on Main Street, and included part of the
Phinney lot.]

[Footnote 99: The clergy house of St. Mary's Church occupies the site of
the Otsego Academy.]

[Footnote 100: The Country Club grounds.]

[Footnote 101: The present "Brookwood."]

CHAPTER XIV

FENIMORE COOPER IN THE VILLAGE

The childhood memories of James Fenimore Cooper were associated with the
village which his father had settled at the foot of Otsego Lake, for
hither he was brought a babe in arms, and remained until, at the age of
nine years, he was sent to Albany to be tutored by the rector of St.
Peter's Church. After his career at Yale and in the Navy, he was married
in 1811 to Susan de Lancey, and brought his bride to Cooperstown on
their honeymoon. Three years later they came back to take up their
residence at "Fenimore" just out of the village, on Otsego Lake, but,
after three seasons of farming, circumstances once more drew Fenimore
Cooper away from Cooperstown.

It was in 1834, when he had become a novelist of international fame, and
had lived for seven years in Europe, that Cooper, at the age of
forty-five years, took steps to make a permanent home in the village of
his childhood. Otsego Hall, which his father had built upon the site now
marked by the statue of the Indian Hunter, in the Cooper Grounds, was
repaired and partly remodeled, and here Fenimore Cooper dwelt until his
death in 1851.

[Illustration: FENIMORE]

Two names of later renown are connected with Fenimore Cooper's
reconstruction of Otsego Hall. Among the artisans employed was a lad of
seventeen years apprenticed as a joiner, Erastus D. Palmer, who already
had begun to attract attention as a wood-carver, and afterward became
famous as a sculptor. While the alterations were in progress Cooper had
as his guest in Cooperstown Samuel F. B. Morse, who assisted him in
carrying out his ideas for the reconstruction of the Hall, and drew the
designs which gave it more the style of an English country house.[102]
The local gossips said that Morse aspired to the hand of his friend's
eldest daughter, Susan Augusta Fenimore, then twenty-one years of age,
but that Cooper had no mind to yield so fair a prize to an impecunious
painter, a widower, and already forty-three years old. Morse was at this
time experimenting with the telegraph instrument which was afterward to
bring him wealth and such fame as an inventor as to overshadow his
reputation as an artist.

[Illustration: OTSEGO