ould be
ashamed not to harbor romance, and mystery, and ghosts.

Hyde Hall has the air of an English country-seat, with squire and
tenantry, transplanted to the soil of an alien democracy. To comprehend
its place in the life of Cooperstown it must be regarded as the symbol
of certain ancestral traditions toward which good Americans are expected
to be indifferent. George Clarke, who was colonial governor of New York
from 1737 to 1744, came to America shortly after being graduated at
Oxford, having received an appointment to colonial office from Walpole,
then prime minister of England. He came from Swanswick, near Bath. After
a few years' residence in New York he met and married Anne Hyde, the
daughter of Edward Hyde, royal governor of North Carolina. She
subsequently became the heiress of Hyde, in England, in her own right,
and by the old English law of coverture, George Clarke became the owner
of the estate. The lady died during his term of office as governor of
the colony, and was buried, with a public funeral, in the vault of Lord
Cornburg in Trinity church, New York.

George Clarke, the builder of Hyde Hall on Otsego Lake, was a
great-grandson of the colonial governor, a part of whose large estate of
lands in America he inherited. He came to America in 1791, to comply
with the statute requiring all English born subjects who were minors
during the War for Independence, and who owned lands in this State
subject to confiscation, to become American citizens. After several
trips across the water George Clarke decided, in 1809, to make his abode
in the New World, and leaving his home, Hyde Hall, at Hyde, in Cheshire,
he came to America, married as his second wife Anne Cary, the widow of
Richard Cooper, brother of James Fenimore Cooper, and in 1813 began the
building of his new Hyde Hall.

The property originally controlled from Hyde Hall was of vast extent. At
an early day George Clarke encountered much opposition from his
tenantry. The tenure by which they held their lands was not in
accordance with the views of American settlers. The estates were leased
out, some as durable leases, at a small rent, and others for three
lives, or twenty-one years. The settlers disliked the relation of
landlord and tenant, and Clarke was frequently annoyed by demands which
his high English notions of strict right would not allow him to concede.
His prejudices were strong, and if he believed anyone intended to wrong
him, he was stubborn