The year 2015 marks the 175th
anniversary of the Cooks settling in northwestern Rock County, and 2017 will
commemorate the 175th anniversary of the official platting of their
Village of Cooksville.
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| The Cook House (1842) today |
The Cooks arrived in the Wisconsin Territory
on June 25, 1840. The federal census taker that year counted noses at John
Cook’s new little log cabin, revealing
the following living there: himself, a bachelor; his younger brother Daniel
Cook; Daniel’s wife Elizabeth, and their young daughter Rhoda aged two.
(Sometime after 1840 John Cook married his wife Nancy.)
Soon, in 1842, John Cook officially
platted his village of Cooksville near the Bad Fish Creek. (The words
eventually flowed together into “Badfish”; the creek was also known as
“Waucoma” at the time.) Cook must have believed that the growing westward
movement in America justified establishing an official settlement with building
lots for sale, probably hoping to profit from the increased migration from New England, New York and the British
Isles to the newly opened land.
Cook’s modest village consisted of
three blocks platted on the western side of the half-section line running south
from Badfish Creek on the north to then-named Union Road (now State Highway 59)
on the south. The eastern limit of his village, bordering Senator Daniel
Webster’s newly-purchased land, was “Main Street” (now Highway 138). The three blocks contained six lots each,
with two streets that led northwesterly up to the Cooks’ new mill on the creek.
The Cooks quickly erected the saw
mill in 1842 on the Badfish, with a dam and a pond. The mill turned out sawn lumber
for his new frame house built in 1842, as well as for many other future homes
and buildings in the newly-settled area.
The Cooksville Mill, a significant early addition to the frontier
community, signaled that the official village was firmly on the map, geared up
for business and ready for new-comers. The industrial age had arrived on the
frontier, along with great expectations of success. And in that year Daniel
Cook invested in more land to the south of his Cooksville.
Early in 1842, the
Cooks’ log house hosted services for the
Free Will Baptist Church that had been organized with 12 to 15 members
from around the area, with services led by Pastor Elder Low, who farmed nearby.
The church’s future meetings were held in the Cooks’ saw mill on the creek.
Unfortunately, little is known
about either John Cook or Daniel Cook or their families during the ten years
they lived in Cooksville. By the early 1850s, all the Cooks had moved further
West to Iowa, leaving the community they founded, apparently lured further westward
in search of new opportunities and new fortunes.
But Cooksville continued to grow
after the Cooks departed.
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| Dr. John Porter |
In 1846, Dr. John Porter established
his Village of Waucoma adjacent to Cooksville to the east on land he had
purchased from Senator Daniel Webster in 1842. Porter established a much larger
village (14 blocks), which still legally exists, and named it “Waucoma.” For a
while, 19th-century maps listed the two adjacent villages simply as
“Waucoma.” Soon, however, both villages became known by one name, “Cooksville,”
mainly because the post office was most often located in a store on the Cooksville
side of their shared “Main Street.”
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| Waucoma map 1873 |
Other settlers to the Wisconsin
Territory followed the Cooks and the Porters in the1840s and1850s. In fact, the
population of the Wisconsin Territory jumped dramatically from about 3,000 in
1830 and 11,683 in 1836 to 305,391 in 1850, two years after statehood..
One by one, family by family, new settlers
arrived lured by inexpensive land and a new life on the frontier. They, too,
lived in their wagons sometimes in crude shelters, staking out their
land-holdings, disputing land-claims, purchasing land, sometimes walking to
Milwaukee’s land office to register their claim. In Cooksville, they quickly constructed
post-and-beam framed houses from hand-hewn logs and sawn lumber from the mill
with foundations of stone from “Quarry Hill” north of the village. Soon some
houses (and a schoolhouse) were built from the famous vermillion-colored
Cooksville bricks made of local clay fired for weeks in two new local brick
yards.
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| Cooksville’s brick schoolhouse (1850-1886 |
The pioneers— talented farmers, merchants,
carpenters, brick-makers, masons, home-makers and cooks—began their new lives
among the oak-openings, farming the rich prairie next to the fresh, spring-fed
waters of the strangely-named Bad Fish Creek (an 1833 map names the present nearby
Sugar River as the “Bad Fish River”). The fertile soil, the oak trees and the
flowing waters provided a comfortable and sustainable setting for these
earliest settlers who mainly grew their own food and provided vital services to
each other.
The two side-by-side villages continued
to grow and prosper. Soon the community had a stagecoach hotel-tavern (Waucoma
House), several mercantile and general stores, a meat market, several
blacksmith shops, a saw-mill turned grist-mill (with two other mills nearby on
the Badfish), a cheese factory, as well as tinkers, tailors and a doctor. The
first schoolhouse was of logs, replaced by a brick school, which in turn was
replaced by the present larger wooden frame schoolhouse. Later, two churches
were constructed. But after being by-passed by the railroad just before the
Civil War, the two villages slumbered quietly side-by-side, becoming the “town
that time forgot.”
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| Cooksville and Waucoma, 1858 map |
Because of its well-preserved
historic qualities, it was suggested in 1962 that the Village of Cooksville (a
“wee bit of New England in Wisconsin”) would make an excellent outdoor
historical and pioneer architecture museum for Wisconsin, with the addition of
other ethnic structures. (Instead, of course, the extensive outdoor museum of
Old World Wisconsin was established near Eagle, Wisconsin.)
After 175 years of settlement, the
Village of Cooksville (along with Waucoma) has experienced revitalization and
restoration of its rural charm through a commitment to preservation by its
residents and local government. It is recognized as a rare gem of early
Wisconsin settlement and an important part of the state’s historical heritage.
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