The Fenimore Art Museum
Near Cooperstown, New York
Across the road from the Farmers' Museum, on the shore of Otsego Lake, stands the Fenimore Art Museum, one of the finest small museums in the country. It sits on land that was once part of James Fenimore Cooper's farm. The elegant mansion you see was built in the nineteen thirties by Edward Severin Clark, a member of the wealthy Clark family whose fortune came from the Singer sewing machine company.
In nineteen thirty-nine his brother Stephen Carlton Clark, the same man who founded the Baseball Hall of Fame that very year, invited the New York State Historical Association to make the mansion its home. That organization itself dated back to eighteen ninety-nine. Today the museum holds remarkable collections of American folk art, fine paintings, and historic portraits, including images of Cooper himself.
In the nineteen nineties a major new wing was added to house the Eugene and Clare Thaw Collection of American Indian Art, one of the great gatherings of Native American artistic treasures anywhere. With its lakeside setting and its blend of frontier history, fine art, and Indigenous culture, the Fenimore Art Museum ties together nearly all the threads of Cooperstown's story in a single quiet building above the Glimmerglass.
