Cooperstown

Cooperstown residential and resort village (1990 pop. 2,180), seat of Otsego co., E central N.Y., on the Susquehanna River and Otsego Lake; inc. 1807. It was founded by William Cooper, who brought his family there in 1790. His son, James Fenimore Cooper , made his home in Cooperstown after 1836, and the region is described in his Leatherstocking Tales. Fenimore House is the headquarters of the New York State Historical Association. Other museums include the Fenimore Art Museum, the Farmers' Museum, and the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum (1939), which commemorates the (now discredited) invention (1839) of baseball here by Abner Doubleday . The Glimmerglass Opera (Glimmerglass was J. F. Cooper's name for Otsego Lake) also draws visitors.

Bibliography: See A. Taylor, William Cooper's Town (1995).

Cooperstown, New York state settlement 59 miles west of Albany, founded by William Cooper and described by him in A Guide in the Wilderness (1810) and by his son James Fenimore Cooper in Chronicles of Cooperstown (1838). The younger Cooper used the environs of the town on Otsego Lake as prototype for the setting of some of his fiction, notably The Deerslayer and The Pioneers. The town is also famous as the home of Abner Doubleday, the originator of baseball, and has a National Baseball Museum and Hall of Fame. Cooperstown has been restored, as a 19th‐century frontier town with museums specializing in the life of that era. It is the site of annual summer seminars on American culture and folk art offered by the New York State Historical Association.