Brick Houses of Cooksville
The historic Village of Cooksville
is well-known for a number of reasons—for being a “Wee Bit of New England in
Wisconsin,” for being the home-town of “John
Savage the Best Dam Man in the World,” for having the Oldest General Store
operating in Wisconsin—and, to a lesser
extent, as the site of the proposed Frank Lloyd Wright “Cooksville Chapel”
(which was never built) and for the actress Sigourney Weaver’s suggestion that
Cooksville would be “a wonderful place
for a Summer Little Theater” (which never happened, either).
But Cooksville is probably most
famous for its early architecture— its historic homes, barns, churches, Store,
Public Square and a one-room Schoolhouse—and especially for the many historic houses
constructed of its distinctively-colored, locally-made brick.
Wisconsin’s premier architectural
historian Richard W.E. Perrin greatly admired Cooksville’s brick houses. He wrote
that the brick houses were of “excellent vermilion color” and were “all treated
with domestic feeling, individuality and simplicity not always evident in this
period.” (Perrin also suggested that “Cooksville is the sort of unspoiled
community that would lend itself admirably to a historic preservation project
for which specimens from the surrounding area could be brought in to join with
the existing structures in an open-air historic museum.” That didn’t happen at
Cooksville, of course, but instead near Eagle, at what is now the large and
impressive “Old World Wisconsin” outdoor museum.)
Cooksville in its hay-day (or
perhaps its “clay-day”) had two very productive brickyards, thanks to the thick
pink-orange clay that ran just beneath the surface of the village. It became
the source for the distinctive vermilion brick used in the 1840s-1850s to
construct the brick residences, the first schoolhouse, and for several nearby
farmhouses.
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| Longbourne House |
One brickyard, operated by Hubbard Champney
(1808-1879) from Maine and later by William Johnson, was located just south of
the village across South Street (or now, Church Street), and remained in
operation until about 1860. The Champney site has been farmland since 1875.
The second brick factory was
located west of Cooksville, on the John Dow Farm between the farmhouse and the
Badfish Creek. It was initially operated by Champney for a time, but like the earlier
brickyard, it was abandoned by1865. That was when Mr. Dow and his farmhands
filled in the old deep, dug-out brickyard holes with brush, weeds, and soil,
and then scraped and plowed the site that summer. Shards of bricks can still be
found at both brickyard locations.
Brick-making took time, about three
months, to produce a batch of bricks. First, to dig and prepare the reddish
clay, to mold the clay in the wooden molds, and to air-dry the bricks. Then the
raw bricks were stacked in a circular tower inside a large kiln in the center of
which was built a huge fire that was kept constantly burning for seven days and
nights, or longer, to bake the bricks. The fired clay hardened into the distinctive
pink-orange color; parts of some bricks closest to the fire were partially glazed
and burned to a darker, glassy color. A total of about 24,000 bricks were
produced at a time in each batch, enough for about a half a house
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| A modern Cooksville fireplace with old bricks |
Some bricks did not bake hard
enough to withstand weathering on the exterior of buildings. But they were put to good use as “brick
nogging” inside the walls of several of Cooksville’s wood-framed houses. These
softer bricks, mortared together, served to insulate and solidify the wooden structures.
Lath and plaster were applied on the inside walls and clapboards on the
exterior.
Some of these “soft” bricks discovered in the walls doing 20th-century
rehabilitations have been replaced by modern insulation, and these under-baked
bricks have been re-purposed to construct interior fireplaces in new additions.
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| Brick nogging in a wall |
The village’s historic vermilion brick
houses include the Duncan House (1848), the Longbourne House (1854), the
Backenstoe-Howard House (1848), the Isaac Porter House (1856), the Chambers-
Porter Cottage (1856), the Collins House (1856), and the Frank Seaver House
(1850) Also, the first Schoolhouse was brick (replaced in 1886 with a
wood-frame school,) and a village blacksmith shop, long-gone, was apparently constructed
of local brick. (The recently reconstructed
Grave’s Blacksmith Shop from the 1880s was re-built using its original lighter cream-colored
imported brick.)
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| Frank Seaver House |
Just outside the village are three
additional historic Cooksville brick houses: the Lovejoy-Dow House (1850), the
Cooper-Gillies House (1850-53), and the Miller House (1853-56).
Talented local masons and
brick-layers such as Charles Howard and Richard Houfe are credited with
constructing these sturdy brick houses in and near the village.
The first settlers in Cooksville
were multi-talented and versatile men and women—they had to be in these
isolated first settlements. They knew how to use the raw materials—the clay,
the limestone from quarry hill, the tall
trees for lumber, the water to power the sawmill on the Badfish Creek—that
were at hand to build their new frontier village in the 1840s and 1850s.
This brief period of brick
construction played a major role in the development and character of
Cooksville. The village, founded in 1842 by John and Daniel Cook and added to
by John Porter’s next-door Village of Waucoma in 1846, owes its distinctive
appearance to the excellent examples of early pioneer construction in
Wisconsin, especially those featuring locally-made bricks.
And as time went by, these early
architectural efforts and construction techniques gained greater appreciation
by succeeding generations of family members, new-comers, architectural
historians, historic preservationists and visitors to historic Cooksville.
Their pioneer work has stood the test of time.
