Pomeroy Place
Mrs. Pomeroy passed her later years at Edgewater, the home of her grandson. Her death was typical of her life of piety. On a certain afternoon seventy-five women were assembled for Lenten sewing. After greeting them all in the drawing-room Aunt Pomeroy ascended the stairs to her room, stretched herself upon the bed, and quietly drew her last breath. In accordance with the old custom the clock in the death-chamber was stopped, and a sheet was drawn over the mirror. Down stairs the rector of the parish read a prayer, and the women filed out of the house in silence.
Pomeroy Place was not permanently lost to the family for which it was originally built. When the centennial of the building was celebrated in 1904, the house had already returned to its first estate, having been purchased by the granddaughter of the original owners, Mrs. George Stone Benedict, who with her daughter, Clare Benedict, came to occupy it as their American home between journeys abroad.
Mrs. Benedict's sister, Constance Fenimore Woolson, who made many summer visits in Cooperstown, may be said to have drawn her original literary inspiration from this region, for Otsego appears in her first work, "The Haunted Lake," published in December, 1871, in Harper's Magazine, while Pomeroy Place itself is commemorated in one of her earliest productions, "The Old Stone House." From this period till her death in 1893 the sketches, poems, and novels that came from Miss Woolson's pen reached such a level of literary art that Edmund Clarence Stedman called her one of the leading women in the American literature of the century. Miss Woolson spent the latter years of her life in Europe, changing her residence frequently. Gracefully impulsive and independent, she had a gypsy instinct for the roving life of liberty out-of-doors; yet in character and demeanor she was so serenely poised, so self-contained, with such inviolable reserve and dignity, that she was, as Stedman put it, "like old lace."
One of the most remarkable men of early times in Cooperstown was Elihu Phinney, publisher of the Otsego Herald, who had brought his presses and type here in the winter of 1795, breaking a track through the snow of the wilderness with six teams of horses. The first number of the Otsego Herald, or Western Advertiser, a weekly journal, appeared on the third day of April. This was the second newspaper published in the State, west of Albany, and its title shows that Cooperstown was then regarded as belonging to the far west of civilization. Like all newspapers of that period, the early files of the Otsego Herald appear to the modern reader to be singularly lacking in local news, and only the rarest mention of what was going on in Cooperstown is to be found in its faded pages. There is much of the news of Europe, and the political news of America admits the printing in full of long speeches delivered in Congress, but the happenings in Cooperstown seem to have been left to the tongues of village gossips, and the advertising columns stand almost alone in reflecting the daily life of the place.
Elihu Phinney was a great favorite in the village, being a man of delightful social qualities, and distinguished for his remarkable wit and satire. His bookstore in Cooperstown furnished a large section of the country with an elemental literature, and with many historical works. A year after his arrival he was made associate judge of the county. It was in the printing office of Judge Phinney that Fenimore Cooper, when a boy, was in the habit of setting type "for fun," which experience he afterward stated was very useful to him in the oversight of the typographical production of his writings. On the overthrow of John Adams's administration Judge Phinney changed the political policy of his newspaper, The Otsego Herald, and became a supporter of Thomas Jefferson, in opposition to the views of his patron, Judge Cooper, who remained a Federalist. It was this breach of political friendship which brought to Cooperstown Col. John H. Prentiss, who came from the office of the New York Evening Post, in 1808, to conduct a newspaper in opposition to The Otsego Herald. Thus came into being The Impartial Observer, which shortly changed its name to The Cooperstown Federalist, and in 1828 became The Freeman's Journal, under which name it is still published.
Judge Phinney founded a bookselling and publishing business which, through his sons and grandsons, was carried on in Cooperstown for the better part of a century after its establishment. His place of business was on the east side of Pioneer Street, next south of the building that stands at the corner of Main Street, and the present building on the original site of their enterprise was erected by the Phinneys in 1849.
The Phinney establishment became famous for original methods of conducting business. Large wagons were ingeniously constructed to serve as locomotive bookstores. They had movable tops and counters, and their shelves were stocked with hundreds of varieties of books. Traveling agents drove these wagons to many villages where books were scarcely attainable otherwise. The Erie Canal opened even more remote fields of enterprise. The Phinneys had a canal boat fitted up as a floating bookstore, which carried a variety beyond that found in the ordinary village, anchoring in winter at one of the largest towns on the Erie Canal. Up to the year 1849, when the publishing department was moved to Buffalo, and only a bookstore remained of the Phinney enterprise in Cooperstown, their efforts had built up in this village a large publishing business, while they stocked and maintained the largest bookstores in towns as far away as Utica, Buffalo, and Detroit. As early as 1820 their stereotype foundry in Cooperstown had cast a set of plates for a quarto family Bible, one of the first ever made in the United States, and of which some 200,000 copies were printed. Later they published Fenimore Cooper's Naval History, Col. Stone's Life of Brant, several volumes by Rev. Jacob and John S. C. Abbott which were household favorites for a generation afterward, not to mention many school text-books and histories.