The State Coach to Cooksville - Part 2 by Larry Reed

The Village of Cooksville was served by the newest system of transportation—the stagecoach— between Janesville and Madison in the 1840s and ‘50s. It was an important link to the outside world.

The start of the route was the Stage House in Janesville, the settlement’s first hotel, which opened about 1838, owned by Charles Stevens. It was located on the east side of the Rock River, near the ferry that transported travelers across to the west side, until a bridge was built about 1843. In the fall of 1846, Stevens built a new hotel, the Stevens House, on the west side of the river, and this apparently was the new starting point for the stage line until the hotel burned down in 1853.

The stagecoach left Janesville early in the morning for Madison. The initial route went diagonally northwestward from Janesville toward Leyden, but was soon changed so that the stage went out of Janesville to the north about four miles, where Justine Dayton had built a tavern called the Dayton House, also known as the “Rock River House.”

Then the stage traveled three miles west to Leyden, where Ben McMellen had built a tavern in 1841. The next stage stop for mail was four miles further at William and Catherine Warren’s Tavern, built about 1842, which Frederick and Emily Fellows purchased as part of their farm in 1854. The post office and the stage stop were apparently then moved a half-mile west, where John Winston opened a tavern in 1843. (Stagecoach stops changed, of course, as the region evolved and more settlers established farms and small communities grew.)

The next stop on the stage route was the Ball Tavern, built by Joseph Osborn in 1840 and named after the sign that hung from an oak tree in the shape a large wooden ball. A small stone marker commemorates the tavern’s location just west of the present Ball Cemetery and Tolles Road on the north side of Highway 14.


Union Hotel, built c. 1834

From there, the stage ran five miles northwest along Territorial Road to Union. (Evansville was not yet in existence.) The Union Tavern, built about 1834 by Dan Prentice and later operated by Dan Pond, became the important halfway-house on the roads to Madison, where horses were changed, meals were served to passengers, overnight guests were accommodated, and where travelers to the new Village of Cooksville could disembark to complete their journey three miles to the east.

When the stage line ran to Cooksville directly, it probably came up from the south along Tolles Road or came from Union in the west, on a daily schedule. In Cooksville the stagecoaches first stopped at one of the general stores, whichever housed the post office at the time, and, then later, stopped at Waucoma House, Cooksville’s stagecoach inn and tavern. The stage then would have galloped off to the north for a mile and then headed northwest along the Old Stage Road to Rutland to join the main route to Madison. (The large, stone Graves barn on Old Stage Road, five miles from Cooksville, probably served as stop on that route.) Or the stage also could have just back-tracked to Union from Cooksville, if necessary.

In the early days, Union was a thriving village and logical mid-way stopping point for stages. It eventually boasted not only the tavern-hotel, but four general stores, three blacksmith shops, three churches, two grain warehouses, and a millinery shop and a shoe shop. It was referred to as “a lively little burg in those days.” But little evidence of this prosperity remains, and “lively” Union has faded.

From Union, the stages with fresh horses and perhaps additional passengers headed, if not to Cooksville, for Madison via Rutland, about five miles up the road. The Rutland House, opened by Albert Waterman about 1840, was one of the earliest to be built. After Rutland, the next stop was Rome Corners, about four miles further north, near what is now Oregon, where the first tavern was built in 1843 by C.P. Mosley. From there, the stage traveled about four miles to Oak Hall and the tavern-post office constructed there by William Quivey in 1843. (Later, stops at Lake View and at Nine Springs closer to Madison were included.)

The last stop on the Frink & Walker route was Madison, which had been selected as the capitol of the Wisconsin Territory in 1836. By 1840, Madison had a population of 146 people and consisted of about 24 log and frame buildings; but as the State’s capitol in 1848, it would grow much larger.

(To be continued…)