Passport
[Norman Gilliland, Host, Wisconsin Public Radio, University Place Presents]
Welcome to University Place Presents. I’m Norman Gilliland.
If you’re driving down I-94 or perhaps on Highway 14, you might see a sign for a place called Cooksville and if you slow down and make a turn, you’ll find a New England town as it might have been 175 years ago.
But New England in Wisconsin, why would that be? Well, we’re going to get the story about Cooksville and it’s a long and colorful story, from Larry Reed and he’s the chair of Historic Cooksville Trust, Incorporated. Welcome to University Place Presents.
[Larry Reed, Chair, Historic Cooksville Trust, Incorporated]
Thank you, my pleasure to be here to talk about old Cooksville.
[Norman Gilliland]
If you go to Cooksville, you see that it’s laid out, it’s laid out like a New England village of the 1840s and this is not something that’s buried under a lot contemporary architecture or, you know, zoning violations and that kind of thing. You see the village green and the houses –
[Larry Reed]
Mhmm. Mhmm.
[Norman Gilliland]
– solid brick and frame houses clustered around this village green just as you might see in Massachusetts. What’s the connection?
[Larry Reed]
Yes, Cooksville’s a wee bit of New England in Wisconsin as it’s been called or – or the little town that time forgot. We’ll get into that because the railroad never came there and that’s why it was preserved. It is preserved. We didn’t get railroad, so we didn’t grow. Not that I was back in the 1840s or 50s. But –
[Norman Gilliland]
You didn’t go away, either, which a lot of towns who didn’t get a railroad did.
[Larry Reed]
Thats Right.
[Norman Gilliland]
Still there.
[Larry Reed]
We had some people who were very interested and proud of their heritage from New England and the British Isles and Ireland and they took good care of what they built out of brick and – and the local lumber and the local brick yards and they styled them in the Greek revival, sort of a country simple Greek revival style and gothic revival as well, and they were a fairly cultured bunch.
In fact, they were kidded by eventually when Evansville grew up and Edgerton, they would kid the folks – folks in Cooksville of being too cultured, those New Englanders. But they took good care of the place, especially when the railroad didn’t come there and the little village went asleep for 100 years, until historic preservation came along and said: “Wow these are great sturdy little houses. Let’s take good care of them.”
[Norman Gilliland]
Well, what was there first?
[Larry Reed]
The first – nothing was there except oak openings and a wonderful prairie, rich prairie as is all over Southern Wisconsin in the early 19th century and mid-19th century. And Senator Daniel Webster –
[slide with a photo of Senator Daniel Webster]
– a famous senator in Massachusetts, after the surveys in the 1830s, he bought up a lot of the land, as a speculator.
He wanted to make some money.
I understand he was in dire financial straits at that time and so he bought a lot of land from friends who’d gathered a purse together for him to purchase it in 1837 for a dollar and a quarter an acre and he sold it to his friends in Massachusetts.
The Porter family came out to Cooksville in the 1840s to look at the land they bought from Daniel Webster and they platted a little village, but before the Porters came there and before Daniel Webster got involved, the Cook brothers from Ohio, not from New England, also bought land in 1837 from the U.S. government.
By then, it had been surveyed and the U.S. government was selling it for a dollar and a quarter an acre and the Cook brothers came to Cooksville, wasn’t called Cooksville then, it was just a blank spot next to the Bad Fish river, Bad Fish creek actually, called Waucoma Creek originally, a nice native American name. And the Cook brothers founded Cooksville in 1842, and that’s why we’re celebrating 175 years of Cooksville because the Cook brothers platted it 175 years ago, very small little village.
But then the Porters came along with their purchase from Daniel Webster and platted another village right next to the Cook brothers and called it Waucoma named after the little creek that flowed through the village. So, we had two villages right next door to each other in the 1840s, Cooksville and then Waucoma. Now, it’s all known as Cooksville because that was where the last post office was situated.
[Norman Gilliland]
That always gets the name doesnt it?
[Larry Reed]
In Cooksville, on the Cooksville side of the highway as opposed to the Waucoma side of the highway. But legally, I live in Waucoma, Wisconsin, for instance. When I sell my house, the deeds are legally still Waucoma. But it’s all Cooksville as far as the world is concerned.
[Norman Gilliland]
Well, it’s one thing to plat a village, but it’s another to actually have a reason for it to be there so why that particular place?
[Larry Reed]
Well, it had clear water flowing through it, Waucoma, which apparently means something like clear water in some Indian language. It had oak openings, in other words, lots of lumber to burn, to build with, and the sawmill was built in 1842, the same year as Cooksville was platted, so they immediately started sawing the lumber. And a rich vein of clay, a wonderful pink-orange vermilion colored clay, so they immediately set about building, making bricks, sawing lumber, building houses. The oldest one is from 1842. And it was fertile, they were farmers, making lots of money on the fertile prairies and they wanted to be merchants and farmers and basically, for instance, the – the folks we’re looking at now, the Porters –
[slide with photos of Eliza and Joseph Porter]
– came out in 1846 and they’re the family that platted Waucoma. So, it was just a great, good place on a prairie. There were other places like that in Wisconsin, of course, the open prairies where there was water and rich soil and trees to build houses from so, but Cooksville didn’t grow and therefore didn’t expand, didn’t demolish the old buildings to build new ones. The public square is still there. A wee bit of New England in the middle of our little Cooksville.
[slide of map of Cooksville and Waucoma]
[Norman Gilliland]
Well, so there was not enough to make it grow but there had to be enough to make it stay there for all those years.
[Larry Reed]
And that’s thanks to the people –
[Norman Gilliland]
What kept it going?
[Larry Reed]
Well, the people. Not only the original settlers, who had picnics there for about 50 years, they’d all return, even though most of – some of them that went to the Dakotas, further West, in other words, the Western Migration was still going on, and the California Gold Rush drew some people away, but they always came back to their roots in Cooksville, these families that settled there in the 1840s and 1850s. And their descendants also hung around, but the railroad didn’t come in 1857, so there really wasn’t a lot going on in Cooksville.
We had at one time three blacksmith shops back then and four sawmills along the creek and then turned into grist mills. And then there were the pottery shops and the tinsmiths and mostly farmers, several general stores, too, of course, furnished farmers and folks with material they needed shipped in from Milwaukee or Chicago, including barrels of oysters. Oysters were a big thing on the menu back then.
[Norman Gilliland]
Oh, they – they were in the 19th century –
[Larry Reed]
Yes.
[Norman Gilliland]
– all over the country.
[Larry Reed]
Yeah.
[Norman Gilliland]
Oysters were the big thing.
[Larry Reed]
Lots of oyster suppers. And finally, in 1879, they built the first church. Those Puritans from New England, those Yankees were not spendthrifts, so it took them awhile to build the church. And the – the Leedle Sawmill, the remnants are still there of all the sawmills, but they’re long gone –
[slide of a Cooksville sawmill]
– as are all the commercial buildings except for the general store, which is the oldest general store in Wisconsin still operating.
[Norman Gilliland]
Well have to – we’ll have to have a look at that in a minute.
[Larry Reed]
Yeah. And we’ve reconstructed one of the blacksmith shops that fell down, so we also have an original blacksmith shop that’s been reconstructed. But it’s just the homes, those 35 historic houses, barns, churches and schoolhouse that still remain. A cemetery, the public square, a couple of archeological sites. And really, the preservation began about 1911.
Ralph Lorenzo Warner came over from Racine and discovered this little charming village and he fell in love with it – with the houses and he began, what we think, is probably Wisconsin’s first nationally known preservation project in Cooksville beginning in 1911.
[Norman Gilliland]
A preservation project that early?
[Larry Reed]
Yes, that early. He turned this charming Duncan house, a brick house, into a, not a bed and breakfast, although we might call it that now, but just a place to have lunch and – and sometimes dinners. And he would entertain guests there and he had wonderful antique gardens and a house full of antiques he’d buy for a dime here and a quarter there from – from the folks that lived in the area. And the national magazines discovered that house and wrote stories about Ralph Lorenzo Warner and his House Next Door, that’s what he called it, the House Next Door, because when he came to Cooksville, he wanted to buy a house and one of his friends, Suzy Porter living in the village said: “Well, there’s one for sale next door.” So, he called his house the House Next Door and made national magazines and a number of people visited and said: “Hey, this is kind of interesting to collect antiques, a bit of Americana, to restore a house in the 19 teens and 20s.” So, that set off some other people, including Mineral Point to begin their preservation process.
[Norman Gilliland]
Certainly, a lot of that now.
[Larry Reed]
Yeah.
[Norman Gilliland]
So, the railroad passed by.
[Larry Reed]
Yeah.
[Norman Gilliland]
But what about roads, though? I assume, then, that for a while, even roads were not exactly coursing through town.
[Larry Reed]
No, in the early days, in fact, people would walk from Cooksville to Milwaukee.
Walk.
[Norman Gilliland]
Walk.
[Larry Reed]
To make their land claims, they’d go to the land agent which was in Milwaukee or Green Bay at that time, but Milwaukee was closest. They would walk to Milwaukee if they didn’t have a horse and carriage, but occasionally the settlers or squatters would be competing with each other, and, in fact, one guy from Cooksville, back in the 1840s, beat the guy by walking from Cooksville, near Cooksville, to Milwaukee. The other guy was driving horse and buggy, but there were no roads,
[Norman Gilliland]
Details.
[Larry Reed]
– no trails, rivers. Hard to cross rivers with a horse and buggy and he beat the guy driving horse and carriage and got the land out from under him. So, there were no roads really. Indian trails that they followed, walked, or horse – on horseback, but no wide roads for carriages for quite a while.
But instead of paying taxes – property taxes, you could work them off by road building back then, that’s how the roads got built. Instead of paying property taxes, you would be hired to work them off by –
[Norman Gilliland]
I can –
[Larry Reed]
– grading, building bridges, wooden bridges.
[Norman Gilliland]
That’s an idea that might have – might come back. The time might have come. [laughs]
[Larry Reed]
At the rate we’re going, we may have to look backwards, figure out how to do this ourselves.
[Norman Gilliland]
Yes. Let’s have, kind of, a look through the Cooksville photo album then.
[Larry Reed]
Yes, there’s – theres one of our famous buildings, long gone, unfortunately,
[slide of Wisconsins first implement factory]
Wisconsin’s first implement factory. And it was claimed that, as you can see by the newspaper headline, in 1928 when it was torn down, it was claimed to be Wisconsin’s first farm implement factory. They made gates and plows and potato planters and things like that and had the reputation for having been the first farm implementation factory in Wisconsin.
Cooksville was a thriving little community even though it never grew, because there was nothing else between Janesville and Madison, for instance. Eventually, because of the railroad that did eventually come through Rock County, Stoughton and Edgerton, and nearby cities, Evansville, came on the map because of the railroads, basically, but Cooksville was – was it other than a little town called Union which was a stagecoach stop, also. But stagecoaches did come to Cooksville, so there was transportation.
[Norman Gilliland]
Well, there had to have been, again, a lot of towns that once the railroad passed them by, that – that they just kind of shriveled up and blew away, but Cooksville, kind of like those houses made of brick, in the story of The Three Little Pigs [laughs].
[Larry Reed]
Thats Right.
[Norman Gilliland]
Built to last.
[Larry Reed]
They were sturdy. I live in one of them. They are sturdy, limestone foundations from a nearby hill, quarry hill, and – and even the frame houses were hand hewn, post and beam, sturdy, sturdy houses. And they took good care of them. They really didn’t have any money to tear them down and build new or add too many additions to them, so they remained pretty pristine. Sometimes even abandoned in the 1920s and 30s, in that Depression Era. But as I said, they were discovered in the 19 teens –
[Norman Gilliland]
Still –
[Larry Reed]
and 20s.
[Noman Gilliland]
Still salvageable.
[Larry Reed]
And we’ve had a real preservation project going on, really, for 100 years, and especially recently, thanks to the national preservation program, since 1966 that helped. The Wisconsin Historical Society advice got us going and we’re still working at it, too.
[Norman Gilliland]
You mentioned the general store.
[Larry Reed]
Yes, 1847, and we’re claiming it,
[photo of the Cooksville general store]
and nobodys challenged our claim as the oldest operating general store in Wisconsin. It’s been expanded. It’s presently owned by the Masonic Lodge, which began in 1864 and bought the building. But in 1847 a little store began in Cooksville and that’s it. Expanded with the Masonic Lodge upstairs and they still own the building. So, the lodge is pretty darn old, too. But the store is still operating under various proprietors over the years, of course, but it’s a wonderful, sort of, and it’s still full of wonderful, interesting foods. No longer a general store, it’s more of a Whole Foods, good foods, kind of,
[Norman Gilliland]
Uh-huh.
[Larry Reed]
natural foods store right now with ice cream for sale.
[Norman Gilliland]
Oh, really?
[Larry Reed]
So, it’s worth coming to Cooksville just for that, frankly, to see the old store.
[Norman Gilliland]
And speaking of Cooksville and its brothers that gave it the name, they are among the very first settlers, obviously, so is there any trace of – of their house?
[Larry Reed]
Their house is still standing. The – the Cook house, 1842, is still standing. It’s a lovely vernacular house.
[photo of the original Cook house]
Not particularly stylish, but a wonderful early house. The Cook’s didn’t stay around very long. They moved to Iowa within 10 years. So, they disappear about 1850, further west, as many folks did.
[Norman Gilliland]
Sure.
[Larry Reed]
Looking for a better place to open stores and maybe cheaper land and maybe they had other relatives there. They were lured further west by all sorts of different reasons, but the Cook house is still there and – and thats very – we’re very proud of that, to have that early 1842 house still standing and in good shape, too.
[Norman Gilliland]
What – what about that other name you mentioned, Porter?
[Larry Reed]
The Porter family. Their houses are still standing, too. They came in 1846 with Waucoma, Wisconsin.
[photo of one of the original Porter houses (Cooksville Farmhouse Inn)]
And there’s one of them, the William Porter house has been turned into the Cooksville Farmhouse Inn. And the folks who run the Cooksville Farmhouse Inn adaptively reused the 1914 barn next door as their home. So, it’s a wonderful adaptive reuse of a barn there in Cooksville, too. But William Porter’s house is now a bed and breakfast. Really, it’s an Inn. You can rent it for the weekend or the whole house at one time. I guess it’s a vacation rental now.
But it’s a beautiful house. Its not – it dates from the 1840s, but it now has the appearance of sort of a late Victorian because it has been embellished with some fish scale shingles and some bay windows and a little gingerbread on it. People that had money did try to upgrade their houses in the 1880s and 90s.
[Norman Gilliland]
Yeah, well, sure. That’s something, I assume, as a historical preservationist or somebody who’s interested in, you know, recreating history that you have to go with, in other words, what period are you trying to bring it back to? The very earliest or, you know, the Victorian or something later than that? You have to pick your period, don’t you?
[Larry Reed]
Yes, that – that can be a dilemma. And I think our philosophy has been if the changes are interesting and show the growth of – of the village, they are good changes, like going from Greek revival, say, to the – the gingerbread of the 1880s and 90s, that sort of Victorian look or Queen Ann look. But that’s part of the history and we don’t want to change that, frankly, we want to keep it going from the 1840s. Even now, we do have some new houses, relatively new houses, from the 1950s, ranch houses, basically, split-level,
[Norman Gilliland]
Um-hum.
[Larry Reed]
a couple, not many. But enough that someday they might be historic, as well. So, we have to keep the thread going,
[Norman Gilliland]
Yeah.
[Larry Reed]
the continuity going, I think.
[Norman Gilliland]
You mentioned barns and barns are something that have generated, I think, a resurgence of interest in the past couple of generations. Any noteworthy barns in the Cooksville area?
[photo of the Ericson barn]
[Larry Reed]
Yes, we’ve – weve got one that was built in 1914. The Ericson Barn. It’s a regular gabled roof barn. And it’s been restored and adaptively reused as a house, now. It’s a wonderful adaptive reuse of barns. Which is really important. Our dairy barns in Wisconsin just aren’t used as small family dairy barns any longer, so we have to find different uses for them, and many people are turning –
[Norman Gilliland]
You can get –
[Larry Reed]
them into homes.
[Norman Gilliland]
You can get very creative, can’t you, with a barn –
[Larry Reed]
Or shops or art studios.
[Norman Gilliland]
– turning it into house?
[Larry Reed]
And this one is gorgeous. And we have some smaller we call village barns. I have one on my property and there are couple of other village barns, sort of one-horse barns, you know, just for the – the horse and maybe a cow, so they’re fairly small. And then we have another dairy barn, again, not being used, unfortunately. But we do have a number of historic barns and we have two – two historic churches.
Eventually two churches did get built. The Lutheran Church and the Congregational Church. The Catholics built a Catholic Church, St. Michael’s, near Cooksville, not in Cooksville. They sort of segregated themselves as it were, down the road, the Irishmen came over during the potato famine of the 1840s and 50s, had a community on Caledonia Road near Cooksville. And they had a lovely church there and a cemetery but all that’s left is the cemetery, St. Michael’s cemetery, which is a lovely old cemetery nearby.
[Norman Gilliland]
That’s another phenomenon you see in Wisconsin, I’m sure other places, too, but in Wisconsin it seems to be, if anything, a little easier to spot these crossroads churches that may at one time have been part of a village.
[Larry Reed]
Yes, and the churches, they tend to get maintained even if the congregation is small, they still manage to keep – keep going, as the Cooksville Lutheran Church has. I own the Cooksville Congregational Church because it was abandoned.
[Norman Gilliland]
You – you own it?
[Larry Reed]
I own it. To preserve it. It was abandoned in 1939 by the Congregational Group in America and it was no longer needed. It became the town hall for a while in Cooksville. The Town of Porter town hall in the 1940s and 50s and 60s and then the town, when the schools were consolidated, one-room schools, the Town of Porter bought a brick schoolhouse and abandoned the Congregational church as their town hall, so I bought it to save it from being torn down.
[Norman Gilliland]
And what are you doing with it, this church?
[Larry Reed]
Well, I – I rent it out occasionally for weddings and baptisms and funerals, and music.
[Norman Gilliland]
So – so –
[Larry Reed]
I don’t charge for the music but it’s a wonderful space for music. But I – I don’t have it fully restored. So, it’s just my private building and I – I let folks use it now and then and I try to maintain it. And it’s a really handsome brown, late Victorian 1879 two-tone brown church and it’s a wonderful space, especially for music. You have to come out there some time.
[Norman Gilliland]
I would think. Yes.
[Larry Reed]
The Stoughton Chamber Choir comes out and sings in the spring and we have some other ensembles – ensembles occasionally, and sometimes meetings, but it has limited use.
[Norman Gilliland]
Well, repurposed.
[Larry Reed]
But it’s still standing. Repurposed, absolutely.
[Norman Gilliland]
Well, let’s walk through Cooksville a little bit and look at some of these houses around town. And get some other stories and – and their styles.
[Larry Reed]
Just about all of them were built in the 1840s or 1850s, including the brick houses, so they are early country Greek revival houses, small,
[photo of the Betsy Curtis house]
frame, post and beam, sometimes they had brick nogging, soft brick in between the walls, brick that couldn’t survive on the exterior, couldn’t weather properly, but they would use a soft brick in the walls as insulation and stabilization. Great wide either pine boards or oak boards. They were quite lovely inside. And some of them were covered over with the usual, you know, tin siding –
[Norman Gilliland]
Um-hum.
[Larry Reed]
– in the 1950s or 60s –
[Norman Gilliland]
Yes.
[Larry Reed]
– or aluminum this and shingle that and so. But almost all have been restored in terms of taking off the modern material and revealing underneath perfectly good, sturdy clapboards. Some might have to be replaced. And getting back that shape of the Greek revival with the corner pilasters, the returned eves, and the symmetry and so on. And we’ve had a lot of success. About 20 houses have been restored on the exterior.
[Norman Gilliland]
Wow, that is a – a lot. That house that we were just looking at. What’s the story with it?
[Larry Reed]
That’s the Betsy Curtis house. Named after her because she was one of the owners.
[return to the photo of the Betsy Curtis house]
And that – that was restored. It had aluminum siding on it and it didnt – the pilasters and the eves and so on were – were disappeared under the modern siding and might – some of them might have been removed, actually. But we were able to restore them because we have some good photographic documentation, too.
Once you start taking the material off, that modern material you’ll discover the hidden details and what’s missing and what can be replaced.
[Norman Gilliland]
Do – do you have a sense at all, Larry, that all of these latter-day incrustations actually helped to preserve these houses?
[Larry Reed]
Occasionally they do, especially in Cooksville where people didn’t have a lot of money to tear them down or demolish them. They might have covered them over with some new materials, but once you remove the new materials underneath you find perfectly good clapboards. Like my house was covered and underneath were perfectly good wood clapboards, and easy – easy to restore, actually.
Of course, then, you want to insulate with modern insulation, of course, put plumbing in. We all like plumbing in our house and maybe even a closet or two. And I think almost all the houses that have been added on to, in the back, tastefully with a modern addition just because we do want closets and bathrooms and an extra bedroom. So, some of them, almost all of them, have a new addition, designed by an architect, Michael Saternus, who’s very sensitive to historic buildings, in other words, a good preservation architect. And there are still other architects around who know how to treat these small houses and yet add on to them in – in a modern way that doesn’t fake history, and so on, but gives them a new life.
[Norman Gilliland]
It’s that – its that other sort of tightrope that you walk between history and contemporary use.
[Larry Reed]
Yes, and that’s an issue anywhere in the country and certainly in Wisconsin. My work at the Wisconsin Historical Society, our architects, that was always an issue. How do you add on to a historic house? What can you do and not do? Should you fake history, should you duplicate something? No, just do something that harmonizes, that’s sensitive to the original part and doesn’t detract from it in some way. So, there are lots of ways to – to do additions in good ways and bad ways.
[Norman Gilliland]
Now, what about the roofs on these houses? What would they have been made of originally?
[Larry Reed]
Yeah.
[Norman Gilliland]
These shingles and what do you have today?
[Larry Reed]
They would have had wood shingles, sawn shingles, because we had a lot of sawmills, so there’s a lot of saw lumber, sawn shingles for the roofs on, for plastering the interiors and so on. And I have some wood shingle roofs on my house and barn, for instance, replaced but we – we’re not too concerned about roofs. Its – they’re hard to maintain, wood shingle roofs, frankly, and they’re very expensive, so we don’t require in our historic zoning ordinance that there be wood shingle roofs on our houses at all. So, they’re good new roofs, both asphalt, and even some metal roofs now are designed to look like-
[Norman Gilliland]
Are they?
[Larry Reed]
Yeah. They’re getting with – the industry has gotten with it, so to speak, for roofing, because roofing is very important. And you got to have a good roof on these houses.
[Norman Gilliland]
Everything else rises or falls depending upon that.
[Larry Reed]
Yes.
[Norman Gilliland]
Now –
[Larry Reed]
– and the brick houses, we’re looking at one of the charming brick houses, I think, on the screen now.
[photo of the brick Hoxie house]
[Norman Gilliland]
I was just going to say, that there are certain decades that we associate with certain kinds of looks for houses and this is what I think of as the 1850s look.
[Larry Reed]
Absolutely. That’s the Hoxie house. Benjamin Hoxie, our self-trained architect back in the 1850s and 60s. He designed my church, for instance. The Cooksville Congregational Church and many houses and other buildings in the area and Cooksville.
And this would be a Gothic Revival of that steep – steep pitch roof, a little Gothic, but very tiny, very sweet little Cooksville brick house. With additions on the back. I don’t think we see them in the photograph, but there’s a mansard roof addition in the back –
[Norman Gilliland]
Oh really.
[Larry Reed]
– from the 1890s.
[Norman Gilliland]
A little clashy there.
[Larry Reed]
It is. It’s – its an example of how sort of topsy grew in that house. It changed over the years with the additions in the back but that’s part of the history. How do you manage to live in these tiny pioneer settlers homes without expanding them a little bit?
[Norman Gilliland]
Now, one of the names that’s associated with Cooksville is Van Vleck which sounds kind of familiar.
[Larry Reed]
Yes, it does, at University of Wisconsin campus in Madison.
[Norman Gilliland]
Yeah. Right.
[Larry Reed]
But I don’t think there’s a relationship to that family. Well, there probably is, way back when, but Van Vleck, obviously, there – there were some Dutch folks that came to Cooksville as well as the – the British Isles, their Van Vlecks and – and Van Wormer and some of those early settlers looking, again, for a new place to live in the New World.
[photo of the Van Vleck house]
And Van Vleck was the guy who began the Farm Implement Factory. It was the Van Vleck Farm Implement Factory.
[Norman Gilliland]
This is his house here, I believe.
[Larry Reed]
Yeah, yeah. And that was covered with wooden shingles on the exterior sort of, to make it look like one of the New England cottages –
[Norman Gilliland]
Uh-huh, sure, yes.
[Larry Reed]
– from the 1920s.
[Norman Gilliland]
Cedar shingles, also.
[Larry Reed]
Cedar shingles, yeah, those were removed and revealing, again, that symmetry and the Greek revival pilasters and that wonderful open porch, now. And it has a new addition in the back, as well.
[Norman Gilliland]
And what – so what’s the original vintage of that one?
[Larry Reed]
That one would be about 1840s. Probably between 1847 and 1850. After that the houses either were brick or none more were built, homes were not built.
[Norman Gilliland]
Is – is there any other place in Wisconsin, do you know, that has such a concentration, especially per capita of houses from the 1840s and 50s?
[Larry Reed]
Not the concentration. Certainly, Green Bay, my hometown, has some early structures still surviving but not the concentration, not in a single historic district. Of course, Mineral Point has wonderful stone houses –
[Norman Gilliland]
Sure.
[Larry Reed]
– from the early era in – in a concentrated form and scattered throughout that lovely city in Mineral Point and Cedarburg and there are other small communities but many of them haven’t taken the time or effort to – to recover their history, so to speak. To uncover it, again, with those modern applications or to restore as necessary.
Unfortunately, in the 1950s and 60s, they tore down a lot of them so many small communities didn’t know about their history, didn’t appreciate it, didn’t understand it and there weren’t enough people around to – to take care of it and so many of those small communities like Cooksville just disappeared. There are several nearby Cooksville where there’s really nothing visible unless you have a very keen eye and look underneath the modernizations, you won’t see the old houses anymore. And that’s kind of sad. But there are other small communities, like, nearby here in Stoughton and Edgerton and certainly Evansville had wonderful historic districts, groupings of historic homes or historic downtowns that have been restored over the last 30, 40, 50 years of preservation in Wisconsin. They’re quite stunning.
[Norman Gilliland]
And they turn into attractions if they’re done right, don’t they?
[Larry Reed]
They’re great tools for attracting people, shoppers, visitors, certainly, and – and residents, because they’re marvelous structures and certainly can have a new life. The Main Street Program in Wisconsin, for instance, has been operating for a number of years, it still operates, to help restore and revitalize economically and financially downtowns in Wisconsin and that’s been a great boon, and now some of these old buildings that almost got torn down are now the – the logo of communities.
[Norman Gilliland]
Right, missed it by that much.
[Larry Reed]
And people come to see it and shop and walk those old streets with the new shops, of course, and it really can be a tool to revitalize communities. Cooksville only has a general store and – and the – the vacation rental with the Cooksville Farmhouse Inn and a truck garden and we have a – a chainsaw artist who sells his products out of his barn, but we don’t have a lot of industry in Cooksville and that’s fine with us, we’re – were not looking to expand or grow.
[Norman Gilliland]
Once the sawmills and the blacksmith shops went it was all, kind of –
[Larry Reed]
Yeah, pretty much.
[Norman Gilliland]
– like, quiet in terms of industry.
[Larry Reed]
It’s been really a residential historic district. And one of the earliest ones. 1973, right after Mineral Point was established in the National Register of Historic Places, then Cooksville was added to the National Register of Historic Places.
[Norman Gilliland]
And – and how does that work in terms of what you can and can’t do to Cooksville?
[Larry Reed]
Well, the National Register of Historic Places and the Wisconsin Register of Historic Places don’t put any restrictions on what you can inside or out.
[Norman Gilliland]
Oh, really?
[Larry Reed]
Unfortunately. In other words, they’re not really protected, unless you’re using federal or state monies.
[Norman Gilliland]
Mm-hmm.
[Larry Reed]
Then the federal or state programs are required by law not to use public monies to destroy our heritage. But if it’s your own money and – and if you don’t have a local ordinance or local protection, folks can pretty much do whatever they want. But of course, there’s a lot of programs out there to help people do the right thing. But many communities at the local level have ordinances, restrictions, as does Cooksville-
[Norman Gilliland]
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
[Larry Reed]
– and many, I – I don’t know how many cities and communities and counties and townships have ordinances, but I bet it’s 60 or 70 now that require certain considerations, may not prohibit, but certainly a process that allows discussion of what to do to that old school or that old church, that old downtown building, and do something reasonable to save it, if it’s worth saving.
[Norman Gilliland]
Sure.
[Larry Reed]
First step, of course, –
[Norman Gilliland]
Well –
[Larry Reed]
– is to survey the community and find what’s worth keeping.
[Norman Gilliland]
[laughs] Yes.
[Larry Reed]
And the Wisconsin Historic Society has programs to help people determine what’s in your community and what’s valuable and what’s the story behind it, what story does it tell us about our past and then the next step, of course, after that, awareness and education is, okay, how do we preserve it? What programs are there?
[Norman Gilliland]
Yes.
[Larry Reed]
And there are state and federal tax credit programs. Some local governments have financial programs. The Historic Cooksville Trust in Cooksville. We raise money and – and use it to help the preservation of Cooksville so there are a lot of ways to find the resources whether it’s Wisconsin Historic Society technical information or – or the tax credits from the state and federal government or local programs.
[Norman Gilliland]
Well, let’s look at another brick house, here. What’s the story with this one?
[photo of the Isaac Porter house]
That’s the biggest brick house in Cooksville. The Isaac Porter house. Three Isaac brothers, Isaac, William and Joseph came to Cooksville. Their uncle was the one who bought the land from Daniel Webster. Daniel Webster never came to Cooksville unfortunately, but Dr. John Porter who bought the land did visit once, as did his brother Dr. Isaac Porter and Dr. John Porter’s three nephews, Joseph and Isaac, came to Cooksville, as did William. And Isaac built this brick house, Cooksville brick, a Gothic revival. One of the larger houses, meaning it has more than one or two bedrooms.
[Norman Gilliland]
Sure.
[Larry Reed]
And a parlor.
[Norman Gilliland]
A little harder at least from the outside, from the curb, to – to pin a time period on this one.
[Larry Reed]
Well, I would say 1852, unless I look at my book, I’m not sure, but usually the brick houses, the first one was built about 1846 and then the other brick houses were about 1850s. The brickyards took months to make the bricks, dig up the clay and turn it into a little, you know, mud and put it in the molds –
[Norman Gilliland]
Mm-hmm. And then you have to dry it.
[Larry Reed]
and let it dry. And then to bake it for days or weeks and it takes about three months according to the records I have in my Cooksville archive. About three months to produce a – a load of bricks, about 24,000 bricks, which would be, in my calculation, enough for half a house. Because the brick walls were two bricks thick, so to speak.
[Norman Gilliland]
Sure.
[Larry Reed]
So, it took a lot of bricks and it took them quite a while. And of course, when Cooksville didn’t grow, the brickyards – the holes got filled in, no more bricks were made.
[Norman Gilliland]
And here’s another frame house.
[photo of the Van Buren house]
[Larry Reed]
Yeah, the little Van Buren house. My house, the Dr. Van Buren house, from 1848. Showing again that front Greek temple facade, very simple three turn eves. It’s hard to tell it’s a Greek temple but that’s the inspiration in the 1820s when the Greeks in Greece were having their Democratic revolutions, everything Greek was very popular.
[Norman Gilliland]
Oh, is that where
[Larry Reed]
– in the 20s and 30s.
[Norman Gilliland]
– that came from?
[Larry Reed]
The dress styles.
[Norman Gilliland]
Greek revival.
[Larry Reed]
The – the vases, the old Greek vases, and the temples. You can see them now with pillars usually on campuses and courthouses –
[Norman Gilliland]
Sure.
[Larry Reed]
– and all – all that revival, Greek revival, architecture and including little Cooksville. It’s hard to see the – we don’t have any real pillars, but we have a lot of pilasters which are flat pillars attached on your doorways and so on.
[Norman Gilliland]
And so, you have an addition on this house?
[Larry Reed]
Yes, it doubled the size. And there it is, on the back of the house.
[photo of the back of the Van Buren house]
A very modern addition. Connected, hopefully, sympathetically, to the historic house on the right, and on the left is the new addition, which doubled the size of the house, including more bedrooms and bathrooms and – and a real basement and a screen porch. Very livable and so, it’s really possible to take these quaint, cute little houses and turn them into very use – usable and livable houses. Oh, and there’s another dandy I think we’re looking at now –
[photo of the Duncan house]
– on the public square. A view of the most famous house in Cooksville. It’s the Duncan house, it’s historic name. And that’s the one Ralph Warner bought in 1911 when he came to Cooksville and turned it into the House Next Door and people from all over the country wrote about it, visited it, he had a guestbook full of local – local people and some visitors and we have quite a history connected to that house. It was an example of what you could do with one of these old houses and turn it into, if not a shrine, as they used to call these historic buildings, a lovely place to visit full of antiques and wonderful gardens. And it still is a very handsome, federal style almost, Greek revival federal style, very early looking square Cooksville brick house.
[Norman Gilliland]
Yeah, its a good solid appearance of those brick houses have. And the frame ones, too. We were looking across the town square there, or the commons as they might call it in Massachusetts?
[Larry Reed]
Yes, we have a public – officially, when they laid Waucoma in 1846 the – the Porters called it a public square, used – used by the public for cattle, sheep, horses.
[Norman Gilliland]
Mm-hmm. For grazing.
[Larry Reed]
– Picnics. Just for the people to use and in fact, I think – I make this claim, and nobody’s challenged me yet,
[photo of the Cooksville public square]
– that this may be the last public square in Wisconsin not to have been modernized either with a courthouse or a jail or commercial buildings.
[Norman Gilliland]
Yeah, so it seems.
[Larry Reed]
It’s still surrounded by its 19th century buildings. Nothing new. Additions put on some of the houses and restoration on some of the houses, but it still remains pristine as a public square or green or a commons.
[Norman Gilliland]
So, do you ever get tempted to walk around town with a metal detector?
[Larry Reed]
We do get quite a few of them.
[Norman Gilliland]
Do ya? Do ya?
[Larry Reed]
I haven’t had that yet. So far, they found a few little coins in the village as far as I know –
[Norman Gilliland]
Uh-huh.
[Larry Reed]
– a little gold metal ribbon holder in my church yard –
[Norman Gilliland]
Uh-huh.
[Larry Reed]
– which they gave me to keep as part of the history of the church. But yeah, we do get knocks on the door: “May I use my metal detector?” And they may have found other things I’m not aware of. I find horseshoes all over my backyard.
[Norman Gilliland]
Oh, do you?
[Larry Reed]
When we build new additions, you dig a basement, that’s when you turn up the old horseshoes. Everybody had horses. And I – I have about 30 horseshoes in my barn that I dug up in my yard. I – I think they just threw the old horseshoes away or I don’t know, horses kicked them off and they disappeared under the leaves.
[Norman Gilliland]
Just lose them, yeah.
[Larry Reed]
Just lose them somewhere.
[Norman Gilliland]
Here’s another look at the square, it looks like.
[Larry Reed]
Yes, that’s from the other direction –
[photo of the public square looking at the schoolhouse]
– looking at our historic schoolhouse, which is now owned by all of us. It’s our community center. The Cooksville schoolhouse built in 1886. It replaced the brick schoolhouse from the 1850s.
[Norman Gilliland]
And we’re gonna get a closer look at that, too, and there’s something curious about this and we’re gonna go right to it. And what’s the story here, the two doors in the front?
[close up photo of the front of the old schoolhouse]
[Larry Reed]
Those were restored. That’s the original doors, were restored, one for the boys and one for the girls. It’s like the churches apparently had, some churches, had two doors back then.
[Norman Gilliland]
But it’s a one-room school, right? And they end up all in the same place?
[Larry Reed]
Yup, they do, they go through a cloak room and then they end up in the classroom. Now why, I – I – I’ve often been asked that question. I ask it myself: “Why?” Well, I’m not an expert on that social history of separation of the sexes whether it’s at church or school or the doorways for that matter, but I think, remember, Puritan New Englanders, came to Cooksville and built these buildings and it’s that – that old fashioned way of entering buildings as a community and separating the sexes even as children. They ended up in the same room, of course, whether it’s a church or school so I don’t quite get it. But we did restore the doors. And it’s a lovely schoolhouse and its – we rent it out. Here’s another shot of our public square being used for a wedding.
[photo of a wedding on the public square]
The square is a public park and people can sort of, use the square, the park, and they often use it for family reunions or weddings, in this case. A big tent was erected and the schoolhouse, with bathrooms, and with a kitchenette can be used for food and – and toilet facilities so we get a lot of use out of our public square.
[Norman Gilliland]
You mentioned churches and we haven’t looked at churches, yet.
[Larry Reed]
That’s my Cooksville Congregational Church from 1879 –
[photo of the Cooksville Congregational Church]
– the first church built in Cooksville by the Yankees. And went out of business in 1939, when Congregationalists either died or moved away. And it became the town hall for a while and then I restored it, the exterior, the bell tower and the mignonettes and now use it as a private church for weddings and other occasions. It’s right across the street from my house and Benjamin Hoxie, a local architect designed it and the local carpenters – these settlers, these pioneers, are so talented. If – if they were farmers or merchants, they also were architects and masons and brick makers.
[Norman Gilliland]
And builders, yeah.
[Larry Reed]
And builders. And knew – multi-talented. You had to be, in the middle of nowhere, as Cooksville was in the middle of nowhere.
[Norman Gilliland]
Yeah, you pretty much had to do it all for yourself –
[Larry Reed]
Yeah.
[Norman Gilliland]
– of course, when it came to making clothes, the same thing.
[Larry Reed]
That’s right. The women were equally as talented as the men, of course. I – we have some old letters from the 1840s of some of the Irish and British Isles folks that came to Cooksville. The farmers came and they wrote letters back to England saying: “You’ve got to come to this country. You hardly have to plow. You just need throw the seeds after you scrape the prairie way, everything grows so abundantly, we can feed the melons and the cabbage and the carrots to the hogs, as well as to ourselves, there’s just too much of it.”
So, they were raving back to their relatives in England: “You’ve got to come to America because it’s such a – a rich country and – and there’s trees and water. You don’t have to walk miles to get water.” And it was wonderful to read these letters. And I, because I often wonder: “How did these people – why did these people come here?” From England, especially.
[Norman Gilliland]
Right? Yeah. Yeah. To a point like Cooksville, which is, sort of betwixt –
[Larry Reed]
Blank slate.
[Norman Gilliland]
-and between.
[Larry Reed]
And a blank slate.
[Norman Gilliland]
Yeah.
[Larry Reed]
Again, you have to do all the plowing with your oxen, which they brought with them or bought. And they often – often had a horse or two, of course. And pigs and chickens. And berry trees and nut trees and so on and fish in Bad Fish Creek. Which, probably, I hope was originally called Waucoma. But now it’s called the Bad Fish Creek. People often ask me: “Why is it called Bad Fish Creek?” And I did a little research and I think I found the answer, way back in history, a mistaken identity, so to speak.
[Norman Gilliland]
Oh, really?
[Larry Reed]
Well, I – I won’t take too much time, but I found a map from 1833 of southern Wisconsin and the Bad Fish River shows up on the map as now the Sugar River.
[Norman Gilliland]
Oh, okay. Interesting.
[Larry Reed]
So, maybe the surveyors, when they were coming through Southern Wisconsin, from the east to the west, came to our little creek in Cooksville, there was no Cooksville there yet, so they thought this must be a tributary of the Bad Fish River, so we’ll call it the Bad Fish Creek.
But now I’ve found other information that a historian from the UW-Madison thought that perhaps when the surveyors were coming through, they were getting the creeks messed – mixed up coming from the east to the west. It was Koshkonong, a nice Indian name. Yahara, which can be translated as the catfish river. And then there’s this other creek and some of the mapmakers and surveyors were taking notes, thought they had already come to the Rock River and the Koshkonong River so they called the Yahara Koshkonong and then they came to this next creek and called it the Yahara, which was really the Cooksville Waucoma Creek, but they thought they would call it Catfish or Bad Fish. So that’s how maybe Bad Fish Creek got its name –
[Norman Gilliland]
Confusion.
[Larry Reed]
– because the map makers got it confused with the Yahara, which also means “bad fish” or catfish.” So, there were a couple of theories there.
[Norman Gilliland]
All of this happened, didn’t it, just immediately after the Blackhawk War?
[Larry Reed]
Yes, 1832, I think, the Blackhawk War was concluded, and I think at that time, the American government, after the French had been – had been gone, the British chased out, and then of course, the American government took over the Northwest territory, eventually. After the Michigan – Michigan territory, the Illinois territory, the Indiana territory, Wisconsin territory came next in 1836 after the Blackhawk War, so the U.S. government really owned the land, as it were, in 18 – by 1836.
[Norman Gilliland]
It just really opened it up.
[Larry Reed]
And opened it up. After it was surveyed because you can’t just let anybody come and, you know, chunk a – take a hunk of the land, you have to have it surveyed.
[Norman Gilliland]
And they’re doing this whole thing based on that township system?
[Larry Reed]
Yes. Beginning in southwestern Wisconsin and then off to survey the rest of the state so they had counties and townships. They went that route with townships and laid everything out in – in 640 acres and, you know, and so on and down the line.
[Norman Gilliland]
Right, township.
[Larry Reed]
And you could usually buy your 40 acres or your 80 acres if you were a settler. And so, you actually could buy the land beginning in 1837 as I mentioned from the U. S. government. And actually, own the land, which once belonged to the Native Americans, really. They were the last owners as it were. And thanks to many treaties, for better or worse –
[Norman Gilliland]
Yes.
[Larry Reed]
– or the lack of treaties, or the disavowal of treaties.
[Norman Gilliland]
Misinterpretation and misrepresentation.
[Larry Reed]
Absolutely. Suddenly Americans and immigrants from the British Isles and eventually, of course, Norwegians and our friends in Europe came to – came to settle the land and buy the land but I think we still have, thank goodness, 12 Native American tribes in Wisconsin that still own some of their land.
[Norman Gilliland]
Now, we mentioned the Congregationalists, I think, I guess we’d better give equal time to the Lutherans.
[Larry Reed]
Yes, the Norwegians came to Cooksville and to Wisconsin. The Cooksville area, they arrived about the 1880s and 1890s in great numbers down in the Cooksville area and Rock County area.
[photo of the Lutheran church]
And they were hard working folks who became handy – the hired men, really, of the farmers in the area, the Yankee farmers. And eventually, of course, the Norwegians bought the farmlands and became a real force in – in Cooksville and built the Cooksville Lutheran Church, originally called the Norwegian Lutheran Church. There were so many Norwegians, they were tired of moving or traveling on Sundays from Cooksville area to Stoughton where their Lutheran church existed already, they decided to build their own in Cooksville in 1892, the Cooksville or Norwegian Lutheran Church was built but struck by lightning two years later, burned down. So, they built another one on the same spot.
[Norman Gilliland]
Not a very heartening development.
[Larry Reed]
So, the Cooksville Lutheran Church now was built in 1896, also celebrating an important anniversary this – in 20 – 2016
[Norman Gilliland]
Seventeen.
[Larry Reed]
In 2017, well, it will be 26 years old in 2017. So, 125 years of the present building, congregation.
[Norman Gilliland]
Right. Sure.
[Larry Reed]
I’m sorry, the congregation was formed in 1892, 125 years ago, and then building was built, burned down, and they built another one. But they were a real force and we still have a lot of, obviously, Norwegian names and Norwegian farms in the area. So, I – I think because Norway was going through what other countries had gone through –
[Norman Gilliland]
Yes.
[Larry Reed]
– a lack of land for the growing population to farm.
[Norman Gilliland]
Some real unrest, yeah.
[Larry Reed]
They had to get outta there.
[Norman Gilliland]
In the 1840s.
[Larry Reed]
The inheritance rules and laws were such that young people had no inheritance, no land to live on and farm so they had to come to America in the 1860s and 70s, especially in the 1880s and 90s. There was just no more land left in those smaller European countries, so they came to the wide-open spaces of America.
[Norman Gilliland]
Well, when everything else falls down in a little community, like Cooksville, if not Cooksville, the one memento you have of who was there was the cemetery.
[photo of the Cooksville Cemetery and its sign]
[Larry Reed]
Yes, our old cemetery. Actually, we had two cemeteries. The first one was behind our general store. Somewhere, we don’t know where. People died had to be buried somewhere. If not on their family farm, certainly in the village there had to be a place so there was an original cemetery somewhere behind the general store in the 1840s and 50s when some of the old folks started dying. But in 1861, the Porter family donated land for a Cooksville Cemetery. It was actually called, here we go again, Waucoma Cemetery. But over the years the name changed and here we have a sign, the Cooksville Cemetery. We have about 1,000, especially old settlers, and some of us, including myself, will end up there. And it’s a lovely little cemetery with some interesting stones.
The earliest, or the oldest, earliest born I guess you’d say lady was born in 1772 and she’s buried in the Cooksville Cemetery, Charlotte Rose Love.
[Norman Gilliland]
Wow.
[Larry Reed]
She died in the Cooksville area and was buried there. So, its – there’s some nice old headstones as well as some of those new headstones will go up there.
[Norman Gilliland]
Yeah, I guess you get the whole span of history, dont you?
[Larry Reed]
It’s right next to the Lutheran church but it has no relationship to the Lutheran church.
[Norman Gilliland]
Oh, its coincidental?
[Larry Reed]
The Lutheran church came later.
[Norman Gilliland]
And we have a few more to go through, here, in the balance of time available.
[Larry Reed]
Ah.
[Norman Gilliland]
And we’ll start with – with this one –
[photo of the railroad bridge]
– which is, there – there’s no railroad, so why would there be a railroad bridge?
[Larry Reed]
Yes, that does puzzle a lot of people and it puzzled me until me, the amateur historian, did some research and fortunately we’ve had a number of historians that have preceded me in Cooksville, because they always had a historian, and they did their research and that was built in 1857 to lure the railroad to Cooksville –
[Norman Gilliland]
Boy, Ive never heard of that.
[Larry Reed]
Apparently, that’s how railroads – thats how –
[Norman Gilliland]
Really, was that done commonly?
[Larry Reed]
Yes.
[Norman Gilliland]
If you build it, they will come. [laughs]
[Larry Reed]
Exactly, that’s what they were thinking back then. If you didn’t build a bridge you could at least give them the land or –
[Norman Gilliland]
Sure.
[Larry Reed]
Or sell it to them cheaply –
[Norman Gilliland]
Yeah.
[Larry Reed]
– or deal with the railroad and lure them to your community because obviously it’s like building a highway to your community, you wanted, for transportation purposes and financial and industrial purposes –
[Norman Gilliland]
It was, yes, as your artery.
[Larry Reed]
You wanted a railroad; you wanted the roads.
[Norman Gilliland]
Yeah.
[Larry Reed]
So, yes, that Caledonia Bridge, built by Irish and Scottish masons was built in 1857 to lure the railroad to Cooksville coming over the Caledonia Springs near Cooksville, but obviously it was never built.
There was also, because there was a railroad bankruptcy, really, I guess, a national financial crisis in 1857, and I don’t know what caused it, exactly, but it certainly affected the railroad companies.
[Norman Gilliland]
Yes, nationwide there was, yes.
[Larry Reed]
Yes, and that affected the railroad companies, who were wheeling and dealing obviously at that period, expanding the railroads but it was a big bubble, a railroad bubble, apparently, and companies went belly up and so many railroads just lost – went out of business but were reinstituted there shortly after and the railroads obviously did get built from Chicago and Milwaukee, through Wisconsin, but they didn’t come through Cooksville. They went through Edgerton and of course, Evansville, so that’s why those communities, small cities now, but thrived and grew.
[Norman Gilliland]
You still have your bridge, though. [laughs]
[Larry Reed]
We have our bridge, now overgrown. I walked back there with some friends –
[Norman Gilliland]
One of those bridges to nowhere.
[Larry Reed]
Exactly, it’s quite a nice piece of archeology at this point. [laughs]
[Norman Gilliland]
Well, let’s look at some of cast of characters that we’ve mentioned during this conversation.
[photo of Benjamin Hoxie]
[Larry Reed]
Yes, one of favorite guys is Benjamin Hoxie, the guy who designed my church, who was also a – a carpenter and he had a sash and door factory, he had a broom factory, he – he built a cheese factory in Cooksville, in 1875, which won blue ribbons at the state fair. Our cheese factory, by the way, still stands. It’s a house that was half house and half cheese factory and still stands. But Benjamin Hoxie was a real go-getter. He also became a horticulturist and he helped design the 1893 horticulture exhibit at the Columbian World Fair in Chicago. So, he was a real mover and shaker.
[Norman Gilliland]
Cosmopolitan mover and shaker, yeah.
[Larry Reed]
He – he and his brother, Isaac Hoxie, who founded a number of newspapers in the area were real go-getters.
[photo of Ralph Warner]
This is Ralph Warner. An early photograph of the guy who came over from Racine and discovered Cooksville and turned the Duncan house into the House Next Door and put Cooksville on the map. He had lots of notoriety because of his serving food and showing off his antiques. It was quite an unusual thing to do back in the 19 teens.
[Norman Gilliland]
Any notable Cooksvillians?
[Larry Reed]
Well, we have the best dam man in the world grew up in Cooksville, and there’s a photograph of him –
[photo of John Savage]
– on the Yangtze River back in 1944, he’s being cruised down the Yangtze, looking where to build the Three Gorges Dam back in 1944. He was hired because he was known as the best dam man in the world even then. That’s D-A-M.
[Norman Gilliland]
I got it. [laughs]
[Larry Reed]
Because he was the chief engineer for the U. S. Reclamation Bureau, and he designed, helped design, and invented ways of pouring concrete and having it cure properly in the 1930s and 40s, all the biggest dams in the world were built under his design supervision. As people said when he died, if you spin the globe and just stop it with your finger, every continent almost had a dam built by him. And if you’re out in outer space, the first thing you see, if you’re flying to Earth, the planet, the biggest structures in the world, were designed by John Savage, the best dam man in – in the world who grew up along the – the Bad Fish Creek where there were four dams when he was a kid.
[Norman Gilliland]
Oh, really, there were?
[Larry Reed]
I imagine – I imagine he played and frolicked –
[Norman Gilliland]
Sure.
[Larry Reed]
– as the kids did.
[Norman Gilliland]
Became fascinated with them.
[Larry Reed]
Swimming, fishing, opening the gates on Halloween to let the water out of the – the pond behind the dam and therefore the dam lost its waterpower. I think the owners of those mills hated those kids doing that. But I’m sure John Savage learned all about waterpower and its benefits and – and certainly his – the dams of the world in the 30s and 40s, and even the Yangtze River Dam is now completed –
[Norman Gilliland]
Sure.
[Larry Reed]
– and I visited it, by the way, and gave them some information about John Savage which they didn’t have. They knew he had designed the first one –
[Norman Gilliland]
Oh, did they?
[Larry Page]
– and the mural in the museum in China, at the Three Gorges Dam, when I visited, was only half finished but they already had a museum, and I told them where I came from and I had this material about John Savage, and they were very happy to get it because they just had a tiny black and white Xerox of John Savage’s portrait. Nothing else at the beginning of this huge mural and so they made me sign the – the guestbook and I gave them some information about John Savage.
They were gonna come to Cooksville and film about John Savage’s life, but unfortunately, his house had burned down, years ago, and he died in Colorado, so he’s not buried in Cooksville, so there was nothing left of –
[Norman Gilliland]
No connection there to show.
[Larry Reed]
– John Savage, so the people of China didn’t come to Cooksville to do a documentary on John Savage who designed the present Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River. They moved it slightly to a different location, but they still credit him with the concept and the location.
[Norman Gilliland]
Yeah, well that was the big era of dam building, wasn’t it, the 30s, yeah?
[Larry Reed]
Yeah, and it’s changing now, of course. They are controversial in some –
[Norman Gilliland]
Yes, they are, taking some of them out.
[Larry Reed]
They are indeed.
[Norman Gilliland]
Including in Wisconsin.
[Larry Reed]
But when John Savage died, though, he was given praise for the fact that the world, especially the third world as we call it now, was so improved, in terms of irrigation and flood control and electricity that the dams were just a great boon to humankind back then –
[Norman Gilliland]
Yes.
[Larry Reed]
– in the 30s and 40s, and still do serve that function, obviously, the Chinese dam just opened on the Yangtze River. But there – theres – there’s always something wrong with the technology that we have to be aware of.
[Norman Gilliland]
The big picture and you can’t always see it.
[Larry Reed]
Don’t fool with Mother Nature, too much.
[Norman Gilliland]
Yeah, yeah, so true. We have a – a diagram here, what’s the significance of this?
[photo of an architectural drawing]
[Larry Reed]
Ah, a connection to Frank Lloyd Wright. Cooksville has that connection. Through Gideon Newman, a farmer, an early settler, the farmer in the area, I think, met Frank Lloyd Wright at UW-Madison in the 1880s or 90s when they both were in school there. Because even the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and Taliesin West doesn’t know the story behind this Cooksville Chapel that Frank Lloyd Wright designed in 1934, never got built, or we’d be looking at photographs instead of architect’s drawings, of the Cooksville Chapel, titled by Frank Lloyd Wright, a memorial to the soil based on the Walt Whitman poem.
He – it was commissioned by this Gideon Newman, who lived in Cooksville. His family grew up on a farm in Cooksville, he grew up in Cooksville. He commissioned this in 1934 and the local papers, when they, in the 1930s, were always talking about Frank Lloyd Wright’s projects and this shows up as one of his projects, the Cooksville Chapel out of case concrete. It’s a small chapel and you can see it’s very Prairie Style, very radiant.
[Norman Gilliland]
Mm-hmm.
[Larry Reed]
But never built. It’d be nice to have it, I think. It would certainly bring a lot of tourists to Cooksville if we had it.
[Norman Gilliland]
Well, some of those Wright designs, as we know, sit for a long time before they’re finally implemented.
[Larry Reed]
In – in Madison, and maybe another one in Madison on Lake Monona, perhaps.
[Norman Gilliland]
Sure.
[Larry Reed]
I’d love to see the Cooksville Chapel built on Gideon Newman’s farm, near Cooksville, not in Cooksville. It’d be a great boost to the area. But also, it’s a – its a lovely piece of architecture on the drawing boards. I’ve talked to the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation but unfortunately, nobody has any money at this point. But they’re also very protective of his designs and in fact, over the telephone, suggested they wouldn’t allow it because you can’t build Frank Lloyd Wright’s buildings anymore because the materials have changed.
[Norman Gilliland]
Well, yes, you have to –
[Larry Reed]
And they will never be authentically Frank Lloyd Wright Buildings.
[Norman Gilliland]
That’s – thats the thing even with Frank Lloyd Wright –
[Larry Reed]
That’s the controversy.
[Norman Gilliland]
– isn’t it? That, well, when they built Monona Terrace –
[Larry Reed]
They had a controversy.
[Norman Gilliland]
– they had to make some changes –
[Larry Reed]
Modifications
[Norman Gilliland]
– modifications, for the physical plan, that kind of thing.
[Larry Reed]
Yeah, so I think we couldn’t call it, nor can people call, anything now, built by Frank Lloyd Wright. Based upon, perhaps.
[Norman Gilliland]
It’s – its kind of ironic because he – his designs have become historic too and become, kind of, beyond the reach of, you know, implementation in some cases.
[Larry Reed]
Yeah, yeah. It’s interesting, isn’t it? I – I personally think you can still proceed, but the claim has to be based upon. It would be wonderful –
[Norman Gilliland]
Youd have to water down your claim a little.
[Larry Reed]
– to bring them to life – to bring them to life.
[Norman Gilliland]
Sure.
[Larry Reed]
Because they still have value, I think to – to our, to us, that prairie style and Frank Lloyd Wright, especially, of course.
[Norman Gilliland]
And this is everybody in Cooksville.
[photo of a painting of Cooksville residents]
[Larry Reed]
Yes.
[Norman Gilliland]
Getting ready to take a bow here?
[Larry Reed]
We had an important artist in Cooksville, John Wilde, retired University of Wisconsin professor or art who lived near Cooksville and this is the 15 Cooksvillians that John Wilde painted in 1996. He took Polaroid cameras of some of us. I show up in there somewhere in the crowd. And then he did silver point drawings and converted the drawings into this magnificent paintings, large paintings, now at the Chazen Museum.
He also did a print which some of us own in our homes. So, we have to thank John Wilde and many other people who have documented Cooksville, including the Cooksvillians, the people, as well as the buildings. Cooksville still thrives. It’s still a wonderful community and we’re very proud of everybody from John Wilde and Frank Lloyd Wright, back to the Benjamin Hoxie and the Porters and Ralph Warner and – and the Cook brothers who founded Cooksville 175 years ago. So, we’ve got a lot to show and talk about.
[Norman Gilliland]
You certainly do. And thanks for sharing it, Larry Reid. A walk through Cooksville, its history and its present also.
[Larry Reed]
You’re welcome. Thanks for having me.
[Norman Gilliland]
Larry Reid is the chair of Historic Cooksville Incorporated and I’m Norman Gilliland. I hope you’ll join me next time around for University Place Presents.
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