ssion during
the seventy days of its sessions was regarded as a fitting culmination
of half a century of public office. For his signature of the Treaty of
Washington turned out to be his last official act. During the final
hours of the session the chill of the rooms in which the commissioners
sat was the cause of an illness from which Justice Nelson never fully
recovered, and which occasioned his resignation from the bench of the
Supreme Court in 1872. In commenting upon his resignation, the _New York
Tribune_ said, "It would be difficult to exaggerate the respect and
regard which will follow this able and incorruptible jurist from the
post he has so long filled with honor to himself and profit to the
commonwealth, when he retires to the well-earned repose which his gifts
of mind and heart will enable him so perfectly to enjoy."

In the village of Cooperstown the street called Nelson Avenue is named
in honor of the distinguished jurist, and three different places of
residence are associated with his memory. When in 1825 he married, as
his second wife, Catharine A. Russell, daughter of Judge John Russell
of Cooperstown, they began housekeeping at Apple Hill, on the site now
occupied by Fernleigh. In 1829 they removed to Fenimore, which still
stands just outside of the village, near the western shore of the lake,
and lived there until 1838, when they took up their residence at Mrs.
Nelson's homestead, the large brick house on the north side of Main
Street near the corner of Pioneer Street, and made it their home for the
rest of their lives.

[Illustration: NELSON AVENUE]

Although Judge Nelson survived Fenimore Cooper by more than twenty
years, he was only three years his junior, and the two men became
intimate personal friends in Cooperstown. They were often seen together
on the street, and in fine personal presence and noble bearing they
bore some resemblance to each other. In the old stone Cory building on
Main Street, when the lower part was conducted as a hardware store,
Judge Nelson and Fenimore Cooper used often to spend an evening, sitting
about the stove in a circle of admiring auditors gathered to hear the
great men talk. It was shortly after Fenimore Cooper's return to
Cooperstown to live at Otsego Hall that Judge Nelson was appointed Chief
Justice of the State, and Cooper ever thereafter spoke of his friend as
"the Chief." The novelist had a good deal of the lawyer in his
composition, and he often discussed