COOPERSTOWN, a village of New York, U.S.A., 8om. W. of Albany, at the foot of Otsego lake, where the Susquehanna river emerges from it, I , 2oof t. above sea-level; the county seat of Otsego county. It is served by the Delaware and Hudson and the Southern New York (electric) railways. The population in 193o (Federal census) was 2,909.
The charming village, with many quaint old houses, is in the midst of the romantic scenes of J. Fenimore Cooper's "Leather stocking Tales," now a prosperous dairying region. The shores of the lovely lake (9m. long and from 4 to 2m. wide), Cooper's "Glimmerglass," are now lined, as he predicted in 1838 they would be, with beautiful estates and modest cottages. The village has a community club, which shares with the library and the museum a commodious building. A public playground (Doubleday field) occupies the site where in 1839 Gen. Abner Doubleday, the in ventor of baseball, marked out the first diamond.
In 1785 Judge William Cooper, of Burlington (N.J.), acquired large tracts of land in this region, and in 1788 laid out the village, which was incorporated in 1807. The Cooper home, Otsego hall, was for many years the largest private residence in the State. It was burned in 1852, and its site is now a public park. Coopers town was the home also of Erastus F. Beadle (d. 1894), who origi nated the "dime novel," and of Samuel A. Nelson, a justice of the supreme court.
See J. Fenimore Cooper, The Chronicles of Cooperstown (Coopers town, 1838) .