James Fenimore Cooper | Page 6

miles from home, without food of any kind. I caught trout in the brook and roasted them in the ashes. My horse fed on the grass that grew by the edge of the waters. I laid me down to sleep in my watch-coat, nothing but the wilderness about me. In this way I explored the country and formed my plans of future settlement. May, 1786, I opened a sale of forty thousand acres of land, which in sixteen days were all taken up by the poorest order of men." Here William Cooper laid out the site of Cooperstown, which, until 1791, when it became the county-town, was at times also called "Foot-of-the-Lake." He built a store for his sturdy pioneers, giving credit for their simple needs of life, and traded settlement products for them. His tenants put up log houses, and paid rent in butter, wheat, corn, oats, maple-sugar, and finally in pork;--so much that rentals known as "pork leases" were sold like farms. Money was scarce in those days,--when one John Miller, and his father, coming to the Lakeland's point of the river, felled a pine, over which they crossed to the Cooperstown site. Its stump was marked with white paint and called the "bridge-tree" by Fenimore Cooper. His sister Nancy's grandson, Mr. George Pomeroy Keese, from whom much will appear in these pages, has all there is left of that stump.
[Illustration: COUNCIL ROCK.]
In a few years the town's growth gave such promise that William Cooper began to build his own home. It was generally known as "The Manor," but the patent of Cooperstown was not according to law a manor. It was finished in 1788, when a few streets were laid out and the town's first map was made. And October 10, 1790, he brought his family and servants, some fifteen persons, and their belongings, from Burlington New Jersey, to this early pioneer home. Mr. Keese says that "The Manor" was of wood with outside boarding, unplaned; that it was two stories high, had two wings and a back building added in 1791. It first stood facing Main St. and Otsego Lake and directly in front of the later Otsego Hall, now marked by the Indian Hunter. In 1799 it was moved down the street, and was burned down in 1812. In its time it was the most stately private house for miles around. The second home, Otsego Hall, built in 1798, was of bricks which were made at the outlet of the lake. It had seventy feet of frontage by fifty-six of depth, and had two stories with attic and basement. The main hall measured twenty-four by forty-eight feet and the rooms on either side were twenty feet wide. Otsego Hall is said to have been of the exact, generous proportions of the Van Rensselaer Manor House at Albany, New York, where Judge Cooper was a frequent visitor. His own Hall home on Otsego's southern shore ever had "the air and capacity of a mansion and a history of hospitality well deserved."
[Illustration: THE MANOR.]
[Illustration: ORIGINAL OTSEGO HALL.]
[Illustration: JUDGE WILLIAM COOPER.]
To a friend William Cooper wrote: "I began life with a small capital and a large family, and yet I have already settled more acres than any man in America; and I trust no one can justly impute to me any act of oppression. Your good sense and knowledge will excuse this seeming boast." He elsewhere said that he owed his success to "a steady mind, a sober judgment, fortitude, perseverance, and above all, common sense." And here he lived as a wise and kind landlord among his people. For nine years he was First Judge of the County Court of Common Pleas, and he served two terms in Congress. Of Judge William Cooper there are three portraits,--Gilbert Stuart's of 1797-98, Trumbull's of 1806, and one by an unknown artist. His kindly gray eye, robust figure, and firm expression bear out the story of his life as told by these portraits.
James Fenimore Cooper, in a letter to his wife, dated Canajoharie, 1834, wrote of his father: "I have been up to the ravine to the old Frey house. It recalled my noble-looking, warmhearted, witty father, with his deep laugh, sweet voice, and fine, rich eye, as he used to light the way with his anecdotes and fun. Old Frey, with his little black peepers, pipe, hearty laugh, broken English, and warm welcome, was in the background. I went to the very spot where one of the old man's slaves amused Sam and myself with an imitation of a turkey that no artist has ever yet been able to supplant in my memory." This Heindrick Frey was a noted character of the Mohawk Valley over one hundred years ago.
It was, however, to the first home on Otsego's shore that