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.
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| 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.)
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| 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.
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| 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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