William Cooper Founds the Village

The name Cooperstown honors not the novelist but his father, William Cooper, the frontier entrepreneur who built this village out of the wilderness. In seventeen eighty-five William Cooper bought land at the southern end of Otsego Lake, on land at the very source of the Susquehanna River. The tract had earlier been patented to Colonel George Croghan, and Cooper acquired the rights and set about selling farm lots to settlers streaming into central New York after the Revolution.

He was a shrewd and ambitious man who became one of the largest landowners in the state and later served as a Federalist congressman during the presidencies of George Washington and John Adams. He built himself a grand home called Otsego Hall, among the most spacious private homes in central New York, and governed the growing settlement almost as a personal domain. In his book A Guide in the Wilderness, William Cooper described the hard, hopeful work of turning raw forest into farms and towns.

His methods were not gentle, and questions still linger about how fairly he treated the settlers who owed him money and the Native peoples whose land this had been. But there is no doubt that the orderly little village you see today, laid out along the lake, grew directly from his vision and his relentless drive.