Civil War financier Jay Cooke's stately home on Gibraltar Island hosted many visitors during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Water damage plus asbestos and other restoration issues make entering it pretty much off limits to visitors these days, so you can imagine how excited I was when I saw some of the home's interior during a trip I took to the island with outdoor and science writers hosted by Ohio State University last summer.
The university now owns the island and "Cooke Castle", and I'd gotten a glimpse of the home's exterior and grounds when I took a public tour of the island and OSU's Stone Lab facilities there. Stone Lab is the oldest freshwater biological research field station in the United States, and I learned a lot during that student-led tour that Tim and I took, but the vintage architecture and history fan in me really became curious about the house.
Little did I know that I would be able to somewhat satisfy my curiosity about the place less than a month after I wrote my original article about taking that tour!
Who Was Jay Cooke?
So, who was Jay Cooke and why did he build a mansion on Gibraltar Island?
Cooke was born in Sandusky, Ohio on August 10, 1821. He often bragged about being "probably the first or nearly first, baby boy born in Sandusky" (which leads me to wonder about the first baby girl born in that northern Ohio city, but I digress).
Cooke started working in finance at the age of 18 and became a powerful Philadelphia banker by the time he turned 40.
Cooke was the developer of a system of war bonds that allowed small investors to help finance the Union Army during the Civil War. Cooke's program raised more than one billion dollars for that effort and became the model for many subsequent war bond drives.
After the massive undertaking of orchestrating the financing of the Union's Civil War effort, Cooke decided that it was time for a little R&R and set about providing the perfect island vacation home along the shores of Lake Erie near his hometown of Sandusky for his family and friends.
Cooke, an avid fisher, found the perfect place, purchasing the 6.5-acre Gibraltar Island near the end of the war for $3,001.
Cooke apparently wasn't one to do things by halves and soon began building a 15-room vacation retreat in a high Victorian style based upon classic Italian villa architecture.
Cooke's island home featured a seven-sided, four-story tower with a rooftop observation area to better take in a 180-degree view of the lake. You can see a lot of the ornate architectural details on the home's exterior, but there are even more cool decorative features like detailed plasterwork, woodwork, moldings, marble fireplaces and a Gothic-style library at the foot of the tower inside of the home.
Cooke added to a cornerstone placed near the home site in 1859 by the Battle of Lake Erie Monument Association with plans to erect a larger monument to honor Perry's War of 1812 victory to honor Perry. (The Perry Victory and International Peace Memorial eventually went up on nearby South Bass Island near Put-in-Bay.)
From Presidents to Pastors
Cooke, 43 at the time he purchased Gibraltar, and his wife Dorothea, 38, began a pattern of twice-a-year stays generally lasting three to six weeks at a time and lavish entertaining with guests featuring many of the most notable political, political and religious figures of the time.
The Cookes had a full-time staff at the house and could house as many as 25 guests at a time.
The family, which included their four children, usually timed their visits for June or September, when fishing was at its best. Cool breezes and the large porch on the home usually meant it was five to ten degrees cooler than the mainland or other nearby Lake Erie Islands.
The initial idyllic island days ended for the family when Dorothea died around 1870 and Jay Cooke lost his fortune during the financial Panic of 1873.
Each morning on the island for the family brought pre-breakfast prayers and evening devotions, which bracketed a busy schedule of amusements that included fishing, boating, staging plays and sing-a-longs, playing games like croquet, boating trips to other islands aboard The Velma, reading, knitting, picnics, visiting nearby vineyards and orchards, hunting, napping, lavish receptions and trips to Put-in-Bay on neighboring South Bass Island for church services
Cooke was a very devout man and often invited Protestant pastors as guests or offered his home as a retreat place for groups of pastors.
Prominent political guests at Gibraltar during the late 1800s and early 1900s included General William T. Sherman, Lincoln's Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase and Presidents Rutherford B. Hayes and William Howard Taft.
Cooke and his family were all avid readers and journal keepers, recording many of the visitors and island activities. There are six existing volumes of Cooke family journals and more than 2,000 candid photographs mostly captured by Jay Cooke's son, Rev. Henry E. Cooke., which you can find online in more than one place.
Jay Cooke continued to love visiting his home on Gibraltar Island each spring and fall until he died in early 1905.
The Cookes leave Gibraltar and OSU moves in
His daughter Laura Barney inherited the island and Cooke Castle and continued hosting the extended Cooke family and friends until she sold the island to Julius P. Stone in 1925.
Stone, a member of the Ohio State University Board of Trustees and son of mathematician and astronomical researcher Franz Theodore Stone, donated the property to OSU and asked that the school name the scientific lab there for his father.
The house, added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1966, remained largely unused and unvisited by guests except when OSU used it as a men's dormitory for visiting students, scholars and researchers until about 1985.
The school managed to maintain much of the structure's outer shell with efforts to keep the roof sound, repair some mortar and replace the porch decking with more durable material in an effort to protect the home's interior, which remained much as the Cooke family left it when they departed from it in the mid-1920s.
OSU officials would like to renovate and restore Cooke Castle as a 13-suite conference and meeting facility, but that plan comes with a $4 million-plus price tag.
For now, the best way to get a look at Cooke Castle (the exterior of the house anyway) is to take one of Stone Lab's Science and History tours of the island this summer.
Student-led tours happen this summer on Wednesdays from 11 a.m. until 1 p.m. from June 24 through August 12. The tour fee is $10 for adults and $5 for children ages 6-12.The tour fees support Stone Lab scholarships.
A water taxi trip to and from the island, departing and arriving back at Put-in-Bay costs $6 for each passenger.
Want to learn more about Jay Cooke and the Lake Erie Islands during the century following the War of 1812? Check out Jay Cooke: The Napoleon of Finance by Daniel Alef or Lake Erie Islands: Sketches and Stories of the First Century After the Battle of Lake Erie by Michael Gora.
Thanks to Ohio State University and Stone Lab for sponsoring my visit to Stone Lab and Gibraltar Island during a two-day workshop for science and outdoor writers.
© Dominique King 2015 All rights reserved