Letter from Jay Cooke to George R. Butler

On October 25, 1901, Jay Cooke wrote a letter to George R. Butler, owner of a manufacturing firm in Sandusky, Ohio. George R. Butler and Jay Cooke shared grandchildren, since Jay Cooke’s daughter, Sarah Cooke, married John Butler, the son of George R. Butler. In the 1901 letter, Jay Cooke wrote that he caught one hundred fifteen fish at East Sister Island, one hundred of them black bass. He instructs Mr. Butler to give two fish to Elly Kieffer, six fish to I.F. Mack, six fish to George Tollack, and to keep sixteen for himself. The letter was written on stationery from Jay Cooke’s home on Gibraltar Island in Ottawa County, Ohio

Jay Cooke, pictured above in a portrait taken by Philadelphia photographer Frederick Gudekunst, was the son of Sandusky’s first lawyer, Eleutheros Cooke. Born in Sandusky on August 10, 1821, Cooke was well known as a Civil War financier. Several photographs of the Cooke and Butler families can be viewed at Lake Erie’s Yesterdays, a collection of historic photographs from Northwestern Ohio.