In this year William Cooper decided to give up his residence in New Jersey, and to bring his family to Cooperstown for their permanent home. Accordingly he returned to Burlington, and early in the autumn completed arrangements for the transportation of his family and belongings to Otsego. Only in one quarter did he find any opposition to his project, but that opposition was serious. His wife positively refused to go.
Three years before, Mrs. Cooper had had a brief experience of the new settlement. She remembered the tippy boat, the rough pioneers, and the carriage that had to be steadied with ropes as it careened through the woods. In Burlington there was a well-established society, congenial friends, an atmosphere of culture, and such comforts as civilization was then able to afford. Mrs. Cooper had no mind to exchange her residence in Burlington for the wild uncertainties of life in the wilderness; and so with the conveyance ready and waiting at the door, and with her husband pleading, she sat firmly in the chair at the desk in the library of her Burlington home, and positively refused to budge.
Mrs. Cooper was a strong-minded woman, but William Cooper was a stronger-minded man. He seized the chair, with his wife seated in it, and putting her aboard the wagon, chair and all, began the long journey to Otsego. Thus William Cooper carried his point, while his wife also carried hers, for she travelled the whole distance in the chair from which she vowed she would not move. The chair itself, sacred to the memory of two strong minds, is still in use in the Cooper family.
This journey had much to do with the shaping of another mind which was not at the time consulted or considered. For Mrs. Cooper brought with her the baby boy of the household, thirteen months old, whose whole life, because of this change of residence, was cast in a new mould. This child was called James, but in later years he adopted also his mother's family name, so that he honored both father and mother in the fame which he gave to the name of James Fenimore Cooper. All his first impressions, he said long afterward, were obtained in the Otsego region. It is to be doubted whether Fenimore Cooper would have gained such wide celebrity as a novelist if he had not discovered the unique field of romance which the lake and hills of Otsego began to open to his vision. Had Fenimore Cooper remained in Burlington he might have written good novels, but not The Leather-Stocking Tales, for which he is most renowned. So that when William Cooper took up his residence in Otsego, he not only became the founder of a town, but he brought to the town the founder of American romance.
FOOTNOTES:
[56] A Guide in the Wilderness, a series of letters to William Sampson, published in Dublin, 1810, reprinted by James Fenimore Cooper, grandson of the novelist, 1897.
[57] The names "Cooper" and "Cooperstown" are pronounced by the Cooper family and by natives of the village with a short oo, as in the word book, not as in moon.
[58] Ebbal is L'Abbe, spelled backward. His last years were spent near New Berlin, beside a lonely waterfall, where he had a flower garden, and kept bees. His grave was four miles south of New Berlin, until relatives came and removed his remains to France.
[59] The account of this incident is quoted from Fenimore Cooper's Chronicles of Cooperstown.
[60] In his Chronicles of Cooperstown, (1838), Fenimore Cooper says, "The house standing at the southeast corner of Second and Water streets, [now called Main and River street], and which for the last forty years has belonged to the Ernst family, was erected this summer [1790] by Mr. Benjamin Griffin. It is now the second oldest house in the village." Cooper had already referred to the house of Israel Guild, erected in 1788, as the oldest house standing in the village (in 1838). Guild's house was burned in the fire of 1862, and therefore the house erected by Griffin has been, ever since that time, the oldest house. By some inadvertence, Cooper incorrectly designated the location of the Griffin house. He placed it at the southeast corner of Main and River streets, when he meant to say northwest. That Cooper writing of what was perfectly familiar to him, should have overlooked so palpable an error, seems most improbable; yet that he did so is now beyond doubt, although for many years his authority was cited to disprove the claims of the oldest house in Cooperstown. At the time of Cooper's writing, the house standing nearest to the southeast corner of Main and River streets, afterward torn down, had been built by Richard Cooper, and never had belonged to the Ernst family. Furthermore, in a letter dated May 23, 1805, Rev. John Frederick Ernst, in reply to an inquiry concerning the location of his property in Cooperstown, wrote to his son—"Here is a copy from the deed: 'The house-lot—being the northwest corner of Water Street and Second Street, is seventy-five feet front on the said streets, and seventy-five feet in rear on the west and north by [then] vacant lots, belonging [then both] to Wm. Cooper, Esq.'" It is clear that this is the same property which Fenimore Cooper, by some slip, described as being at the southeast corner. Some of the earlier charts of Cooperstown were drawn with the lake front at the bottom of the map, for convenience of reference, thus reversing the north and south of the usual cartography. It may plausibly be conjectured that Cooper had one of these maps before him as he wrote, and unthinkingly recorded, in this instance, its transposed points of the compass. This labored exposition of a small matter would be an inexcusable pedantry, except that the location of the oldest house in the village is of particular interest.