the settlement of the spot, and in 1788
laid out the plot of the village which bears his name, and built for
himself a dwelling-house. On the 10th of November, 1790, his whole
family--consisting, with the servants, of fifteen persons--reached the
place. The future novelist was then a little less than thirteen months
old, for he had been born at Burlington on the 15th of September of
the year before. His father had determined to make the new settlement
his permanent home. He accordingly began in 1796, and in 1799
completed, the erection of a mansion which bore the name of Otsego
Hall. It was then and remained for a long time afterward the largest
private residence in that portion of the State. When in 1834 it came
into the hands of the son, it still continued to be the principal
dwelling in the flourishing village that had grown up about it.

On his father's side Cooper was of Quaker descent. The original
emigrant ancestor had come over in 1679, and had made extensive
purchases of land in the province of New Jersey. In that colony or in
Pennsylvania his descendants for a long time remained. Cooper himself
was the first one, of the direct line certainly, that ever even
revisited the mother-country. These facts are of slight importance in
themselves. In the general disbelief, however, which fifty years ago
prevailed in Great Britain, that anything good could come out of (p. 003)
this western Nazareth. Cooper was immediately furnished with an
English nativity as soon as he had won reputation. The same process
that gave to Irving a birthplace in Devonshire, furnished one also to
him in the Isle of Man. When this fiction was exploded, the fact of
emigration was pushed merely a little further back. It was transferred
to the father, who was represented as having gone from Buckinghamshire
to America. This latter assertion is still to be found in authorities
that are generally trustworthy. But the original one served a useful
purpose during its day. This assumed birthplace in the Isle of Man
enabled the English journalists that were offended with Cooper's
strictures upon their country to speak of him, as at one time they
often did, as an English renegade.

His mother's maiden name was Elizabeth Fenimore, and the family to
which she belonged was of Swedish descent. Cooper himself was the
eleventh of twelve children. Most of his brothers and sisters died
long before him, five of them in infancy. His own name was at first
simpl