James Fenimore Cooper, 1789–1851

Abstract On September 15, 1789, a New Jersey couple ushered a new son into their crowded quarters in the old Quaker city of Burlington. Wheelwright William Cooper had been an energetic but impoverished nineteen-year-old when, on the eve of the American Revolution in 1774, he convinced Elizabeth Fenimore, three years his senior, to run off and marry him. In the topsyturvy conditions produced by the war, such a man was not to be kept down. As fighting raged on in the Delaware Valley and else-where, he threw up a store on a piece of vacant land outside Burlington and soon coaxed into existence there a hamlet of a dozen or so buildings that he called “Coopertown.” His ambition whetted by this experience, he began looking farther afleld. With a Burlington partner in 1785, he wrested control of forty thousand frontier acres in New York from the heirs and creditors of the colorful trader and Indian agent George Croghan.