Cook House

Tom Cook’s 3rd Street house represents an incomparable advance over the log cabin in which he and his wife, Nellie, lived after their marriage in 1886. At the time, Cook, the son of a Scottish immigrant coal miner, was himself mining coal for the Fremont, Elkhorn & Missouri Valley Railroad, along Shawnee Creek, just east of the new town of Douglas. In the spring of 1887, Cook built a “better cabin” for his bride—using plaster in lieu of mud at the log interstices. When the mine closed in January of 1888, the Cooks moved to Douglas, which was then in the throes of infancy. “Our water,” Cook’s sisterin-law, Florence Hartman Cook, reports, “was hauled from the Platte River and cost us 35 cents a barrel.... Except for the abundant game and the wild small fruits, the living expenses were high, as there were no gardens.” And the infrastructure, too, left something to be desired: “[O]ur streets all sparkled with bits of broken bottles from the 13 saloons we were reported to have had at that time.... There were no fences ... and the herds of range cattle driven past the town to the shipping pens were a menace to our small children.” By 1904, Cook had the wherewithal to begin construction of the house on North 3rd Street, using locally-manufactured brick, his own labor, and—probably—a set of standard, store-bought plans. Except for the modern window treatments, the building appears today much as it did then: spare, sturdy, and redolent of Scottish thrift. The broad, low-hipped roofs, the expanses of red brick, and—above all—the massive chimney that ascends from the basement up through the center of the house are all emblematic of Cook’s victory over the days when, as Florence Cook recalls, “During the blizzards we had to hang our surplus carpets and blankets on the walls to keep out the snow.”