Program Announcement: Author Visit

On Wednesday, October 4, at 7PM in the library's program room, author M. John Lubetkin will present a talk on his book, Jay Cooke's Gamble: The Northern Pacific Railroad, the Sioux, and the Panic of 1873. (The book will be available for purchase at the program.)

Jay Cooke was a native of Sandusky, born here in 1821, the son of Eleutheros Cooke, and one of the first children born in the new settlement. Although he left Sandusky at a young age, he returned to the area regularly throughout his adulthood. The image above shows Cooke and his family at their summer home ("Cooke Castle") on Gibraltar Island, near Put-in-Bay (now the site of the Stone Laboratory research station of the Ohio State University). He is perhaps best remembered as "the financier of the Civil War," when, as a banker in Philadelphia, he helped to secure loans from leading bankers to help pay for the war; through his influence, the goverment was able to raise millions of dollars from the sale of treasury notes. After the war, Cooke became an investor in the Northern Pacific Railway. Learn more about this period in Jay Cooke's life at John Lubetkin's book talk this Wednesday.

Update: Oops . . . this may not be Jay Cooke's house on Gibraltar Island. Although the original image in our collection is labelled the Cooke House, we have strong information from a researcher with extensive knowledge of the house on Gibraltar that the architecture in the image does not match that of the Gibraltar house. The image may be of the C.C. Keech house, on the site of the original Providence Hospital.