Cooksville’s Artists and Artisans, Part Four: Dorothy Hansen Kramer Toigo, by Larry Reed

Over the 175 years of its existence, the Village of Cooksville, like every community, had its share of talented artisans, maybe more than most small villages that never had more than 175 residents. Perhaps Cooksville’s “smallness” combined with its special “architectural quaintness” helped attract and create a community supportive of artists, artisans and antiquarians. Its well-cared-for character certainly impressed Wisconsin’s premier architectural historian Richard Perrin to propose in1962 that historic Cooksville would make an excellent place for an “old world Wisconsin” outdoor architectural museum.

Dorothy Kramer (1900-1971)

One of the village’s 20^th-century artists was Dorothy Hansen Kramer Toigo (Sept 21, 1900-Oct. 30, 1971). She was an art and crafts teacher and a life-long practicing artist.  Employed in the WPA arts program in Illinois in the mid-1930s, she also was an art teacher at Ferry Hall, Lake Forest, Illinois, in 1958-59, and at Stoughton, Wisconsin, in 1959-60, and then once again at Ferry Hall from 1960-69. She lived about 45 years in Cooksville, always pursing her various artistic endeavors.

Dorothy specialized in ceramics and weaving. She studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1921 to 1924 where she met and soon married Arthur Kramer (1892-1962), an advertising and business teacher. (They also met Elton Breckenridge there who eventually taught at Chicago’s Art Institute and eventually purchased his home in Cooksville in 1952, where he continued his close friendship with the Kramers, helping to decorate some of Dorothy’s pottery; in 1976 “Breck” left the village and his home, “Breckhurst,” with its brick terraces, fountain and statuary  he had created.)

At first, Dorothy Kramer lived part-time in Cooksville in the historic Benjamin Hoxie House, which her father bought for her in 1926; he then also bought the Robertson Blacksmith Shop property next door for her in 1930. She lived there permanently beginning about that year and with her husband Arthur operated a very active pottery studio there from 1952-56.

Dorothy Kramer pottery

In 1953, the Cooksville School’s student journal-newsletter reported that “Arthur Kramer has an interesting hobby of making pottery. He uses some Cooksville clay, taken from the bottom of the Badfish creek. The clay is shaped by turning it on a potter’s wheel. It is fired and glazed in an electric kiln at a temperature of about 1923 degrees F. When the clay is fired, it is a deep buff, but when it is freshly dug, it is gray. Some of the things he makes are pottery mugs, vases, ash trays, bowls, and jam jars.”  Arthur had been commuting to Cooksville from Chicago, where he worked during the week, but spent his weekends setting up his and Dorothy’s artist work spaces.

Apparently, Arthur made his pottery in the Blacksmith Shop-studio, with Dorothy doing the decorating and glazing. But soon, according to a family report, “they couldn’t work together so she started doing it herself. Plates, bowls, cups.”  Arthur also built looms for his creatively active wife who began weaving various items (place mats, napkins). She probably taught her nearby neighbor Marvin to hook rag rugs.

Map of Cooksville by D. Kramer 1955

Together, Dorothy and Marvin Raney operated the “Cooksville House” where they sold their arts and crafts in the mid-1950s, along with weavings and blacksmith-forged and silver items by others. (Marvin was an antique collector and dealer in Cooksville as well as a weaver and owned the Duncan House and “Waucoma Lodge.”). The Cooksville House shop was first located in the old Duncan House barn and then in the Backenstoe-Howard House (“Waucoma Lodge”) in the late-1950s. A note came with each purchased piece stating, “Your gift from Old Cooksville in Wisconsin is a genuine hand-crafted work, created with the same high regard for honest craftsmanship that has distinguished our arts for more than a hundred years…. It comes to you with some of the craftsman’s heart in it, and a little bit of the beauty of the old village.”

Dorothy’s artful pottery had a distinctive style, based on her admiration of the forms and colors of ceramic pottery from thirteenth century Korea. Her green glaze apparently was based on this early Korean pottery, a piece of which was gifted to her by a nephew. Her pottery pieces in that distinguishing style are highly valued. She also produced small, simple pottery pieces that were sold to visitors to old Cooksville—tea cups, coffee cups, saucers, jam pots, ashtrays, decorative square ceramic tiles, many with her charming, simple, hand-painted portraits of Cooksville’s buildings. She also painted at least two primitive maps of Cooksville-Waucoma in 1938 and 1955, which are valuable documents of the co-joined villages.

Hoxie House tile painted by D. Kramer

In 1970 after Art Kramer died, Dorothy married John Toigo in Cooksville. She had met Toigo earlier in Chicago in the 1920s, and they lived briefly in New York City in 1970, returning to Cooksville in 1971, where she died of cancer. She is buried in the Cooksville Cemetery.

Dorothy’s sister, Helen Rose Hansen Naysmith Toigo Bradley (1906–1989), also lived in Cooksville beginning in the 1930s in the Morgan House, first as a summer home, then after 1945 permanently, when she taught in several area schools. Many happy Hansen family reunions took place in Dorothy’s and Helen’s backyards of their historic Cooksville houses. Helen’s son Jim Naysmith now lives in the Morgan House.

[Material for this story came from the Cooksville Archives and from “The History of the Hansens & Salisburys in Europe and America 1020-2010 and beyond,” by Mary E. Osgood and Charles F. Osgood, 2014.]

(COOKSVILLE’S ARTISTS AND ARTISANS: to be continued.)