More Anniversaries to Celebrate in Old Cooksville… by Larry Reed

This year 2016, and next year in 2017, the Village of Cooksville celebrates a number of special but lesser-known important anniversaries as the community remembers its early formal establishment 175 years ago. (A previous story in the Cooksville News Blog of April 28, 2016, lists a number of major mile-stones in the village’s history.) 

It’s not just the major anniversaries of the village’s early “birth dates”—two of them!— of 1842 and 1846 that are to be celebrated: those dates when Cooksville was first founded by the Cook brothers175 years ago and four years later when its large contiguous neighbor, the Village of Waucoma, was founded by the Porter brothers. 

Or that important and famous “non-event” event of 1857, the year the railroad did not come to Cooksville. That would be 160 years ago when it didn’t happen, thus helping to preserve much of the village’s early and historic architecture and atmosphere. 

Ralph Warner at his "House Next Door"

But also important is an event 105 years ago, in 1911, the year Ralph Lorenzo Warner arrived, purchasing the Duncan House, which he named the “House Next Door” (next door to his friend Susan Porter’s home, “Waucoma Lodge”). Warner’s restoration efforts soon put old Cooksville on the map in local, state, and national publications with his creation of an antique house filled with antiques and set in antique gardens, all of which he shared with friends, neighbors, journalists and a large interested public who experienced something new and intriguing in his historic home filled with historic objects and who experienced his shared and charming antiquarian attitude. And, thus, historic preservation began in Cooksville (and Wisconsin) 105 years ago.

Also notable is the year when electricity first came to Cooksville —and that would be 100 years ago in 1917. That is when an electric power line was run from the Stebbinsville power dam on the Yahara River west to Cooksville. Folks were given the first opportunity to sign up for that new-fangled source of light, and the Congregational Church and five households signed up. (But candles and kerosene were probably kept handy, just as they still are today.)

Cooksville School House, c. 1910

Also, the present one-room School House, now the Cooksville Community Center, was built 130 years ago in 1886, to replace the original old, small, deteriorating brick school house. Also something to celebrate.

And 2017 will mark 55 years ago, in 1962, that the Cooksville Community Center was formed and purchased the one-room School House from the discontinued School District. The CCC was established as a non-profit, charitable, membership organization, and the historic School House on the Public Square is still the setting for various programs, celebrations, wedding receptions, family reunions and meetings.

"Friends Celebrating?" an unidentified and undated tintype

All these historical events, added to the others, have made the Village of Cooksville the charming, interesting, lovely, atmospheric, living and lively community that it is. Thanks to people, past and present, the now exists and will continue to celebrate many more anniversaries in the future. History is always being made in the village!