Cooperstown is one of America’s best known small towns. If I say I am going to Cooperstown, no one asks me where the town is or what I am going to see there. Cooperstown is a nationally famous village even though its population is a tiny 1,837. If you yell out at a baseball game that a player is “Going to Cooperstown” it means that he is a superb ballplayer and everybody knows it.
The town is known as being the home of the Baseball Hall of Fame. The institution is in Cooperstown because of unreliable information that Major General Abner Doubleday invented baseball while he was a student in the town. Albert Spaulding appointed a commission in 1905 to study where baseball originated. The commission found that Doubleday started the game in 1839 in Cooperstown.
Doubleday died in 1893. At no time did he claim to have invented baseball. However, a man who was five years old in 1839 said that he saw Doubleday play the game in Cooperstown. Unfortunately however, in 1839 Doubleday was at West Point, not in Cooperstown.
There is a monument to Civil War veterans in the civic center at Main Street and Pine Blvd. Doubleday was the most famous veteran of the war, but his name does not appear on the monument.
The monument is classical and is well-executed. The inscription is simple:
“In Memory of
the Soldiers and Sailors
of Otsego County
1861 – 1865″
Behind the monument is the Otsego County Courthouse. Cooperstown is the county seat of Otsego, one of the most beautiful counties in New York.
At the foot of the monument is a plaque containing Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
There are many houses and stores in Cooperstown that date to the 19th Century or to the period right after the Revolution. For example, this fine house right across from the Civil War monument is one that the veterans would have seen when the monument was dedicated.
Also across the street is this Veteran’s Monument dedicated to all veterans.
If you have children, I recommend taking them to the Farmer’s Museum where they can experience farming from the time of the Civil War. Much of Cooperstown’s wealth came from farming and from harvesting Maple sap which was used to make Maple Syrup. James Fenimore Cooper’s father, William Cooper, was a Quaker and an Abolitionist and he thought that right-thinking people should not eat sugar since almost all of it involved slave labor. Of course, he might have thought that sugar mapleing was a good way to make money.
The Cardiff Giant lies in state at the museum. He was reportedly the tallest man ever in history.
This eight-sided building houses the remains which you can visit today.
Two blocks from the museum is Otsego Lake, called “Glimmerglass Lake” in James Fenimore Cooper’s novels. The lake is one of the most beautiful in New York State. You can view the lake from Council Rock, a sacred place to Native Americans.
Otsego Lake is the source of the Susquehanna River. It runs southward to Binghamton and then through Pennsylvania. The river empties out in the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. From Council Rock you can see the Susquehanna River where the Sullivan-Clinton Campaign started in 1779 during the American Revolution. The river is so shallow that for the bateaux to sail down it General Clinton had his troops build a dam stopping the flow of the rivers until it built up on the north side and them he broke through it to allow his boats to traverse the river southward.
Otsego Lake is the home to a popular opera festival, The Glimmerglass, and to Glimmerglass State Park. The park includes hiking trails, a wooden bridge, and an old mansion.
Cooperstown rose to prominence not because of its heroic sons volunteering for the Civil War, but because baseball was “invented” in the village. But, in popular lore, the Civil War and baseball came together. According to a very old man’s story, Major General Abner Doubleday invented baseball in Cooperstown in 1839. In 1905 the Mills Commission was given the task of discovering when baseball was first invented. Abner Graves said that as a child he had watched Abner Doubleday invest baseball. The problem was that Doubleday never claimed to have had anything to do with baseball and he was at West Point in 1839.
Doubleday was born in 1819 in Ballston Spa, New York near Saratoga. He did go to an academy in Cooperstown, equivalent to a high school today, before going on to the United States Military Academy, but except for his education there, he was never a resident of Cooperstown. However, he became a hero for is actions in the Mexican War and the Civil War. When he died in 1893 he was remembered for his bravery as the second-in-command of Fort Sumter when the war began in 1861, for his taking command of the I Corps at Gettysburg after John Reynolds was killed, and his defense of Washington in 1864.
Below is the Baseball Hall of Fame, a very good museum for both children and adults. Apart from modern baseball it includes exhibits on baseball in the 19th Century.
Doubleday came to prominence at the very start of the Civil War. He was the second in command at Fort Sumter as it was surrounded by Confederate forces in April of 1861. His commander, Major Robert Anderson was desperately trying to hold out against the vastly superior Confederate forces, but he was from the South and saw his actions as having nothing to do with slavery. Captain Doubleday was an abolitionist and he saw that the motive for the attack was the preservation of slavery.
Doubleday would later write that Major Anderson “could not read the signs of the times, and see that the conscience of the nation and the progress of civilization had already doomed slavery to destruction.” Doubleday thought that Anderson saw himself “more like an arbiter between two contending nations than a simple soldier engaged in carrying out the instructions of his superiors.”
Doubleday carried out all the commands of Major Anderson, but he had hoped that during the months-long siege of Fort Sumter that he had been commanded to open fire on the Confederates especially after the Confederates had opened fire on Federal forces. He wrote;
“In amplifying his instructions not to provoke a collision into instructions not to fight at all, I have no doubt he thought he was rendering a real service to the country…He knew the first shot fired by us would light the flames of a civil war that would convulse the world, and tried to put off the evil day as long as possible. Yet a better analysis of the situation might have taught him that the contest had already commenced, and could no longer be avoided.”
On April 12, 1861 the Confederates opened fire on Fort Sumter, setting off the Civil War. Doubleday returned fire. Doubleday wrote that “In aiming the first gun fired against the rebellion I had no feeling of self-reproach, for I fully believed that the contest was inevitable, and was not of our seeking…The only alternative was to submit to a powerful oligarchy who were determined to make freedom forever subordinate to slavery.”
Doubleday does not have a statue a statue in Cooperstown, but he is honored with a baseball field, Doubleday Field.
The field was built by the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression in 1938 and 1939. The field had been used for baseball since 1920, and a wooden grandstand was built in 1924. The steel and concrete stadium was built by the WPA to give Cooperstown its own 9,000 seat stadium. In 1940, the major leagues started playing the Hall of Fame Game at Doubleday Field in which professional teams played one another for the benefit of the Hall of Fame. The games ended in 2008, and now an old-timers game is played.
During the summer, hardly a day goes by without baseball being played here. Most of those playing are amateurs from six years old to sixty. So many people want to play here that it is constantly in demand. Just stop by on this “first ever” baseball field. While it was not the first ever field, it has had more games played here than any other field I know of.
While many Civil War veterans were honored with statues, monuments, and the names of parts of battlefields, it is nice to have a place of sport named after one of the war’s generals.
If you take children to the park, don’t just talk to them about the Civil War and baseball, also include the work of people of the 1930s during the Great Depression to help create the world we live in.
I have attended many games on this field.
Outside the park is a boy getting ready to bat in a sand-lot game.
There is a good history of Doubleday Field at the entrance.
Here is a closeup.
After you tour the Baseball Hall of Fame and Doubleday Field as well as other sites, there are a number of cafes and pubs where you can get “baseball food” nearby. I like to stop by the Otesaga Resort on the lake for lunch. It is quite expensive for dinner, but the cost is more reasonable for lunch.
If you have some time, go 40 minutes south to Oneonta where you can get Cornell Chicken at Brooks Bar-B-Q. This is not a Southern-style barbeque, it makes the Central New York style chicken that seems to be unknown to people outside the region. The inventor was Dr. Baker who later taught at Cornell. He is best know for the invention of the Chicken McNugget, but the Cornell Chicken is just so much better. Brooks is an award-winning restaurant. It offers ribs, brisket, salmon, and sausages, but chicken is its forte.
You pick your meat and you get included an unlimited amount of visits to the buffet table that includes salad, soup, hushpuppies, potatoes, pastas, and many other foods. The price includes soda, coffee, iced tea and iced coffee, and ice cream. Below is my half-chicken.
My sister and my nephew, Pat, are across from me. Neither lives in Oneonta, but both love going to Brooks.
If you go to Cooperstown, I would avoid going on Summer weekends. There are often twenty times as many tourists as residents in the town. Go in the off-season or on a weekday. This way you can enjoy the ambiance of this two century old town.
Note: All color photos in this post were taken by Patrick Young except as noted.
Sources:
Larson, Erik. The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War
Doubleday, Abner. My Life in the Old Army: The Reminiscences of Abner Doubleday
Follow Reconstruction Blog on Social Media:
