The Belt Cook Family

 

                                                                Picture Created by Val (AI)

The Belt Cook family were African Americans who lived in Phoenix from 1887 on.  Belt Cook was born between 1845 and December 1846 in Maryland.  It is not known whether he was born a slave or free.  Around 1866, he married Rebecca Hall, who had been born in Pennsylvania and was, therefore, more likely to have been born free.  He and Rebecca had fifteen children, nine of whom lived to adulthood. 

The birthplaces of the Cook children show that the family moved back and forth across the country between 1869 and 1887, living in Nevada and California before finally coming to Arizona.  Since Belt and his son Charles were barbers and one of Belt’s sons-in-law was a porter, it is possible that they were either employed by the railroads or simply followed the railroads to the next boom town out West.

1881 saw the Cook family residing in the boom town of Globe, Arizona, where their son William Thomas was born.  The Cooks owned a house on Broad Street, and Belt appears to have invested in a silver mine there.  However, as placer mining gave way to large-scale operations like the Old Dominion mine, Globe reverted to the status of a small frontier town, and the Cooks moved on to Phoenix in 1887.

In spite of having moved around the country during their formative years, the Cook children seem to have received a good education for the times.  In 1900, son Elias Belt Cook was a member of the McKinley Club, a political organization of prominent colored men that included fellow barber Frank Shirley, barber and mail carrier John Bolton, and wholesale produce supplier William Powhatan Crump.

No matter their position in the community, though, the Cooks were still subject to the illnesses of the day.  Daughter Eva, aged 27, died in 1894 of what was probably meningitis.  Charles’s wife Lola succumbed to tuberculosis in 1897.  Daughter Lillie, aged 22, passed away in 1902, and son William Thomas, 28, died of tuberculosis in 1909.  All are buried in the Pioneer & Military Memorial Cemetery, as is an elderly man named Elias Cook who might have been Belt’s older brother.

-Donna Carr