Cooksville consists of two villages: Cooksville, platted in 1842, and Waucoma, platted in 1846. John and Daniel Cook settled here in 1840, establishing Cooksville on Badfish Creek, where a sawmill was soon constructed. Dr. John Porter of Massachusetts laid out Waucoma east of Cooksville after purchasing land next to Cooksville from his Massachusetts friend, Senator Daniel Webster. The two villages were settled by people from New England, New York, the British Isles, and later Norway. Waucoma was laid out around a public square, and Yankee settlers soon built Greek Revival and Gothic Revival style houses, some of locally fired brick, along with blacksmith shops, general stores, a hotel, a door and sash factory, a schoolhouse, and two churches. Because the post office was located there, the combined village became known as Cooksville, but after being bypassed by railroads in the 1860s it became known as “the town that time forgot.” Listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, Cooksville is also known as “a wee bit of New England in Wisconsin.”