e which bears this
inscription:

WHITE MAN, GREETING!

WE, NEAR WHOSE BONES YOU STAND,
WERE IROQUOIS. THE WIDE LAND
WHICH NOW IS YOURS WAS OURS.
FRIENDLY HANDS HAVE GIVEN BACK
TO US ENOUGH FOR A TOMB.

These lines offer a fitting introduction to the story of Cooperstown.
There is enough of truth and poetry in them to touch the heart of the
most indifferent passer-by. No sense of pride stirs the soul of any
white man as he reads this pathetic memorial of an exiled race and its
vanished empire. From this region and from many another hill and valley
the Indians were driven by their white conquerors, banished from one
reservation to another, compelled to exchange a vast empire of the
forest for the blanket and tin cup of Uncle Sam's patronage.

The mound in Fernleigh-Over is probably an Indian burial site of some
antiquity. In 1874, when the place was being graded, a number of Indian
skeletons were uncovered in various parts of the grounds. The owner of
the property, Mrs. Alfred Corning Clark, caused all the bones to be
collected and buried at the foot of the mound. Some years afterward she
marked the mound with the granite slab and its inscribed epitaph.

The lines were composed by the Rev. William Wilberforce Lord, D.D., a
former rector of Christ Church, in this village, once hailed by
Wordsworth as the coming poet of America. He had written some noble
verse, but wilted beneath the scathing criticism of Edgar Allan Poe,[1]
and after becoming a clergyman published little poetry. This epitaph
alone, however, fully justifies Dr. Lord's earlier ambition, for no poet
of his time could have included more of beauty and truth and pathos
within the compass of so brief an inscription.

In a comment upon the placing of this tablet, Mrs. Clark afterward
wrote: "The position of the stone is misleading, and gives one an idea
that the mound contains the bones--whereas they are buried at the foot
of the mound. I have sometimes wondered if this rather curiously shaped
mound, with the two maple trees thereon, might not contain undisturbed
skeletons; and I feel sure that throughout this strip of land, which the
grading only superficially disturbed, there are many bones of the
Iroquois, for in 1900, when we cut down some trees, a skull was found in
the fork of a root."

Mrs. Clark's record shows that the mound existed prior to 1874, and
since this particular corner of ground was unoccupied before that