrustations
actually helped to preserve these houses?
- Occasionally they do, especially in Cooksville
where people didn't have a lot of money
to tear them down or demolish them.
They might have covered them over with some new materials,
but once you remove the materials
underneath you find perfectly good clapboards.
Like my house was covered and underneath
were perfectly good clapboards,
and easy to restore, actually.
Of course, then, you want to insulate
with modern insulation, of course, put plumbing in.
We all like plumbing in our house
and maybe even a closet or two.
And I think all the houses that have been added on to,
in the back, tastefully with a modern addition
just because we do want closets and bathrooms
and an extra bedroom.
So some of them, almost all of them, have a new addition,
designed by an architect, Michael Saternus,
who's very sensitive to historic buildings,
in other words, a good preservation architect.
And there are still other architects around
who know how to treat these small houses
and yet add on to them in a modern way
that doesn't fake history, and so on,
but gives them a new life.
- It's that other sort of tightrope that you walk
between history and contemporary use.
- Yes, and that's an issue anywhere in the country
and certainly in Wisconsin.
My work at the Wisconsin Historical Society,
our architects, that was always an issue.
How do you add on to a historic house?
What can you do and not do?
Should you fake history, should you duplicate something?
No, just do something that harmonizes,
that's sensitive to the original part
and doesn't detract from it in some way.
So there are lots of ways to do additions
in good ways and bad ways.
- What about the roofs on these houses?
What would they have been made of originally?
Are they shingles and what do you have today?
- They would have had wood shingles, saw shingles,
because we had a lot of sawmills,
so there's a lot of saw lumber,
saw shingles for the roofs on,
for plastering the interiors and so on.
And I have some wood shingles on my house and barn
since replaced but we're not too concerned about roofs.
They're hard to maintain wood shingle roofs, frankly,
and they're very expensive, so we don't require
in our historic zoning ordinance that there be
wooden shingle roofs on our houses at all.
So they're good new roofs, asphalt,
and even some metal roofs now are designed to look like--
- Are they? - Yeah.
They're getting with ... the industry
has gotten with it so to speak for roofing,
because roofing is very important.
You got to have a good roof on these houses.
- Everything else rises or falls depending upon that.
- Yes, and the brick houses, we're looking at
one of the charming brick houses, I think,
on the screen now.
- I was just going to say, that there are certain decades
that we associate with certain kinds of looks for houses
and this is what I think of as the 1850s look.
- Absolutely, that's the Hoxie house.
Benjamin Hoxie, our self-trained architect
back in the 1850s and 60s.
He designed my church, for instance.
The Cooksville Congregational Church
and many houses and other buildings in the area
and in Cooksville.
And this would be a revival of that
steep pitch roof, a little Gothic, but very tiny,
very sweet little Cooksville brick house.
With additions on the back.
I don't think we see them in the photograph,
but there's a man star roof addition
in the back - Oh really.
- From the 1890s. - A little clashy there.
- It is.
It's an example of how sort of topsy grew in that house.
The change over the years with the additions in the back
but that's part of the history.
How do you manage to live in these tiny
pioneer settlers homes without expanding them a little bit?
- Now, one of the names that's associated with Cooksville
is Van Vleck which sounds kind of familiar.
- Yes it does, at University of Wisconsin campus in Madison.
But I don't think there's a relationship to that family.
Well, there probably is, way back when,
but Van Vleck, obviously, there were some Dutch folks
that came to Cooksville as well as the British Isles,
their Van Vlecks and Van Wormer
and some of those early settlers
looking, again, for a new place to live in the new world.
And Van Vleck was the guy who began
the Farm Implement Factory.
It was the Van Vleck Farm Implement Factory.
- [Norman] This is his house here, I believe.
- [Larry] Yeah, yeah.
And that was covered with wooden shingles on the exterior
to sort of make it look like one of the
New England cottages - Uh, huh, sure, yes.
- From the 1920s. - Cedar rich, also.
- Yeah, those were removed and revealing
the symmetry and the Greek revival pilasters
and that wonderful open porch, now.
And it has a new addition in the back, as well.
- And so what's the original vintage of that one.
- That one would be about 1840s.
Probably between 1847 and 1850.
After that the houses either were brick
or none more were built, homes were not built.
- Is there any other place in Wisconsin
that has such a concentration, especially per capita
of houses from the 1840s and 50s?
- Not the concentration.
Certainly Green Bay, my hometown,
has some structures still surviving
but not the concentration,
not in a single historic district.
Of course Mineral Point has wonderful stone houses
from the early era in a concentrated form
and scattered throughout that lovely city in Mineral Point
and Cedarburg and there are other small communities
but many of them haven't taken the time or effort
to recover their history, so to speak.
To uncover it with those modern applications
or to restore as necessary.
Unfortunately, in the 1950s and 60s,
they tore down a lot of them so many small communities
didn't know about their history, didn't appreciate it,
didn't understand it and there weren't enough people around
to take care of it and so many of those small communities
like Cooksville just disappeared.
There are several nearby Cooksville
where there's really nothing visible
unless you have a very keen eye
and look underneath the modernizations,
you won't see the old houses anymore.
And that's kind of sad.
But there are other small communities nearby here
in Stoughton and Edgerton and certainly Evansville
had wonderful historic districts,
groupings of historic homes or historic downtowns
that have been restored over the last
30, 40 years of preservation in Wisconsin.
They're quite stunning.
- And they turn into attractions
if they're done right, don't they?
- They're great tools for attracting people, shoppers,
visitors, certainly, and residents,
because they're marvelous structures
and certainly can have a new life.
The Main Street Program in Wisconsin, for instance,
has been operating for a number of years,
it still operates, to help restore and revitalize
economically and financially downtowns in Wisconsin
and that's been a great boon,
and now some of these old buildings
that almost got torn down and now the logo of communities.
- Right, missed it by that much.
- And people come to see it and shop on those old streets
with new shops, of course, and really can be
a tool to revitalize communities.
Cooksville only has a general store and the vacation rental
with the Cooksville farmhouse and truck garden
and we have a chainsaw artist
who sells his products out of his barn,
but we don't have a lot of industry in Cooksville
and that's fine with us, we're not looking to
expand or grow. - Sawmills and the blacksmith
shops went. - Yeah, pretty much.
- It was all kind of like quiet in terms of industry.
- It's been really a residential historic district.
And one of the earliest ones.
1973, right after Mineral Point was established
in the National Register of Historic Places,
then Cooksville was added to the National Register
of Historic Places. - And how does that work
in terms of what you can and can't do to Cooksville?
- Well, the National Register of Historic Places
and the Wisconsin Register of Historic Places
don't put any restrictions on what you can inside or out.
- Oh, really? - Unfortunately.
In other words, they're not really protected,
unless you're using federal or state monies.
Then the federal or state programs
are required by law not to use public monies
to destroy our heritage.
But if it's your own money or you don't have a local
ordinance or local protection,
folks can pretty much do whatever they want.
But of course, there's a lot of programs out there
to help people do the right thing.
But many communities at the local level
have ordinances, restrictions, as does Cooksville, and many.
I don't know how many cities and communities and counties
and townships have ordinances,
but I bet it's 60 or 70 now that require
certain considerations, may not prohibit,
but certainly a process that allows discussion
of what to do to that old school
or that old church, that old downtown building,
and do something reasonable to save it,
if it's worth saving.
First step, of course, is to survey the community
and find what's worth keeping.
The Wisconsin Historic Society has programs
to help people determine what's in your community
and what's valuable and what's the story behind it,
what story does it tell us about our past
and then the next step, of course, after that,
awareness and education, how do we preserve it?
What programs are there?
And there are state and federal tax credit programs.
Some local governments have financial programs.
The Historic Cooksville Trust in Cooksville.
We raise money and use it to help the preservation
of Cooksville so there are a lot of ways
to find the resources whether it's Wisconsin Historic
Society technical information or the tax credits
from the state and federal government or local programs.
- Well, let's look at another brick house, here.
What's the story with this one?
- That's the biggest brick house in Cooksville.
The Issac Porter house.
Three Issac brothers, Issac, William and Joseph
came to Cooksville.
Their uncle was the one who bought
the land from Daniel Webster.
Daniel Webster never came to Cooksville unfortunately,
but Dr. John Porter who bought the land
did visit once, as did his brother Dr. Issac Porter
and Dr. John Porter's three nephews, Joseph and Issac,
came to Cooksville, as did William.
Issac built this brick house, a Gothic revival.
One of the larger houses, meaning it has
more than one or two bedrooms.
And a parlor. - Sure.
A little harder at least from the outside, from the curb,
to pin a time period on this one.
- Well, I would say 1852, unless I look at my book,
I'm not sure, but usually the brick houses,
the first one was built about 1846
and then the other brick houses were about 1850s.
The brick yards took months to make the bricks
to get this clay and turn it into little mud
and put it in the molds and let it dry.
And then to bake it for days or weeks
and it takes about three months according to the records
I have in my Cooksville archive.
Three months to produce a load of bricks,
about 24,000 bricks, which would be,
in my calculation, enough for half a house.
Because the brick walls were two bricks thick.
- Sure.
- So it took a lot of bricks and it took them quite a while.
And of course, when Cooksville didn't grow,
the brickyards holes got filled in,
no more bricks were made.
- And here's another frame house.
- Yeah, the little Van Buren house.
My house, the Dr. Van Buren house, from 1848.
Showing again that front Greek temple facade,
very simple three turn eves.
It's hard to tell it's a Greek temple
but that's the inspiration in the 1820s
when the Greeks in Greece were having
their Democratic revolutions, everything Greek was
very popular. - Oh, is that where
- In the 20s and 30s. - That came from?
- The dress styles. - Greek revival.
- [Larry] The vases, the old Greek vases, and the temples.
You can see them now with pillars usually
on campuses and courthouses and all that
revival, Greek revival, architecture
and including little Cooksville.
It's hard to see ...
We don't have any real pillars, though.
We don't have any pilasters which are flat pillars
attached on your doorways and so on.
- And so you have an addition on this house.
- Yes, it doubled the size.
And there it is, on the back of the house.
A very modern addition.
Connected, hopefully, sympathetically,
to the historic house on the right,
and on the left is the new addition,
which doubled the size of the house,
including more bedrooms and bathrooms
and a real basement and a screen porch.
Very livable and so it's really possible
to take these quaint, cute little houses
and turn them into very usable and livable houses.
Oh, and there's another dandy I think we're looking at now
on the public square.
A view of the most famous house in Cooksville.
It's the Duncan house, it's a historic name.
And that's the one Ralph Warner bought in 1911
when he came to Cooksville and turned it into
the House Next Door and people from all over the country
wrote about it, visited it, he had a guestbook
full of local people and some visitors
and we have quite a history connected to that house.
It was an example of what you could do
with one of these old houses and turn it into,
if not a shrine, as they used to call
these historic buildings, a lovely place to visit
full of antiques and wonderful gardens.
And it still is a very handsome, federal style almost,
Greek revival federal style, very early looking
square Cooksville brick house.
- Yeah, very solid appearance of those brick houses have.
And the frame ones, too.
We were looking across the town square there,
or the commons as they might call it in Massachusetts?
- Yes, we have a public ...
Officially, when they laid Waucoma in 1846
the Porters called it a public square,
used by the public for cattle, sheep, horses.
- For grazing. - Pigs.
Just for the people to use and in fact,
I make this claim and no one's challenged me yet,
that this may be the last public square in Wisconsin
not to have been modernized either with a
courthouse or a jail or commercial buildings.
- Yeah some would say. - It's still
surrounded by its 19th century buildings.
Nothing new.
Additions put on some of the houses
and restoration on some of the houses
but it still remains pristine as a public square
or green or a commons.
- So, do you ever get tempted to
walk around town with a metal detector?
- We do get quite a few of them.
I haven't had that yet.
So far, they found a few little coins in the village
as far as I know, a little gold metal ribbon holder
in my church yard, which they gave me to keep
as part of the history of the church.
But yeah, we do get knocks on the door,
"May I use my metal detector?"
They may have found other things I'm not aware of.
I find horseshoes all over my
backyard. - Oh, do you?
- When we build new additions, you dig a basement,
that's when you turn up the old horseshoes.
Everybody had horses.
I have about 30 horseshoes in my barn
that I dug up in my yard.
I think they just threw the old horseshoes away
or I don't know, horses kicked them off
and disappeared. - Just lose them, yeah.
- Just lose them somewhere.
- Here's another look at the square, it looks like.
- Yes, that's from the other direction
looking at our historic schoolhouse,
which is now owned by all of us.
It's our community center.
The Cooksville schoolhouse built in 1886.
It replaced the brick school house from the 1850s.
- And we're gonna get a closer look at that, too,
and there's something curious about this
and we're gonna go right to it.
And what's the story here, the two doors in the front?
- [Larry] Those were restored.
That's the original doors, were restored
one for the boys and one for the girls.
It's like the churches apparently had,
some churches, had two doors back then.
- [Norman] But it's a one room school, right?
And they end up all in the same place.
- Yup, they do, they go through a coat room
and then they end up in the classroom.
Now why, I've often asked that question.
I ask it myself, "Why," well, I'm not an expert on
that social history of separation of the sexes
whether it's at church or school
or the doorways for that matter,
but I think, remember, Puritan New Englanders,
came to Cooksville and built these buildings
and it's that old fashioned way of entering buildings
as a community and separating the sexes even as children.
They ended up in the same room, of course,
whether it's a church or school so I don't quite get it.
But we did restore the doors.
And it's a lovely schoolhouse and we rent it out.
Here's another shot of our public square
being used for a wedding.
The square is a public park and people can sort of
use the square, the park, and they often use it
for family reunions or weddings.
In this case, a big tent was erected
and the schoolhouse, with bathrooms,
and with a kitchenette can be used for food
and toilet facilities so we get a lot of use
out of our public square.
- You mentioned churches and we haven't
looked at churches, yet.
- That's my Cooksville Congregational Church from 1879,
the first church built in Cooksville by the Yankees.
And went out of business in 1939,
when Congregationalists either died or moved away.
It became the town hall for a while
and then I restored it, the exterior, the bell tower
and the mignonettes and now use it
as a private church for weddings and other occasions.
It's right across the street from my house
and Benjamin Hoxie, a local architect designed it
and the local carpenters ...
These settlers, these pioneers, are so talented.
If they were farmers or merchants, they also were
architects and masons and brick makers.
- And builders, yeah. - And builders.
And multi-talented.
You had to be, in the middle of nowhere,
as Cooksville was in the middle of nowhere.
- Yeah, you pretty much had to do it all for yourself,
of course, when it came to making clothes, the same thing.
- That's right.
The women were equally as talented as the men, of course.
We have some old letters from the 1840s
of some of the Irish and British Isles folks
that came to Cooksville.
The farmers came and they wrote letters back to England
saying, "You've got to come to this country.
"You hardly have to plow.
"You just throw the seeds after you scrape the prairie way,
"everything grows so abundantly, we can feed
"the melons and the carrots and the cabbage to the hogs,
"as well as to ourselves, there's just too much of it."
So they were raving back to their relatives in England
"You've got to come to America because it's such
"a rich country and there's trees and water.
"You don't have to walk miles to get water."
And it was wonderful to read these letters.
Because I often wonder, "Why did these people come here?"
From England, especially. - Right, to a point
of Cooksville, which is, sort of betwix and between.
- Blank slate.
Again, you have to do all the plowing with your oxen,
which they brought with them or bought.
And they often had a horse or two, of course.
And pigs and chickens and berry trees and nut trees
and so on and fish in Bad Fish Creek.
Which I hope was originally called Waucoma.
But not it's called the Bad Fish Creek.
People often ask me, "Why is it called Bad Fish Creek?"
And I did a little research and I think I found the answer,
way back in history, a mistaken identity,
so to speak. - Oh, really?
- Well, I won't take too much time, but I found a
map from 1833 of southern Wisconsin
and the Bad Fish River shows up on the map
as now the Sugar River.
So, maybe the surveyors, when they were coming
through Southern Wisconsin, from the east to the west,
came to our little creek in Cooksville,
there was no Cooksville there yet, so they thought
this must be a tributary of the Bad Fish River,
so we'll call it the Bad Fish Creek.
But now I've found other information
that a historian from the UW of Madison
thought that perhaps when the surveyors were coming through
they were getting the creeks mixed up
coming from the east to the west.
It was Koshkonong, a nice Indian name.
Yahara, which can be translated as the catfish river.
And then there's this other creek
and some of the mapmakers and surveyors were taking notes,
thought they had already come to the Rock River
and the Koshkonong River so they called
the Yahara Koshkonong and then they came to this next creek
and called it the Yahara, which was really
the Cooksville Waucoma Creek but they thought
they would call it Catfish or Bad Fish.
So that's maybe how Bad Fish Creek got its name,
because the map makers got it confused with the Yahara,
which also means "bad fish" or "cat fish."
So, there were a couple of theories there.
- All of this happened, didn't it,
just immediately after the Blackhawk War?
- Yes, 1832, I think, the Blackhawk War was concluded
and I think at that time, the American government,
after the French had been gone, the British chased out,
and then of course the American government
took over the Northwest territory, eventually.
After the Michigan territory, the Illinois territory,
the Indiana territory, Wisconsin territory came next in 1836
after the Blackhawk War, so the U.S. government
really owned the land, as it were, by 1836.
- Just really opened it up. - Opened it up.
After it was surveyed because you can't just
let anybody come and take a hunk of the land,
you have to have it surveyed.
- And they're doing this whole thing based on
the township system? - Yes.
Beginning in southwestern Wisconsin
and off to survey the rest of the state
so they had counties and townships.
They went that route with townships
and laid everything out in 640 acres and so on
and down the line. - Right, township.
- And you could usually buy your 40 acres
or your 80 acres if you were a settler.
And so you could actually buy the land beginning in 1837
as I mentioned from the U.S. government.
And actually own the land,
which once belonged to the Native Americans, really.
They were the last owners as it were.
And thanks to many treaties, for better or worse,
or the lack of treaties, or the disavow of treaties.
- Misinterpretation and misrepresentation.
- Absolutely.
Suddenly Americans and immigrants from the British Isles
and eventually, of course, Norwegians
and our friends in Europe came to settle the land
and buy the land but I think we still have,
thank goodness, 12 Native American tribes in Wisconsin
that still own some of their land.
- Now, we mentioned the Congregationalists, I think
we'd better give equal time to the Lutherans.
- [Larry] Yes, the Norwegians came to Cooksville
and to Wisconsin.
The Cooksville area, they arrived about the 1880s and 1890s
in great numbers down in the Cooksville area
and Rock County area
and they were hard working folks
who became the hired men, really, of the farmers
in the area, the Yankee farmers.
And eventually, of course, the Norwegians
bought the farmlands and became a real force
in Cooksville and built the Cooksville Lutheran Church,
originally called the Norwegian Lutheran Church.
There were so many Norwegians,
they were tired of moving or traveling on Sundays
from Cooksville area to Stoughton
where their Lutheran church existed already,
they decided to build their own in Cooksville in 1892,
the Cooksville or Norwegian Lutheran Church was built
but struck by lightning two years later, burned down.
So they built another one on the same spot.
- Very heartening development.
- So the Cooksville Lutheran Church now
was built in 1896, also celebrating an important
anniversary in 2016 - Seventeen.
- In 2017, well, it will be 26 years old in 2017.
So 125 years of the present building of the congregation.
I'm sorry, the congregation was formed in 1892,
125 years ago, and the building was build and burned down,
they build another one.
But they were a real force and we still have
a lot of, obviously, Norwegian names
and Norwegian farms in the area.
I think because Norway was going through
what other countries had gone through,
a lack of land for the growing population to farm.
- Some real unrest, yeah.
- They had to get outta there. - In the 1840s.
- Inheritance rules and laws were such that
young people had no inheritance, no land to live on
and farm so they had to come to America in the 1860s and 70s
especially, in the 1880s and 90s.
There was just no land left in those
smaller European countries, so they came to
the wide open spaces of America.
- Well, when everything else falls down
in a little community, like Cooksville,
if not Cooksville, the one memento you have
of who was there was the cemetery.
- [Larry] Yes, our old cemetery.
Actually, we had two cemeteries.
The first one was behind our general store.
Somewhere, we don't know where.
People died had to be buried somewhere.
If not on their family farm, certainly in the village
there had to be a place so there was
an original cemetery somewhere behind the general store
in the 1840s and 50s when some
of the old folks started dying.
But in 1861, the Porter family donated land
for a Cooksville Cemetery.
It was actually called, here we go again, Waucoma Cemetery.
But over the years the name changed
and here we have a sign, the Cooksville Cemetery.
We have about 1,000, especially old settlers,
and some of us, including myself, will end up there.
And it's a lovely little cemetery
with some interesting stones.
The earliest, or the oldest, earliest born I guess you'd say
lady was born in 1772 and she's buried
in the Cooksville Cemetery, Charlotte Rose Love.
She died in the Cooksville area and was buried there.
So there's some nice old headstones
as well as some of those new headstones will go up there.
- I guess you can see the whole span.
- It's right next to the Lutheran church
but it has no relationship to the Lutheran church.
The Lutheran church came later.
- And we have a few more to go through, here.
In the balance of time available.
And we'll start with this one, which is, there's no
railroad, so why would there be a railroad bridge.
- [Larry] Yes, that does puzzle a lot of people
and it puzzled me until me, the amateur historian,
did some research and fortunately we've had
a number of historians that have preceded me in Cooksville,
because they always had a historian
and they did their research and that was built in 1857
to lure the railroad to Cooksville.
Apparently that's how railroad - Wow, I've never heard that.
Really, was that done commonly?
- [Larry] Yes.
- [Norman] If you build it, they will come.
- [Larry] Exactly, that's what they were thinking back then.
If you didn't build a bridge you could at least
guild them the land. - Sure.
- [Larry] Or sell it to them cheaply
or deal with the railroad and lure them
to your community because obviously it's like
building a highway here, in your community,
you wanted it for transportation purposes
and financial and industrial purposes.
- It really acts as your artery.
- You wanted a railroad, you wanted the roads.
So, yes, that Caledonia Bridge, built by Irish and Scottish
masons was built in 1857 to lure the railroad
to Cooksville coming over the Caledonia Springs
near Cooksville, but obviously it was never built.
There was also, because there was a railroad bankruptcy,
really I guess, a national financial crisis in 1857,
and I don't know what caused it, exactly,
but it certainly affected the railroad companies.
- Yes, nationwide there was, yes.
- Yes, and that affected the railroad companies,
who were wheeling and dealing obviously at that period,
expanding the railroads but it was a big bubble,
a railroad bubble, apparently,
and companies went belly up and so many railroads
just lost ... went out of business
but were re instituted there shortly after
and the railroads obviously did get built
from Chicago to Milwaukee, through Wisconsin,
but they didn't come through Cooksville,
they went through Edgerton and of course Evansville,
so that's why those communities, small cities now,
but thrived and grew.
- But you still have your bridge, though.
- We have our bridge, now overgrown.
I walked back there with some friends.
- One of those bridges to nowhere.
- Exactly, it's quite a nice piece
of archeology at this point.
(both laugh)
- Well, let's look at some of cast of characters
that we've mentioned during this conversation.
- [Larry] Yes, one of favorite guys is Benjamin Hoxie,
the guy who designed my church,
who was also a carpenter and he had a sash and door factory,
he had a broom factory, he built a cheese factory
in Cooksville, in 1875, which won blue ribbons
at the state fair.
Our cheese factory, by the way, still stands.
It's a house that was half house
and half cheese factory and still stands.
But Benjamin Hoxie was a real go-getter.
He also became a horticulturist and he helped design
the 1893 horticulture exhibit
at the Columbian World Fair in Chicago.
So he was a real mover and shaker.
- Cosmopolitan mover and shaker, yeah.
- He and his brother, Isaac Hoxie, who founded a number
of newspapers in the area were real go-getters.
This is Ralph Warner.
An early photograph of the guy who came over from Racine
and discovered Cooksville and turned the Duncan house
into the House Next Door and put Cooksville on the map.
He had lots of notoriety because of his serving food
and showing off his antiques.
It was quite an unusual thing to do back in the 19 teens.
- Any notable Cooksvillians?
- Well, we have the best dam man in the world
grew up in Cooksville, and there's a photographs of him
on the Yangtze River back in 1944,
he's being cruised down the Yangtze,
looking where to build the Three Gorges Dam back in 1944.
He was hired because he was known
as the best dam man in the world even then.
That's D-A-M. - I get it. (laughs)
- [Larry] Because he was the chief engineer
for the U.S. Reclamation Bureau,
and he helped design and invented ways of pouring
concrete and having it cure properly in the 1930s and 40s,
all the biggest dams in the world
were built under his design supervision.
As people said when he died, if you spin the globe
and just stop it with your finger,
every continent almost had a dam built by him
and if you're out in outer space,
the first thing you see, if you're flying to Earth,
the planet, the biggest structures in the world,
were designed by John Savage,
the best dam man in the world
who grew up along the Bad Fish Creek
where there were four dams when he was a kid.
- Oh, really? - I imagine he played and
frolicked as the kids did. - Sure.
- Swimming, fishing, opening the gates
on Halloween to let the water out of the pond
behind the dam and therefore the dam lost its water power.
I think the owners of those mills
hated those kids doing that.
But I'm sure John Savage learned all about
water power and its benefits and certainly
as the dams of the world in the 30s and 40s,
and even the Yangtze River Dam is now completed
and I visited it by the way and gave them some information
about John Savage which they didn't have.
They knew he had designed the first one
and the mural in the museum in China,
at the Three Gorges Dam, when I visited,
was only half finished but they already had a museum,
and I told them where I came from
and I had this material about John Savage
and they were very happy to get it
because they just had a tiny black and white
Xerox of John Savage's portrait.
Nothing else at the beginning of this huge mural
and so they made me sign the guestbook
and I gave them some information about John Savage.
They were gonna come to Cooksville and film
about John Savage's life, but unfortunately,
his house had burned down, years ago,
and he died in Colorado, so he's not buried in Cooksville,
so there was nothing left of John Savage,
so the people of China didn't come to Cooksville
to do a documentary on John Savage who designed
the present Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River.
They moved it slightly to a different location
but they still credit him with the concept and the location.
- Yeah, well that was the big era of dam building,
wasn't it, the 30s?
- Yeah, and it's changing now, of course.
They are controversial in some--
- Yes they are, taking some of them out.
- They are. - Including in Wisconsin.
- And when John Savage died, though, he was given praise
for the fact that the world, especially the third world
as we call it now, was so improved,
in terms of irrigation and flood control
and electricity that the dams were just
a great boon to human kind back then, in the 30s and 40s,
and still do serve that function, obviously,
the Chinese dam just opened on the Yangtze River.
But there's always something wrong with the technology
that we have to be aware of.
- The big picture and you can't always see it.
- Don't fool with Mother Nature, too much.
- Yeah, yeah, so true.
We have a diagram here, what's the significance of this?
- [Larry] Ah, a connection to Frank Lloyd Wright.
Cooksville has that connection.
Through Gideon Newman, a farmer, an early settler,
the farmer in the area, I think,
met Frank Lloyd Wright at UW Madison in the 1880s or 90s
when they both were in school there
because even the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation
(mumbles) doesn't know the story behind
this Cooksville Chapel that Frank Lloyd Wright designed
in 1934, never got built, or we'd be looking at
photographs instead of an architect's drawings,
of the Cooksville Chapel, titled by Frank Lloyd Wright,
a memorial to the soil based on the Walt Whitman poem.
It was commissioned by the Gideon Newman,
who lived in Cooksville.
His family grew up on a farm in Cooksville,
he grew up in Cooksville.
He commissioned this in 1934 and the local papers,
in the 1930s, were always talking about Frank Lloyd Wright's
projects and this shows up as one of his projects,
the Cooksville Chapel out of case concrete.
It's a small chapel and you can see it's very Prairie Style,
very radiant. - Mm-hmm.
- But never built.
It'd be nice to have it, I think.
It would certainly bring a lot of tourists
to Cooksville if we had it.
- Well, some of those Wright designs,
as we know, sit for a long time before
they're finally implemented.
- In Madison, and maybe another one in Madison
on Lake Monona, perhaps. - Sure.
- I'd love to see the Cooksville Chapel built
on Gideon Newman's farm, near Cooksville,
not in Cooksville, it'd be a great boost to the area.
But also, it's a lovely piece of architecture
on the drawing boards.
I've talked to the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation
but unfortunately, nobody has any money at this point.
But they're also very protective of his designs
and in fact over the telephone suggested
they wouldn't allow it because you can't build
Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings anymore
because the materials have changed.
- Well, yes, you have to-- - And they will never be
authentically Frank Lloyd Wright Buildings.
That's the controversy. - That's the thing
with Frank Lloyd Wright, isn't it?
That, well, when they built Monona Terrace,
they had to make some changes, modifications,
for the physical plan, that kind of thing.
- Yeah, so I think we couldn't call it,
nor can people call, anything built by Frank Lloyd Wright.
Based upon, perhaps.
- It's kind of ironic because his designs have become
historic too and become beyond the reach
of implementation in some cases.
- Yeah, yeah.
It's interesting, isn't it?
I personally think you can still proceed,
but the claim has to be based upon.
It would be wonderful to bring them to life.
- [Norman] They'd be watered down a little, sure.
- Because they still have value, I think,
to us, the prairie style and Frank Lloyd Wright,
especially, of course.
- And this is everybody in Cooksville.
Getting ready to take a bow here?
- We had an important artist in Cooksville, John Wilde,
retired University of Wisconsin professor or art
who lived near Cooksville and this is the 15
Cooksvillians that John Wilde painted in 1996.
He took Polaroid cameras of some of us.
I show up in there somewhere in the crowd.
And then he did silver point drawings
and converted the drawings into this magnificent paintings,
large paintings, now at the Chazen Museum.
He also did a print which some of us own in our homes.
So we have to thank John Wilde and many other people
who have documented Cooksville,
including the Cooksvillians, the people,
as well as the buildings.
Cooksville still thrives.
It's still a wonderful community and we're very proud of
everybody from John Wilde and Frank Lloyd Wright,
back to the Benjamin Hoxie and the Porters
and Ralph Warner and the Cook brothers
who founded Cooksville 175 years ago.
So, we've got a lot to show and talk about.
- You certainly do.
And thanks for sharing it, Larry Reid.
A walk through Cooksville, its history and its present also.
- You're welcome and thanks for having me.
- Larry Reid is the chair of
Historic Cooksville Incorporated
and I'm Norman Gilliland.
I hope you'll join me next time around for
University Place Presents.