Today Cooperstown, upstate New York, is best known for, er, baseball, although it is named after William Cooper, the father of the novelist James Fenimore Cooper. Fenimore Cooper is perhaps most noted for his novel The Last of the Mohicans (1826), but also for the other four of 'The Leatherstocking Tales' – also novels with Natty Bumppo as the main character: The Pathfinder (1823), The Pioneers (1823), The Prairie (1827), and The Deerslayer (1841).
The Cooper statue in Cooper Park just off Main Street, Cooperstown.
'JAMES
FENIMORE
COOPER
1789 1851'
'ON THIS SITE STOOD
OTSEGO HALL,
BVILT BY WILLIAM COOPER
THE FOVNDER OF COOPERSTOWN, IN 1798.
THE HOME OF
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER
WHERE HE LIVED FROM 1834
TO THE DAY OF HIS DEATH
SEPTEMBER 14TH 1851.
DESTROYED BY FIRE IN 1853.'
The novelist is buried alongside his wife in the nearby Christ Episcopal churchyard.
'JAMES FENIMORE COOPER
BORN SEP. 15TH, 1789
DIED SEP. 14TH, 1851'
'SUSAN AUGUSTA
WIFE OF
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER
AND DAUGHTER OF
JOHN PETER DE LANCEY
BORN JAN. 28TH, 1792
DIED JANUARY 20TH, 1852'
There is a monument to James Fenimore Cooper in Lakewood Cemetery less than a mile north of Cooperstown.
This shadowy early morning photo doesn't really do justice to the statue of Natty Bumppo at the top of it.
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