A Visit to Cockayne

June 11, 2024 Cockayne Farmstead

Yesterday, June 10th, the Bellaire Middle School After Hours Academy come to visit us at the farmstead! A great time was had all around. As soon as everyone got off the bus, our visitors went right into the farmhouse for a tour. They had excellent questions and we were happy to answer every one of them.

Bellaire AHA students in the North Parlor of the farmhouse with their tour guide, our 2024 AmeriCorps member, Trent.

After their tour, we had a few activities lined up for them. They were split up into two groups. One group went to learn how to weave on looms and the other went to write with quills and ink. After they were done, they swapped activities.

Cockayne Site Manager, Kara, teaching students how to weave yarn using looms.

One of our lovely volunteers, Michal, helping students write with a quill and ink.

After their activities were finished, we had some delicious donuts being freshly made over a fire as they played yard games.

Jacob, our volunteer donut chef, did a great job frying up some donuts for the students (and other volunteers)!

Once they finished their donuts and wrapped up with the yard games, it was time for them to leave. We enjoyed having the Bellaire AHA come for a visit and look forward to seeing them again soon.

Having school groups come visit us here at the farmstead is always such a joy! We and the students have such a great experience every time.

Sheep Registers

January 27, 2023 Cockayne Farmstead

After going through Irena’s account book, we wondered what other treasures have been hiding right under our noses. While setting up one of the displays again, we decided to look at a few registers that have been on display. Yet again, we were thrilled to see what was inside.

The registers were used by Samuel Andrew Jackson Cockayne, the son of Bennett Cockayne who built the house. In 1868, Samuel bought a purebred merino sheep (a sheep known for excellent quality wool) for $1,500, which would be around $30,000 today. The register for the male sheep, or “bucks”, starts in 1877, just one year after he won an award for his wool at the 1876 International Exhibition in Philadelphia. It also happens to be the same year that the Cockayne’s land was featured in “The Illustrated Atlas of the Upper Ohio River Valley” (If you look close at the sheep on the bottom, you can see that they are named there too). The second register is for the female sheep, or “ewes” and that started to be used in 1880.

These registers give a lot of information about the sheep that were here, including some of their names! Though the ewes did not have names and are only marked as numbers, some of the bucks had pretty adorable names, such as “Eureka”, “Comet”, and “Dexter”, while some other names were more or less describing them, like “Wooly Face”, “Broad Tail”, and “Wide Horn”. It also shows loads of information about the sheep and wool, such as the quality of the wool, thickness of the fleece, and even shows us how much wool was on their belly, head, and legs.

Irena's Account Book

January 10, 2023 Cockayne Farmstead

While going through an exhibit in the house, we decided to take a quick peek inside the account book Irena Cockayne used from 1898 through 1901. Irena was the daughter of Samuel Andrew Jackson Cockayne (the man who put the Cockaynes on the map for Merino wool) and Hannah. She was also later the wife of Samuel Craig Shaw, the second editor and publisher of the Moundsville Daily Echo.

What seems to be an unassuming old book from its cover actually reveals a unique insight into the day to day life of a woman from over 100 years ago. For three years, Irena wrote down what she bought, what day she bought it, and how much it cost.

One thing I noticed while going through this book is that most months have multiple entries of “carfare”, usually around 5 or 10 cents each time. Around then, most of the area from Moundsville up through Wheeling and into Wellsburg was all connected by streetcars. The charter was granted for the Benwood Southern Railway Company to establish a line down to Moundsville in order to transport passengers in 1890. I somewhat assumed, as I’m sure many people do, that she would have gotten out her horse and buggy and ridden to her desired destination, but stepping off the streetcar seems a lot easier than parking your horse. Public transportation at this time made it easier than ever to travel the Ohio Valley quickly and inexpensively.

Something else that stood out to me is one page near the back of the book where she keeps track of when she was paid for playing with the orchestra from 1896 to 1902. Irena played with several musical groups throughout her life, including the Oriole Banjo and Mandolin Club made up mostly of her sisters and close friends, and the I. B. Wilson's Symphony Circle orchestra, where she played first violin. She was very musically talented, as were her four sisters. In fact, in the back of the book, there are also some pages to keep track of payments from teaching violin lessons.

She was also quite skilled at woodworking, which I bet many people would not see coming from a woman in the late 1800s! In the back of the book (the book gets very interesting at the end if you can’t tell already), she lists all the items she bought for certain furniture pieces she was making, such as a writing desk made of poplar and a cherry cabinet. Many of these pieces are probably still in the Cockayne farmhouse. We will be doing some investigating in the near future to see if we can identify these pieces.

Everybody here must’ve walked past this book hundreds of times at this point, it’s wild we have never looked at it before as much as we have this past week. There’s a story to even the simplest objects if you take the time to dig deeper.

Cockayne News and Notes - Spring 2021

April 19, 2021 Cockayne Farmstead

Check out our most recent newsletter! To be added to our mailing list, send us a message at cockaynehouse@gmail.com!

Centennial Exhibition Notepad

April 1, 2021 Cockayne Farmstead

There is an exciting new development over here at the farmhouse because we have always wondered whether or not the Cockayne family made the trip to Philadelphia for the Centennial International Exhibition in 1876. This was a huge event for America's 100th birthday and was attended by about 10 million people! Samuel A.J. Cockayne won an award at the event for his Merino wool, which gained the Cockayne family international acclaim.

While digging around in our archives, we happened upon this memo notebook in one of our miscellaneous boxes. It just about proves that Samuel A.J. or someone else in the family attended the exhibition in Philadelphia because this notepad could only be purchased at the event as a souvenir! Inside, places they may have visited are recorded: Fairmount Park, Agricultural Hall, Horticultural Hall, and Machinery Hall, which you can see on the map below of the exhibition. They also detail landmarks in New York City and Washington D.C. so it must have been a fun trip out East!

Victorian Facebook?

December 29, 2020 Cockayne Farmstead

Social media may be relatively new, but taking an interest in your neighbors’ lives is certainly not!

Before computers, notices were printed in the social pages of the newspapers, letting the whole community know who was in town, who was away visiting, who was getting married, and even who was having a private card party at their home that evening.

The Cockaynes appear frequently in the social pages of the Wheeling newspaper, attesting to their active social life and numerous acquaintances. In this notice from the Wheeling Daily Intelligencer, June 18, 1886, the Cockaynes hosted a reception at their home in honor of a visiting guest from Wheeling. Often such notices would list the entertainment, the food served, the guests present, and even what the guests were wearing!

The next time someone complains to you that young people today spend too much time on social media sharing what they had for breakfast with the whole world, just think of the Victorians, putting the social in social media back in the 1800s!

Want to check out more historic local newspapers? Visit https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/ to search newspapers digitized from all over West Virginia!

2020 Christmas Concert with Faire May!

December 14, 2020 Cockayne Farmstead

This past Sunday, Cockayne Farmstead hosted its second Christmas Concert with Faire May. This year, the event was not open to the public but was live-streamed on Facebook as a paid event. Faire May put on a fabulous show that impressed everyone who watched!

If you missed the live performance but would still like to enjoy the concert, you can still purchase access to the video on Facebook and watch it whenever it is convenient for you! Gather around the Christmas tree and enjoy the historical sounds of the season, while supporting Cockayne Farmstead and all the community programs offered throughout the year!

Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/1639343289579380

The Mysterious Milk Bottle

October 27, 2020 Cockayne Farmstead

Evan Wenner, Preserve WV AmeriCorps Member

Sometimes uncovering the stories of old objects is a little bit like detective work. This week, one of our neighbors came into our visitor center with a milk bottle to donate to our collection. Etched on the bottle are the words, “Glendale Farms.” Our donor thought that the bottle may have come from the Cockayne farm, since we have heard that the Cockayne family referred to their farm as “Glendale” in the late 1800s. Our site manager, Kara, graciously accepted the artifact and had me do some digging in order to see if the bottle was really from the Cockayne’s farm. I determined that it is not and I will explain why.

My first step was to look up the patent for the bottle itself. The bottle is called a cream top and was invented by Norman A. Henderson with U.S. patent #1,528,480 established on March 3, 1925. When determining the manufacturer of glass bottles, always look on the bottom for the mark. In this case, the mark is a horizontal diamond with a vertically aligned oval in the middle of the diamond. In the middle of the oval, is a small “I.” A quick Google search took me to sha.org and glassbottlemarks.com, where I found that this is the mark of the Owens-Illinois Glass Company.

The research done by Bill Lockhart on Owens-Illinois was very helpful in determining when and where the bottle was made. On the left side of the manufacturer’s mark is the number 17, which identifies which plant the bottle was produced at. Plant #17 is in Clarion, Pennsylvania. On the right side of the manufacturer’s mark was the number 2. This is the date identifier and in the 1930s they only put the last number of the year. In the 1940s and onward, they began including the last two numbers of the year. Therefore, the bottle was produced in 1932.

The Cockayne farm in 1932 was not producing milk on a large enough scale for them to be ordering milk bottles like this. The family was known for their wool production and not as a dairy farm even though there were many dairy farms in this area during that time. I found several similar milk bottles on websites such as EBay and Etsy that mention a Glendale Farms in the Newark, New Jersey area. I confirmed this on milkmaidbottles.com, which lists all the dairy farms in New Jersey that delivered milk bottles.

Even though this glass bottle does not have relevance to the Cockayne Farmstead, it still has a fascinating story to tell. We hope this example of the work we do will help our readers learn more about their own antiques and show how fun researching artifacts can be.