PHOTO: CORBIS
The statue of the Sandlot Kid, by Victor Salvatore, capturing the
excitement of the game, greets visitors to
Doubleday Field.
baseball town? That’s a reasonable question that can be extensively answered: Cooperstown is a town for shopping, good restaurants, art galleries, comfy and historic inns and B&Bs; it is a place of festivals, car shows, horse shows, parades, muse- ums, and markets. Cooperstown is a one-stoplight village in scenic Otsego County, a pleasant stopping point between Syracuse and Albany. Travelers along one of the smaller highways from Albany come upon Otsego Lake almost unexpectedly. The rolling, wooded landscape opens up suddenly to the shimmering blueness of water, a serene setting further complemented by Cooperstown’s many historic homes, buildings constructed in the 1800s and the early 1900s. The village was settled in the late 1700s by Judge William Cooper, who was the father of James Fenimore Cooper, the author of the Leather- Stocking Tales, including The Last of the Mohicans. The town and its nearby lake attracted well-to-do settlers to the area, and Cooperstown was incorpo- rated in 1812. Early on, the area was recognized for its rich and fertile
farmland; farmers of hops were particularly successful here. A mile from the center of Coopers-
town is the Farmers’ Museum, a fine collection of buildings and artifacts that portray what life may have been like on the farm and in the village during the middle of the 1800s. Museum personnel in period costume tend the museum’s livestock and mind the Middlefield Print Shop, Bump Tavern, and Todd’s General Store. Horse-drawn carriages carry visitors around the grounds, the drivers offering tidbits of social, historical, and agricultural information. Here, too, are exhibits and replicas from a mid-nineteenth century county fair, including a midway tent and the Empire State Carousel.
Close by is a 1930s neo-Georgian mansion that is home to the Fenimore Art Museum. The museum holds fine collections of American and folk art and the Eugene and Clare Thaw Collection of American Indian Art. The village of Cooperstown has an international reputation that is not solely a result of its connection to baseball. In this village, too, is the
u At Doubleday Field, the Boston Red Sox and the Detroit Tigers met for the 2005 Hall of Fame Game, which the Tigers won 6 to 4. T H E E L K S M A G A Z I N E 49
PHOTO: MILO STEWART JR./NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME LIBRARY, COOPERSTOWN, NEW YORK
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