The Historic Cooksville General Store

The Cooksville General Store has a record of about 165 years serving the small village of Cooksville in Rock County, Wisconsin. Most likely it is the oldest General Store operating in Wisconsin.

The General Store dates from about 1847. In that year, Charles Smith acquired from John Cook, founder of the village in 1842, a corner lot, 26 feet by 66 feet, at Main and Spring streets and built and began operating his store in the small Village of Cooksville.

In 1864, the building was sold to the second floor tenant, Waucoma Lodge No. 90. The lodge had been chartered in 1858 and had been leasing the second floor of the building. Thus begun the long association of the Masonic Lodge with the General Store.

The Masons made several improvements to the building. In 1879 shutter blinds were hung on the building’s windows, and the Masonic hall on the second floor acquired new chairs, hanging lamps, carpets, and wallpaper. In 1882 the large glass front windows were installed and new paint was applied and the “store looks very nobby,” reported the nearby Evansville newspaper at the time.

Old diaries provide details of the store’s business dealings—purchases of raisins, cream of tartar, a barrel of Spitzenberg apples, fifty pounds of flour, and delivery to the store of 19 ½ pounds of cheese—and records of luxury goods for those times such a shipment of oysters in 1872, most probably destined for an oyster supper at the Lodge (oysters were actually a frequent component of a special supper). And in June 1874 rare lemons arrived.

In 1890 the Masons bought 18 feet of land west of the building for expansion of the building, accomplished in 1894 and, as the Badger newspaper of Evansville wrote, “the room over the new part will be used as a dining room” for the Masonic Hall.

In 1893, in a jocular but nonetheless fairly accurate newspaper story, the store owner was described as a “dealer in soft and hard coal, ice cream, wood, lime, cement, perfumery, nails, putty, spectacles and tomato catsup, chocolate caramels and tar roofing, hides, tallow and maple syrup, fine gold jewelry, silverware, salt, glue, codfish and gents neckwear, full line of patent medicines, diseases of horses and children a specialty.”

The Cooksville General Store was, like most early stores, a basic dry goods, grocery and produce store. It the early days there were cracker and pickle and flour barrels, and cookies and tea in bulk tins. At times, the Cooksville Store also included fuels and building materials and hardware. Eventually, the store sold such widely assorted things as Cornish game hens, lag bolts, wash pans, clothesline, bone-meal, garden seeds, drill bits, underwear, anchovies, overshoes, lamp chimneys, paint, tobacco cloth, and kitchen utensils, as well as dairy and meat products and hot sandwiches and newspapers.

The barter system was used for many of the early years, and credit was given, even in later years, and the storekeeper functioned in some ways as a middleman for locally-grown produce.

By the mid-20th century, traveling salesman and their companies’ delivery trucks kept the rural Cooksville General Store supplied with everything on the market. That most famous of country store institutions, the” hot stove league,” weakened by many factors of modern life, such as television. was there throughout the 20th century providing written and oral communications, as well as other services for the community such as receiving and mailing packages or a place to turn to when in need of emergency assistance.

By the end of the 20th century, having been in business in the same location since 1847, the Cooksville General Store had achieved the status of the oldest operating general store in Wisconsin. At least no one has disputed the title.

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[Written by Larry Reed, 2011]

The Archeology of Historic Cooksville, by Larry Reed

Like most communities, the Village of Cooksville and the Town of Porter has evidence of its history (and prehistory) that is found both hidden underground and is visible on top of the ground.

In addition to the dozens of visible historic houses and buildings, Cooksville has several significant historic archeological sites—once-important features of the village that have disappeared from view but retain important, significant information about the community’s history found beneath the ground.

Three of these sites are within the village and are listed in the National Register of Historic Places, and one of them, also listed in the National Register, is located just to the northwest of Cooksville.

One village archeological site, the Hoxie Sash and Door Factor that later housed the important Van Vleck Implement Factory, is located near the northwest corner of Webster and Dane streets. Isaac Hoxie (brother of self-trained architect, Benjamin Hoxie) built his sash and door carpentry shop in 1848 to supply the area with doors, windows and blinds (shutters). Powered by a horse walking in a circle to turn the gears, the workshop ceased operation in 1858, when the local “building boom” ended.

Shortly afterward the building became the Van Vleck Implement Factory (1861-1928), manufacturing wagons, corn and potato planters, farm gates, and other implements, as well as repairing them. The second floor housed the Lyceum Hall and the Cooksville Academy. News about the Civil War was shouted to the citizens from the second-story porch.

When the deteriorated Van Vleck building was demolished in 1928, a Wisconsin newspaper printed a photograph of the deteriorated structure and called it “Wisconsin’s first implement factory.”

Another important archeological site is the Cooksville Mill Site, west of the Main Street (State Road 138) bridge over the Badfish Creek. Built as a sawmill by John Cook in 1842, it became a gristmill by 1847, grinding locally-grown wheat, oats and corn, and operated by a series of owners. The dam and pond were abandoned in 1897, and the mill building was used as a family residence for a time, and, later, the derelict structure served as shelter for homeless tramps and then as storage. It burned down in 1905.

A third archeological site is the Champney Brickyard and House Site, located on the south side of the village, on Church Street (then South Street). Hubbard Champney was the brick-maker (and farmer) and operated the brickyard for about ten years, making the distinctive vermilion-colored Cooksville brick. Others operated the brickyard until about 1860, when the property was turned into farmland. Shards of brick, glass and pottery have been found in the area. (A second Cooksville brickyard was located just west of Cooksville, but little evidence of its location remains.)

The fourth officially-designated archeological site is the Leedle Mill Truss Bridge and Mill Site, located just northwest of Cooksville on the Badfish Creek in the Town of Union. The mill was built about 1849, owned by various operators including William Leedle, who enlarged the dam and the mill. The dam washed out a number of times, permanently about 1918, and the mill’s wood frame structure and most of the foundation were demolished in the late 1950s.

Unfortunately, the historic Leedle Mill Pratt truss bridge constructed about 1916 over the Badfish Creek at the location of the mill, which had been closed to traffic for many years, was demolished in 2011 and a new bridge has replaced it.

Other undiscovered archeological sites, prehistoric and historic, in or near Cooksville, may lie hidden from view—or almost hidden. For instance, the remains of a blacksmith shop’s brick foundation can be seen near the Gunn House at Breckhurst; two outhouse foundations remain in the yard of the Cooksville Congregational Church; dozens of horseshoes, doorknobs, hinges, etc., have been found in the ground near the historic Van Buren House and Barn, along with many shards of pottery and an almost-intact bourbon bottle from 1825. Probably every Cooksville property owner has uncovered similar pieces of pottery, china or metal in their backyards, especially in the cultivated gardens.

And perhaps evidence of Cooksville’s long-lost stage coach inn, the Waucoma House, and the village’s Opera House remains buried in the ground. Or there may exist, along the Badfish Creek, Native American sites that pre-date the existence of Cooksville and the State of Wisconsin.

Several prehistoric and historic Native American archeological sites have been previously reported east of Cooksville in the Town of Porter, classified as campsites or village sites, probably because arrowheads or other artifacts had been discovered there. These sites, recorded in Wisconsin’s Archeological Sites Inventory, remain uninvestigated and unevaluated.

Other interesting archeological sites and artifacts undoubtedly remain in or near historic Cooksville, undiscovered, unexamined and unevaluated, a hidden part of the area’s long history.

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Cooksville: What's in a Name? - "Badfish" and "Waucoma"?

Two questions, related to each other, are often asked about two distinctive names in Cooksville’s history: “Why is the creek named ‘Badfish’?” and “Why is the larger part of the village of Cooksville legally named ‘Waucoma’?”

The name “Badfish” is the present name given to the small river or creek that runs along the northern edge of Cooksville, flowing and zigzagging from the Madison-Oregon area southeast to the Yahara River east of Cooksville. But it probably had another name originally.

The name, “Bad Fish,” appears to have been applied, perhaps mistakenly, in late 1833, when the U.S. government land surveyors were moving through the Wisconsin part of the Michigan Territory from the east and the Rock River to the west past the Yahara (Catfish) River and on further west in Rock County (then part of Brown County), through a “Rolling Prairie,” as their sketch map called it. When the surveyors came upon a large creek in the northwest corner of what is now Rock County, they apparently thought they had reached a part of the Bad Fish River (later the Sugar River) system



The Bad Fish River was the name of the upper branch of the Sugar River at that time. (A map published in 1833 by Baldwin and Crudock shows the “Bad Fish River” flowing south from the Four Lakes area near Madison to the Sugar River in Illinois.) The land surveyors presumed, mistakenly, that the little creek flowing from that direction was a small tributary of the Bad Fish River. Thus, they named it the Bad Fish Creek. (Most likely these early surveyors did not know the existing Indian name of the creek.)

For whatever reason, the name “Bad Fish Creek” was recorded in the early 1830s survey.

The original name of the creek appears to have been “Waucoma.” A recollection by a Cooksville resident, possibly Isaac Porter, written circa 1911, describes the early 1840s settlement of the area, which later became Porter Township. His recollection sheds some light on the origin of the name “Waucoma” chosen by his uncle, Dr. John Porter, for the village he platted in 1846 adjacent to Cooksville. The recollection also reveals the possible original name of the “lovely little river” flowing through Cooksville.

Filed under “Porter Memories” in the collections of Susan Porter (daughter of William Porter) and now part of the Cooksville Archives, the document refers to the Cooksville area as a “lovely region along the lovely little river Waucoma…. Dr. John Porter named his village plat Waucoma, the Indian name of the river…” Later, the anonymous writer also states that, “very early a saw mill was built by Dr. Porter on that Waucoma River…” (This was the mill built on the Porter farm about a mile east of Cooksville.)

It seems the creek was also known as Waucoma River when the villages of Cooksville (1842) and Waucoma (1846) were settled.

To give some credence to the Indian name of “Waucoma” for the little river— or perhaps to add some confusion — Joseph K.P. Porter, another nephew of Dr. John Porter, published his “reminiscence of the early history of Cooksville” as number seven in a series of “Old Settlers’ Stories” in The Badger newspaper, Evansville, April 6, 1895. In that article, Porter writes that Dr. John Porter “platted it [the village] and gave it the name of Waucoma. Waucoma is an Indian name meaning Clear Water. It was thought to be an appropriate name, as the village lies upon the bank of a fine stream of water. The name was suggested by Governor Doty, who was well versed in Indian lore.”

Perhaps Governor Doty was one of those who knew the creek’s Indian name and suggested it as the name for Porter’s new village, Waucoma, located on that “fine stream of water.”

The name “Waucoma” was researched in the 1960s, but the etymology was undiscovered and did not appear to mean “clear water” in any Indian language. However, in Wisconsin many place names that seem to be associated with water contain that Indian language syllable “wau,” as in Waukesha, Wauwatosa, Milwaukee, Wautoma, Wausau, Waubesa and others. So it seems “Waucoma” could well be of Indian origin. And it may well have been the first name of what eventually became Cooksville’s little Badfish Creek.

So, what’s in a name? The Indians no doubt called the clear-running creek a name, apparently “Waucoma,” and early surveyors named it, perhaps mistakenly, the “Bad Fish,” after the nearby Bad Fish River. And Dr. Porter may well have chosen the name “Waucoma” for his new village, one of the many pleasant, musical names that the Indians had long ago given to the land and its features that once was theirs to name and to claim.

The rather silly “myth” that the name “Bad Fish” came from an Indian husband who blamed his upset stomach on a dinner of bad fish from the creek rather than disparage his new wife’s bad cooking can be easily dismissed if for no other reason than the Indian husband most likely did not utter the English words “bad fish” —or “bad fish fry”—as he rubbed his troubled tummy. (But, then, how did the “Bad Fish River,” now the Sugar River, get its original name?)

Both of these names are part of Cooksville’s story, and the two names—Badfish and Waucoma—reflect two characteristics of the time: the long Native American occupancy of the land and water and the brash spirit of the American frontier as it quickly moved westward into the Wisconsin Territory.



Knowing (or making an educated etymological guess) at the reasons for a particular name can prove interesting. For instance, thanks to the Italian explorer, Amerigo Vespucci, who first realized in 1507 that the two continents in the western Atlantic were not Asia, and especially thanks to Martin Waldseemüller, the German cartographer who made the continents’ first map in 1507 and applied Amerigo’s first name to those mysterious, new continents— thanks to them, we are known as “Americans” and not as “Vespuccians”!
[Excerpt from “The Village of Cooksville: A Chronicle of the Town that Time Forgot,” being written by Larry Reed.]

The 2nd Annual Carving on the Commons happened June 25 and 26. The weather was absolutely perfect. 11 carvers worked Saturday and Sunday to finish their pieces in time for the auction. Cooksville Lutheran Church sold lots of brats, hot dogs, barbecue and homemade pies. Nearly 40 people volunteered their time to help with ticket and t-shirt sales, parking, and clean up. It was a good event.

Ralph Warner Arrives in Cooksville, 1911

Ralph Lorenzo Warner, a Milwaukee native living in Racine, bought a house in Cooksville in 1911, thanks to his friendship with village resident Susan Porter (a teacher in Racine), who told him the “house next door” was for sale. (Porter was living in Waucoma Lodge on Webster Street.)

Warner bought the Cooksville-brick Duncan House for $500.



Thus began Ralph Warner’s 30-year love-affair with the quaint, quiet, little village, during which he filled his house—the historic Duncan House (built 1848) on the corner of Webster Street and Highway 59—with early American antiques and crafts (and some English art works), created an elaborate English-style garden, entertained special guests at lunches and dinners, and helped promote the “wee bit of New England” that Cooksville represented in Wisconsin.

Warner became a beloved figure in village life in the 1910s,’20s and early ‘30s, stimulating interest in early American arts, crafts and architecture, collecting local antiques that otherwise might have been tossed out, and sharing his keen aesthetic interest in 19th-century life and music and gardening, including preparing simple meals of fresh local ingredients for visitors who discovered him and his antiquarian corner of Cooksville. A number of journalists beat a path to the cobblestone walkway to his famous House Next Door.




All in all, Warner led the way, preserving that special “sense of time and place” of America’s early years that was beginning to appeal to the country in the first decades of the 20th century. By doing so, he single-handedly put quiet little mid-19th century Cooksville on the map.

Ralph Warner's undertakings marked the beginning of historical “awareness” in the village, and his efforts inspired many others during the following 100 years to preserve and celebrate historic Cooksville.

On Sunday, August 14, 2011, at 7 p.m., a program will be presented at the Cooksville Community Center entitled, “Cooksville since 1911: Ralph Warner, the House Next Door, and a Century of Historic Preservation.”

The slide program will include scores of photographs and artifacts to illuminate the story of Ralph Warner and the House Next Door, and will be presented by Will Fellows, best-selling author who grew up near Cooksville and now lives in Milwaukee, and Larry Reed, Cooksville’s local historian.

The program will be presented at the historic Cooksville Schoolhouse on August 14th at 7 p.m., sponsored by the Cooksville Community Center, and is open to the public.

Don't Miss the Big Event Next Weekend!

Jody Did It (With a Little Help From Her Friends)

 

The back of the Cooksville Store was the site of the many hour session of making dreadlocks in Jody's hair. There was food. There was laughing. It was a regular dreadlocks party. Jody was so happy. She's been wanting to do this for a very long time.