Cooksville Archives and Collections: More Images

Here are more images from the Cooksville Archives and Collections, documenting, in part, the history of the village since the 1840s to the present...

Cooksville School Class, 1954: "Save the Badfish Creek"

Eddie Julseth (1915-2011), Cooksville General Store owner.

Katie and Dennis Ehle in the Cooksville General Store, owners, photo c.1987.

John Savage (1879-1967) with Chinese children, c.1944, where he designed the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River. John grew up in Cooksville with its three dams on the Badfish Creek.

Larry Reed signing the Three Gorges Dam Museum
guest book after donating John Savage materials
from Cooksville to China in 2000

Most of the subjects of John Wilde's "15 Cooksvillians" painting and print, at the Schoolhouse, 1997.


Bob and Martha Degner's Cooksville Float on their historic truck.

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The Cooksville Archives: More Photographs and Other Collected Items

For the past 180 years (almost), people in the Village of Cooksville and the Town of Porter have been saving and collecting items that tell the stories of their lives. Those items---photographs, newspaper clippings, letters, diaries, books, ledgers, memoires, paintings, art works, property records and genealogies, as well as furniture, rugs, utensils, pottery, and other objects---have been gathered together by residents over the years to create a "Cooksville Archives and Collections," in order to preserve and share the items. 

And items continue to be donated and added to the collection.

Here are some of the photographs and other images, old and new, that help tell the stories of Cooksville and the surrounding area.

Justin Wells and Mary Jane Woodbury, Cooksville wedding photo 1866.

150 years later, the 2015 Molly Zimmerman and Matt Brody wedding, Cooksville Schoolhouse.

Cooksville Cornhuskers baseball team, 1900.

About 120 years later, the Cooksville 59ers baseball team.

                              Log cabin near Cooksville, c.1840s.

Wallin Log Cabin, Town of Porter, c.1840s.

                                               

Land speculators platted "paper cities," named Van Buren and Warsaw, north and east  of Cooksville, in the1830s-40s. Others named Saratoga and Caramana were also "plotted" nearby. 

But no buyers,  no communities.       

A 1903 essay about the origins of the name "Wisconsin."

A  c.1930 pamphlet about the Agency House at Fort Winnebago.

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Another pamphlet: "Paul Bunyan Tales," 1922.

John Van Vleck's obituary, 1910.

                

 George and Eunice Mattakat  at their Red Door Antique Shop in the historic Cook House (1842). They lived nearby in the Van Vleck House (c.1852).

A cute"outhouse" pamphlet, 1930.

One of the "gems": The Tourist.

Another "gem": The Sportsman, for hunting and traveling trips.

Elton Breckenridge, newspaper photo, 1975, as he worked  to create his "Breckhurst" from the old Gunn House in Cooksville.

The old Gunn House before Elton Breckenridge transformed it.

                           (To be continued....)