Two names of later renown are connected with Fenimore Cooper's reconstruction of Otsego Hall. Among the artisans employed was a lad of seventeen years apprenticed as a joiner, Erastus D. Palmer, who already had begun to attract attention as a wood-carver, and afterward became famous as a sculptor. While the alterations were in progress Cooper had as his guest in Cooperstown Samuel F. B. Morse, who assisted him in carrying out his ideas for the reconstruction of the Hall, and drew the designs which gave it more the style of an English country house.[102] The local gossips said that Morse aspired to the hand of his friend's eldest daughter, Susan Augusta Fenimore, then twenty-one years of age, but that Cooper had no mind to yield so fair a prize to an impecunious painter, a widower, and already forty-three years old. Morse was at this time experimenting with the telegraph instrument which was afterward to bring him wealth and such fame as an inventor as to overshadow his reputation as an artist.
Otsego Hall
The Cooper Grounds, now kept as a public park by the Clark Estate, include the property that belonged to Fenimore Cooper. Otsego Hall, which was destroyed by fire in 1852, after the novelist's death, must be imagined at the centre of the grounds, where its outward appearance, as well as the arrangement of its interior, may be reconstructed by the fancy from the wooden model made from a design by G. Pomeroy Keese, and now to be seen in the village museum. Cooper's favorite garden-seat exists in facsimile in its original situation at the southeast corner of the grounds.
When in 1834 the old mansion of the founder of Cooperstown began once more to be occupied it was a matter of great interest to the people of the village. Many of them well remembered Fenimore Cooper and his bride when, twenty years before, they had lived at Fenimore. They recalled the former resident as James Cooper, for it was not until 1826 that he adopted the middle name, in compliance with a request which his mother had made that he should use her family name.[103] Twenty years had made many changes in Cooperstown, and there was a large proportion of residents who knew Fenimore Cooper only from his writings and by reputation. Therefore when he came back to dwell in the home of his youth he was regarded by many almost as a newcomer in the neighborhood, and to his family as well as to himself a rather cautious welcome was given. It had to be admitted at the outset that the changes which Fenimore Cooper made in Otsego Hall were disapproved by some of the villagers. They did not like the foreign air which the old house now began to give itself with its battlements and gothic elaborations. Here was the first muttering of the storm that clouded the later years of Fenimore Cooper.
James Fenimore Cooper