"Waucoma House" to "Hidden Prairie House"
The story of the Village
of Cooksville’s stagecoach inn (and its demise) and the role it played in
village life is a part of the long history of Cooksville, founded 175 years ago
this year.
Cooksville's stagecoach inn and tavern called "Waucoma House," built about 1850, served as one of several stage stops on the route from Janesville to Madison. The undoubtedly impressive tavern-inn, about midway between the two bigger villages, once stood on the northeast corner of Main and Rock streets (now highways 59 and 138) and was a special hub of Cooksville activity.
Cooksville's stagecoach inn and tavern called "Waucoma House," built about 1850, served as one of several stage stops on the route from Janesville to Madison. The undoubtedly impressive tavern-inn, about midway between the two bigger villages, once stood on the northeast corner of Main and Rock streets (now highways 59 and 138) and was a special hub of Cooksville activity.
Unfortunately, it no longer exists.
Nor do any photographs or paintings except for a very simple pencil sketch done
from someone’s memory in the mid-20th century. The “Tavern,” as it
was usually referred to in the 19th century, was a 2 ½ story,
clapboard-sided, frame building. No doubt it exhibited the period’s popular
Greek Revival-style of architecture with symmetrical bays or window
arrangements, returned eaves, and a columned and roofed front porch. Most
likely Waucoma House resembled the other stagecoach inns and taverns of the era
such as those in nearby Union, Delavan and Delafield.
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| Hawks Inn, Delafield |
An 1858 map of Cooksville (and its joint
village Waucoma) indicates that Waucoma House with its barn faced south on the
corner property. Several newspaper clippings and anecdotal stories confirm its
existence and the important economic and social role it played in the village.
Records reveal that on July 17, 1850,
Nehemiah Parker bought the land (lots 1 and 2, block 2, Plat of Waucoma) for the
tavern-inn for $60 from John Porter, the Village of Waucoma’s founder. Shortly
thereafter the stagecoach inn was built, and the 1850 census listed J. M.
Aldrich as “hotelkeeper” in Cooksville. In addition to Aldrich, Horace Love
(1860) and David Johnson (1870) are also listed as innkeepers.
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| Union Tavern stagecoach inn |
The area’s early stagecoach
companies traveled northwest from Janesville to Madison on the old “Territorial
Road” (parts of which are now U.S. Highway 14 and Dane County Highway MM). Stops
for mail and passengers were made at Leyden, Fellows Station, Ball Tavern, Union,
Cooksville, and then in Dane County at Rutland, Rome Corners, Nine Springs and
Madison.
When the route included Cooksville,
the stagecoach unloaded and re-loaded in the village and then headed northward
to the present Old Stage Road, where it galloped northwesterly to the Rutland
stage stop and back onto the Territorial Road to Madison. (Wisconsin was a large
Territory from 1836 to 1848, when it became a state with its present smaller
boundaries.)
For several decades Waucoma House
served as the area’s transportation center for delivery of mail, travelers, and
goods, and as a restaurant-tavern and guest hotel and village social center. Besides
the daily excitement of the arrival of mail and travelers and the latest news,
the inn was the scene for village parties and special occasions, as well as
serving as a guesthouse and restaurant.
However, by the1860s, stagecoaches
ceased regular trips to Cooksville as well as to other places. Horses were rapidly
replaced by the new technology of “iron horses”; the railroad’s steam engines
had arrived.
Unfortunately, the Village of
Cooksville (or, as it was often called on some maps, Waucoma) did not succeed
in luring a railroad company to lay its tracks to the combined villages. But it
tried. A local attempt at enticement was made by building a stone railroad
bridge over the nearby Caledonia Springs for a proposed railroad route in 1857,
but that effort failed. Apparently, the lure of what was probably a free bridge
(and probably some local financial investments) was not a lucrative enough
offer. Without a railroad, without that new mode of transportation, the need for
an inn or a hotel (or for any large commercial building) disappeared.
From then on, Waucoma House
struggled to serve its loyal local villagers and farmers. Mail did continue to
arrive in Cooksville by horseback from Evansville, which had a rail line, and later
by a small mail coach that could transport a few passengers as well on its
daily or weekly mail delivery gallops to the village and then onward to Fulton
and points east.
On November 20, 1867, the inn’s
barn burned down. The blowing wind endangered Henry Duncan’s nearby barn as
well as the houses of Hoxie and Wells to the east, as fire-brands flew through
the air. But the small fires that erupted were doused by “an active force of
women and boys,” it was reported. William Johnson, owner of the hotel’s barn,
suffered a $500 loss, partially covered by insurance.
Waucoma House, the tavern,
continued to carry on as a business venture.
In 1870, David Johnson, the owner of the hotel, was granted a license to
sell “strong spirituous ardent or intoxicating liquors” for one year after
depositing money with the Town treasurer. (The usual fermented drink was
probably home-brewed cider or beer.)
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| A recent drawing of Waucoma House |
At one point, Waucoma House served as
a dancing school where classes were held every two weeks, taught by a Mr. Brown
from Oregon. (Cooksville had many social parties, with games, sometimes with
costumes and contests, and with music, so knowing how to trip the light
fantastic was an important skill for many reasons.)
In 1881, a harness maker moved to
Cooksville and opened a shop in the ex-hotel building. Business was good at
first, and he “means to secure plenty of work,” stated a local newspaper. The
next year, the Evansville Review newspaper reported in a letter from Cooksville
that “the old tavern is sold, a stranger takes possession,” and in 1883, the
newspaper reported, “The old hotel is empty again. The family that was in it,
having moved to Jug Prairie last week.”
By 1885, the building had changed
hands yet again. The Cooksville correspondent for the Evansville Review
reported that a “family from England are going to occupy it. We hope sometime
in the near future a new residence will be erected on the old site.” The
building must have been deteriorating by then. In 1889, the newspaper reported
that E. T. Stoneburner “bought the old tavern stand and is repairing it and
improving the looks of the premises greatly. It has been in a dilapidated
condition for a long time….” Stoneburner made it “his new home” with “a new
fence and garden.” In 1894 he rented his house to a Miss Stetzer for a
dressmaker’s shop.
Unfortunately, the old Waucoma
House did not find a sustainable use and was demolished about 1910.
Sometime after the “Tavern” was
torn down in the early 20th century, the paving stones laid to
provide a “crossing to the old street near the Tavern” were removed by Ralph
Warner, who used some of the smoothly-worn stones to construct his small
parlor-garden pool at his famous “House Next Door,” the historic Duncan House
just east of the demolished Waucoma House.
Although the old stagecoach inn was
gone, another building soon took its place on that prominent corner of
Cookeville, and its story is part of the history of the village, too.
In April 1913, the Evansville
newspaper’s Cooksville correspondent reported that, “Jerry Armstrong has built
a fine hen house on the site of the Old Tavern.” This new and smaller commercial
building was first used by Oscar Egner as a meat market, then as a tavern, and
eventually as a grocery store. In 1923, Franz Holm bought the land, but the
records are quiet about its use in the 1920s and’30s.
The next time the new corner “hen
house” comes up in records it had been lived in by Paul Savage (1875-1951) from
1940 to 1947. Savage had bought the house-tavern and in about 1947 it was moved
to a site north of the Cooksville Cheese Factory (built 1875) on the western
edge of Cooksville. The new site was the 10-acre “Morningstar Gardens” created
in 1944 by Emil Priebe, Jr. of Milwaukee, where Savage was working as gardener
and caretaker. Savage, a long-time resident and handyman in Cooksville, was
given a life-lease on the acre with the house-tavern. The Gardens served as a
retreat for Priebe from the big city.
In 1950, the ten-acre Morningstar Gardens
property including the house-tavern was purchased from Priebe by C. S. (“Star”)
Atwood and his wife Cora, who owned the Waucoma Lodge residence on the village’s
Public Square. Savage continued to live in the newly-reroofed house-tavern
residence until his death in January of 1951, when he succumbed to a heart
attack in his outhouse.
In May of 1951, the ten acres were
sold by the Atwoods to Chester Holway, a Cooksville resident, journalist and
gardener, who with his partner E. Marvin Raney lived in the Duncan House. They re-named
the garden property “Emfield” and used the old house-tavern mostly for storage,
with their extensive flower gardens and fruit trees surrounding it.
In 1963, Holway sold the property
to Karl Wolter, and the old house began its new and revitalized life. Dr. Wolter
continued and expanded the tradition of planting the fertile soil with gardens—various
specimens of trees, flowers and a large impressive prairie. He also remodeled and
expanded the old house-tavern that historically was one-step-removed from being
an edificial descendent of Cooksville’s mid-19th century stagecoach
inn, the Waucoma House.
Eventually, Karl’s and Patrick
Comfert’s horses roamed their “Hidden Prairie” farmland, but their horses were
never called upon to pull a stagecoach into or out of Cooksville’s “Waucoma
House.” stage stop.
# # #
[Note:
The original site of the Waucoma House inn and tavern remained vacant in
Cooksville until 1976 when June and Carrol Wall, who had been living in the
historic Isaac Hoxie House just to the north, built a new residence on the
site. In 1980, the Cooksville Historic District was enlarged to include that
property along with historic properties in that part of the old Village of
Cooksville. Larry Reed]
