Jay Cooke, son of Ohio Congressman Eleutheros Cooke, was born in Sandusky, Ohio, on August 10, 1821. He began his career at E.W. Clarke and Co., a private banking house, becoming a partner at the age of 21. In 1861, he opened his own private banking house in Philadelphia, Jay Cooke and Company.
During the Civil War, Cooke was appointed the government’s sole financial bond agent by Salmon P. Chase, the Ohio senator and governor, then serving as President Lincoln’s first Secretary of the Treasury and later appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. By 1864, Cooke’s bonds were raising nearly two million dollars a day, and by the end of the war, he had sold over a $1 billion in bonds for the federal government. He received only a small commission from the sale of the bonds, but his success as a financier of the war engendered trust and acclaim for his business, causing it to flourish.
That same year, 1864, Cooke purchased Gibraltar Island in Lake Erie’s Put-in-Bay and almost immediately began construction on the 15-room Cooke Castle, a project overseen by his brother, Pitt, until its completion in the spring of 1865. The Cooke family visited the island at least twice each summer after that for nearly 60 years, entertaining hundreds of guests, including Chase, General William Tecumseh Sherman, and President Rutherford B. Hayes. The visits continued even as Cooke lost his fortune in the Panic of 1873, declaring bankruptcy as he attempted to finance the nation’s second transcontinental railroad, the Northern Pacific Railway. By 1880, however, he had amassed a new fortune through his investments in a Utah silver mine.
The members of the Cooke family were avid readers and dedicated journal writers. Six volumes of journals exist, including more than 2,000 candid photographs taken mostly by Jay’s son, Rev. Henry E. Cooke.
Following the death of Jay Cooke in 1905, the island passed into possession of his daughter, Laura Barney. In 1925, she sold Gibraltar to philanthropist and Ohio State University Board of Trustees member Julius F. Stone. Stone donated the property to the university to develop a facility for teaching and research on Lake Erie, creating what is now Franz Theodore Stone Laboratory, named after Julius’ father.
