Alicia Fabbre, a freelance writer for the Elgin Courier-News, wrote a lovely story recently about Ramona and Sam Jones, who have rescued a former mansion in that city from a long abandonment.
Fabbre had a more dramatic story to tell but for one considerable detail that did not appear: Who was David Caleb Cook, and how did he afford to build this mansion in 1885?
Yes, there is a religion angle here.
Fabbre referred to Cook only as “a publishing magnate.” Imagine if someone bought the former mansion of the legendary and volcanic Robert R. “Colonel” McCormick and the Elgin Courier-News, which is owned Tribune Publishing, referred to him only as “a former Chicago newspaper editor.”
McCormick’s onetime home, Cantigny, was spared that fate and is under the protective shield of the McCormick Foundation. Still, the comparison is valid for Christians who have worked in Sunday schools that have relied on the extensive curriculum developed by David C. Cook, the global publisher that still bears its founder’s name.
A Courier-News story by Mike Danahey in May 2018 had this minimal detail about Cook:
Born in 1850, David C. Cook founded what would become the nation’s largest interdenominational publishing house. The Cook home is a 12-room mansion that cost $10,000 to build in 1885, the city said. It became a nursing home in 1945, and additions were added over the decades.
It appears the background on Cook’s former mansion may be the victim of morgue decay, in which good details fall to the side based on various reporters’ limits on column inches, or their greater interest in other matters.
Certainly the primary focus of this story belongs on the visionary couple from the suburbs of Atlanta who knew they had found a neglected jewel with an asking price of only $1. Fabbre tells their story with engaging details:
“I said there was a lot of work,” Sam Jones Jr. recalled telling his wife on their first visit. “That’s all I kept saying.”
Ramona Jones, on the other hand, saw possibility.
“It was a mess,” she said. “But I saw the beauty in it.”
When she called the bank to inquire about the property, they told her the couple didn’t need to pay the $1. In fact, the bank gave them money to take ownership, which they in turn used to pay a portion of the back taxes owed on the property.
They moved in in July 2019.
As the lead photo in the Courier-News shows, family is of deep importance to the couple:
“My grandmother’s dream was to buy a house big enough for everyone to live there,” Jones said, recalling memories of large family gatherings as a child. “Family is so important to me.”
Her plan is to have large rooms for family to gather in throughout the property. Family members would also share kitchen space. Sam has his eye on the sprawling basement as his man cave, and the couple plans to live primarily in the mansion once renovation is completed.
The most engrossing backstory is told by Historic Elgin:
105 N. Gifford was built in 1885 for David C. Cook for $10,000. Cook, the son of a Methodist minister, a prominent Elgin publisher, born in New York in 1850. As a young man, David worked in his father’s Chicago print shop and taught Sunday school. It was these two activities which led him down the path to founding the nation’s largest interdenominational publishing house.
David’s mail order sewing machine accessories business was destroyed in the Chicago fire of 1871. Undaunted, Cook started over in the business of helping the victims of the fire. He opened a mission on North Avenue in one of the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods. There, he saw the need for Sunday School lesson books written at a level at which these underprivileged students could read. Cook took on the task of writing and printing “Our Sunday School Quarterly” himself. His new wife, Marguerite, helped in the venture also, and they began “Our Sunday School Gem,” a 16-page magazine, definitely the most popular School paper of the day.
How striking that an old home constructed for a man who cared about inner-city families is now being rescued from the ravages of time — and hideous renovations by a nursing home — by a couple with an extended family of 11.
FIRST IMAGE: Cropped from an item posted by cheapoldhouses on Instagram.