Eight Real Photo Postcards Likely from the James Fenimore Cooper Sesquicentennial Celebration, Cooperstown, New York
- Eight postcards: one 3 ½ x 8 inch and seven 3 ½ x 5 ½ inch. All with Brown Brothers stamps and captions verso
- Cooperstown, New York , 1940
Cooperstown, New York, 1940. Eight postcards: one 3 ½ x 8 inch and seven 3 ½ x 5 ½ inch. All with Brown Brothers stamps and captions verso. Some chipping at edges, some with corners missing; overall very good to excellent.. James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) was an American author from Cooperstown, New York - the town was named for his father, William Cooper, who founded it in 1786. Fenimore Cooper wrote numerous novels, short stories, and works of non-fiction and political writing; he is probably now best known for his 1826 novel The Last of the Mohicans.
Offered here are eight postcards relating to Fenimore Cooper and Cooperstown. Three of them are captioned verso “Pageant at Cooperstown”, making it likely that the photographs are from Cooperstown’s James Fenimore Cooper Sesquicentennial Celebration in August and September of 1940. This celebration commemorated Fenimore Cooper’s arrival in Cooperstown as a one-year-old child in 1790, and included a pageant that re-enacted the history of Cooperstown and the Cooper family. The pageant photos show actors dressed as leather- and fur-clad pioneers, and others in war bonnets and loincloths. One photo, which appears to have been pasted together, shows an “Indian Hunter on Council rock as in Cooper’s tales” – Council Rock, which sits in Otsego lake, is claimed to have been an ancient Iroquois meeting point. Three photographs give various angles of the Leatherstockings monument in Lakewood Cemetery—not the statue of Fenimore Cooper by Victor Salvatore that was unveiled at the Sesquicentennial—and one is of the grave markers of Fenimore Cooper and his wife, Susan Augusta de Lancey, at Christ Church in Cooperstown.
Offered here are eight postcards relating to Fenimore Cooper and Cooperstown. Three of them are captioned verso “Pageant at Cooperstown”, making it likely that the photographs are from Cooperstown’s James Fenimore Cooper Sesquicentennial Celebration in August and September of 1940. This celebration commemorated Fenimore Cooper’s arrival in Cooperstown as a one-year-old child in 1790, and included a pageant that re-enacted the history of Cooperstown and the Cooper family. The pageant photos show actors dressed as leather- and fur-clad pioneers, and others in war bonnets and loincloths. One photo, which appears to have been pasted together, shows an “Indian Hunter on Council rock as in Cooper’s tales” – Council Rock, which sits in Otsego lake, is claimed to have been an ancient Iroquois meeting point. Three photographs give various angles of the Leatherstockings monument in Lakewood Cemetery—not the statue of Fenimore Cooper by Victor Salvatore that was unveiled at the Sesquicentennial—and one is of the grave markers of Fenimore Cooper and his wife, Susan Augusta de Lancey, at Christ Church in Cooperstown.