James Fenimore Cooper | Page 6

curious, and centuries
old, brought over by the first of the name." It descended to Cooper
from his mother, Elizabeth Fenimore, and is now treasured as a family
heirloom by his grandson, James Fenimore Cooper of Albany, New
York.
[Illustration: THE SUSQUEHANNA.]
As the first James Cooper and his wife were Quakers, perchance the
same Quaker thrift influenced William Cooper to follow the lead of
George Washington, who, two years before, in order to find out the
inland waterways of our country, came from the Mohawk Valley to the
headwaters of the Susquehanna--this stream which Fenimore Cooper
called "the crooked river to which the Atlantic herself extended an arm
of welcome." Lake Otsego--the "Glimmerglass"--William Cooper saw
first in the autumn of 1785. "Mt. Vision" was covered with a forest
growth so dense that he had to "climb a tree in order to get a view of
the lake, and while up the tree" he saw a deer come down "from the
thickets and quietly drink of its waters near Otsego Rock." "Just where
the Susquehanna leaves the Lake on its long journey to the sea" this
famous Council Rock "still shows its chin above the water and marks
the spot where Deerslayer met Chingachgook the Great Serpent of the
Delawares." Now "its lake margin belongs to a grandson of the author,
who also bears his name," is a record found in Dr. Wolfe's "Literary
Haunts and Homes." In the red man's tongue Otsego means "a place of
friendly meeting" of Indian warriors. The author of "Deerslayer" has
immortalized that lake-country in the opening chapter of this book.
[Illustration: CHINGACHGOOK ON THE COUNCIL ROCK.]
Of this visit to his future home and lands William Cooper has written:

"In 1785 I visited the rough and hilly country of Otsego. I was alone,
three hundred 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