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How did William Cooper help found Cooperstown, New York?
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James Fenimore Cooper
James Fenimore Cooper, painting by John Wesley Jarvis, 1822; in the Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, New York.
Judge William Cooper helped found Cooperstown, New York, by establishing a frontier settlement at the southern tip of Otsego Lake, where the Susquehanna River emerges, in the late 1780s.12
As a land developer and judge, he moved his family to this primitive site when his son, the future novelist James Fenimore Cooper, was only a year old. The village, which was officially incorporated in 1807, serves as a lasting monument to the Cooper family's role in developing the region.12