By the mid-1880s Cooktown was riding high. It was the port for one of Queensland's richest goldfields on the Palmer River, a railway was pushing inland toward Laura, and the discovery of tin on the Annan River in 1887 added to the boom. A town this confident wanted to advertise its sense of importance, and commemorating Cook's 1770 landing was the way to do it. The reserve also had a working life beneath the ceremony: a deep, brick-lined town well was sunk here to supply ships at the wharves, its shaft dropping more than twenty feet through arched channels that funnelled storm runoff underground, with a capacity of some 47,000 gallons.

The monument was as much a political gesture as a historical one. When Premier Griffith toured the northern ports in 1886, the Separation movement - a push to split the far north off into its own colony - was gathering steam, and Griffith was keen to show that Brisbane cared about the region. Committing the Colonial Architect's office to design the Cook column was politically convenient. Designed under architect George St Paul Connolly and built by Hobbs and Carter of South Brisbane, the column was raised on sandstone hauled from Murphys Creek in the state's southeast. Its foundation stone was laid on 1 September 1887, and it was reputedly the first stone structure ever erected in Cooktown.

Over the following century the small grassed reserve filled with other markers, each a chapter of regional memory. A granite cairn raised in 1948 honours the explorer Edmund Kennedy, who died on Cape York in 1848. Another, set in 1977, marks the start of the National Horse Trail, the route Dan Seymour rode to prove a horse track could run all the way from Melbourne to Cooktown. In 1989 the old town well was capped with a fountain celebrating Cooktown's first reliable water supply, piped at last from the Annan River. And to the north stands an 1803 cannon, cast in Scotland and shipped here during an 1885 panic over a feared Russian attack - now fired once a year for the Cook landing re-enactment.

Today the column is a fine survivor - one of the best sandstone public memorials in Queensland - rising from a granite base whose drinking fountains once poured water from the mouths of sculpted animal heads. It sits on a slight rise between Charlotte Street and the river, almost exactly where the Endeavour was hauled up the sand below Grassy Hill in the winter of 1770. From the water it is a recognisable Cooktown landmark, and to the townspeople it remains a place of identity, the gathering point each June where the long, complicated story of this shore is told again - this time, increasingly, from both sides of it.