Saturday, January 5, 2013

Cooksville’s Blacksmith Shops By Larry Reed




Besides grocery stores and meat markets, blacksmith shops appear to have been the most popular businesses to inspire the entrepreneurial spirit in 19th century Cooksville.

Indispensable in their time, Cooksville’s many blacksmith shops were operated in various locations and for various lengths of time in the village, although in some cases the records are not clear as to the exact location or duration of the businesses. With their red-hot forges and anvils, blacksmith shops were the all-around manufacturing and repair shops— for farm equipment,  wagons and carriages, for horse shoes and harnesses, for household objects and metal work of every kind—and the shops served their purpose on into the 20th century.
Robertson’s Blacksmith Shop, c.1895


All the old shops have disappeared from the village landscape except for one.

In June 1894, according to the Wisconsin Tobacco Reporter (Edgerton) newspaper, there were five blacksmith shops open and operating in Cooksville. Actually, it appears there were six shops if one counts a shop that lasted only about six months, and by the end of 1894 a total of seven had been established, although not all were functioning at the same time.

Nathum Parker’s Blacksmith Shop built in 1849 seems to have been the first to operate in Cooksville. Apparently, Parker’s shop may have been a brick building because part of the brick stoop or foundation remains on lot 8, block 1, in Waucoma (next to the present Breckhurst-Gunn House). Later, William Graves operated the shop in the 1860s. Graves had moved to Cooksville in 1861, at the urging of the Porter brothers who needed a blacksmith in the village, and so Graves began his long career as the village blacksmith; he also did blacksmithing in Evansville in 1869-70.  By the 1870s, Nathum Parker’s small brick shop was operated by Hans Knudson, the village’s first Norwegian settler.  No photographs of the first blacksmith shop exist.

In 1869, Jahiel Courter built his wood-frame blacksmith shop two lots south of the General Store on lot 3, block 2, Cooksville.  Courter operated the shop until 1876 and left town in 1880. (“In fact, when Courter left town and headed for Missouri the local people gathered together and shot off a cannon. It is thought he was not a popular man,” reported historian Marvin Raney in a 1978 interview.) The shop was sold to William Graves in 1887. Graves eventually sold the Courter Blacksmith Shop in 1903, and in 1976, Francis “Butch” Hach purchased the property from Charles Gilbert. The venerable old shop, which had been in use continuously as a blacksmith and welding business on into the 20th century, was demolished in 1978, and a new blacksmith and welding building was constructed near the site by Hach. (Butch Hach, working at his forge, continued the tradition of making items for clients, from fireplace tools and andirons and weather vanes to foot-scrapers and outdoor lamps and lamp-posts in the 1980s.)

In 1874, William Graves, a very busy village blacksmith—he may have owned two blacksmith shops for a time— built his own blacksmith shop, the third in Cooksville, near where he lived on north Main Street on what he thought were parts of lots 6 and 7, block 4, Waucoma. But the shop was discovered to have been constructed on what was a platted street, then called Washington Street (now Webster Street). The shop was eventually removed by Graves in 1888 and transported to lot 14, block 9, Waucoma, to the property of the Blackman-Graves House (built c.1849), which Graves had purchased in 1865. It was sited south of his house to serve as a barn, (The house and barn are no longer extant.)

In about 1886, Graves built and attached to that Blackman-Graves House a new pink-cream brick blacksmith shop. (The Cooksville brickyards had been closed by that time, so new, imported “cream” bricks were used.) Graves, a Civil War veteran and avid local historian, operated his blacksmith business for many years, finally moving to Evansville in old age to be near his daughters, dying there in 1903. Reportedly, on each Fourth of July Graves faithfully fired off the Cooksville cannon, which he stored in his blacksmith shop. (This is another reference to that beloved Cooksville cannon that, unfortunately, went missing sometime in the mid-20th century, according to Marvin Raney.)

Grave’s Blacksmith Shop, c.1886, 2010

By the 1960s, the Blackman-Graves House was a neglected ruin, finally collapsing in 2000, and the pink-cream brick Graves Blacksmith Shop attached to the house had likewise substantially deteriorated. In 2010, the collapsed brick Graves Blacksmith Shop was faithfully reconstructed on the original site, using the salvaged original pink-cream bricks. It is now the only remaining historic “blacksmith shop” in the village.

In early 1885, Harvey Berry built a new blacksmith shop, apparently the fifth in Cooksville, on the lot just south of the General Store, next to Courter’s shop, but his business did not last long: after two years Berry moved his blacksmithing business to Union and sold his property two years later. It is not clear what happened to the shop on that property; it may have been dismantled and moved to Union.

In April 1894, Elmer Franklin and Charles Newkirk, “enterprising young men,” built a blacksmith shop on Mills Street (the long-abandoned street in northwest Cooksville that led to the mill on the Badfish Creek), but in October of that same year, this sixth blacksmith shop was torn down and the lumber taken to Evansville, leaving four shops in operation.

In June of 1894, it was reported that Sever Forest from Chicago “has the frame up for his new blacksmith shop” in Cooksville, according to the Wisconsin Tobacco Reporter. “That makes five blacksmith shops in town.” However, it is unclear exactly where that shop was built or how long it operated.

Robertson’s Blacksmith Shop, c.1910

In September 1894, John G. Robertson opened a blacksmith shop in what originally had been Benjamin Hoxie’s carpenter shop and then became Julius Savage’s broom factory. Located on lot 9, block 2, Waucoma, to the north of the Benjamin Hoxie House on Webster Street, the building had been used by Robertson as a tin-shop since 1890 and was converted by him into his Robertson Blacksmith Shop.  (Robertson was also the village’s award-winning fiddle player.) Later, in the mid-20th century the shop was used by Arthur and Dorothy Kramer as their pottery studio with a kiln (they lived next door in the Hoxie House), until the shop was destroyed by fire in 1956. It appears that this was the seventh blacksmith shop to have been operated in Cooksville.

These seven village blacksmith shops served their purpose, on and off, for more than a hundred years. Advances in 20th-century technology, including cheaper, mass-produced metal goods and the advent of “horseless carriages” soon condemned blacksmith shops to memories of a bygone era in America, except for the occasional part-time hobbyist smithy with his bellows, forge, anvil and hammers.

However, pieces of the history of Cooksville’s village blacksmiths can still be found as property owners dig to build or to plant gardens and discover old horse shoes, old hand-forged door hinges, stirrups, square nails, garden tools, and odd metal pieces hammered and twisted into useful shapes—artifacts that continue to be unearthed in the farmyards and the backyards of historic Cooksville.

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