Island County Historical Museum Opens Exhibit Honoring Preservationist Jimmie Jean Cook

She picked up the nickname as a child, loved it, and held onto it the rest of her life. The Island County Historical Museum is now making sure more people know it, with a new exhibit honoring Jimmie Jean Cook, the Central Whidbey historian and preservationist whose decades of research shaped the landscape of local heritage far more than most residents realize.

The exhibit, which recently opened at the museum's Coupeville location at 908 NW Alexander St., includes a short documentary film and displays items Cook discovered and saved over years of painstaking work. As Harry Anderson wrote in the Whidbey News-Times, the tribute honors "a woman who really ought to be better known than she is in Central Whidbey, with maybe a statue or a building named for her."

Cook was born Marian Frances Cook on April 1, 1921, in a small Kansas town, the fourth of five children to James and Marian Cook. She spent the core of her professional life working in the auditor's office before retiring in the 1980s, at which point she simply kept going. "After she retired from the auditor's office in the 1980s, she continued to research and compile information on the history of this area," Anderson noted. She died at 69 on May 29, 1991, and is buried in Coupeville's Sunnyside Cemetery.

Her legacy is concrete and still accessible. She spent years carefully identifying and preserving the historic elements of the Penn Cove area and laid the groundwork for the creation of the Ebey's Landing National Historical Reserve in 1978. In 1973 she published "A Particular Friend, Penn's Cove," a well-loved book still available at local bookstores and online. Thanks to her research, anyone can walk into the museum or a library today and study a map of Donation Land Claims boundaries running from West Beach to Greenbank, tracing the lives of the area's original settlers.

The exhibit also reflects a lesser-known side of Cook: she made art herself and particularly loved to draw cats.

"All of us owe a big debt of gratitude to Jimmie Jean Cook, who more than almost anyone else made sure we could know and enjoy our history," Anderson wrote.

The Coupeville Museum is open Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Reach the Island County Historical Society at 360-678-3310.