Southern Indiana Business Report
BLOOMINGTON — A native of Southern Indiana and co-founder of Bloomington-based Cook Group has been honored by Indiana Landmarks for outstanding leadership in historic preservation for her more than 40 years of advocacy and direct work to save important historic places. Gayle Cook received Indiana Landmarks’ 2021 Williamson Prize at the Monroe County History Center on May 20. Presenting the award — a sculpture modeled after a tower at the former church that is now Indiana Landmarks Center — was the group’s president, Marsh Davis.
Cook and her family are credited with restoring more than 60 structures. Most of those projects are here in Indiana, and a few are in her late husband Bill’s hometown of Canton, Illinois.
“I can think of no other family in the world who has done more for historic preservation,” said Davis. “Beyond the sheer number of properties they’ve restored, Gayle and her family have elevated preservation in a very public way as both a social good and a practical economic activity.”
Following years of work on buildings in Bloomington with a goal of making the city a vibrant place that attracts working people, professionals, students, and tourists, Cook, Bill and the couple’s son Carl began restoring the West Baden Springs Hotel, a collapsing National Historic Landmark in Orange County, then added the even larger National Register-listed French Lick Springs Hotel a mile away. They invested $560 million, transforming the two turn-of the-century hotels and reviving the economy of the entire region.
Other historic sites Cook and her husband partnered to help save include Beck’s Mill in Salem.
Since the 1970s, Cook has given hundreds of talks to promote preservation and highlighting historic places in Indiana, including her popular “Mystique of Domes” talk, sharing history and engineering lessons learned at West Baden Springs and from other domes of the world.
In 2009, her affinity for domes brought Cook to Indianapolis, where she and Bill undertook their last preservation project together before his death: restoring the former Central Avenue Methodist Church, a vacant domed landmark in the city’s historic Old Northside neighborhood. The Cooks spent $16 million to convert the church into a state-of-the-art headquarters for Indiana Landmarks.
Cook will be honored as part of Indiana Landmarks’ virtual annual meeting on Sept. 11.