| Editors' Introduction | New York History, 88.1

Editors' Introduction

Since its incorporation in 1807, the small village of Cooperstown has evoked two iconic images of American life, one rooted in literature, the other in sport. James Fenimore Cooper based The Pioneers (1823), the first of his enormously successful Leatherstocking tales, on the community's earliest days, and well into the twentieth century the village was popularly identified as the heart of the Leatherstocking region. In the 1940s, the Baseball Hall of Fame began to eclipse Cooper's fictional wilderness, and Cooperstown became synonymous with the national pastime. Remarkably, the ways in which Americans have perceived their frontier past and commemorated their most popular forms of entertainment and recreation owe a great deal to a village whose population has never exceeded 3,000.	1
The authors of the following essays have also discovered great value in Cooperstown, in this case in the social, cultural, and material histories of its ordinary residents. Collectively, these essays address the long gap between the publication of Cooper's novels and the founding of the Hall of Fame. Covering the late antebellum years through to the Great Depression, they find the village to be a prime location for understanding the process of modernization that transformed the country as a whole. The authors document the changing roles of African Americans, women, and workers in the new industrializing economy; early instances of suburban development, mass consumerism, and car culture; and the new relationships ordinary citizens developed with their material possessions.	2
Perhaps as compelling as the content of these essays is their blend of research methodologies and strong sense of social purpose. All of the authors conducted their research while completing advanced degrees in History Museum Studies at the Cooperstown Graduate Program, a collaborative academic offering of the State University of New York College at Oneonta and the New York State Historical Association. The authors devote their attention not only to expanding academic interpretations of New York history, but also to improving the content and diversifying the approaches of historical societies, sites, and museums nationwide. Reflecting the scholarly demands of today, the essays work with the analytical categories of race, class, and gender. They utilize traditional source types, including diaries, census data, and oral history, but also draw evidence from material objects—ranging from streetscapes to sports cars to stained-glass windows—and popular representations in visual culture, language, and the media. While broadening the spectrum of people whose history they explore, the authors aim to make their subjects' personal stories, and the larger story of modernization and historical change, accessible to a wide audience.	3
Sylvea Hollis begins this larger discussion with her study of African American workers in Cooperstown during the late nineteenth century. African American slaves were among the first residents of the village, and until the Civil War they and their descendants continued to work as local farm hands and domestic servants. As Hollis describes, their pre-industrial forms of labor, as well as those of freed black men and women newly attracted from the South, were needed when Cooperstown quickly became a resort town after the war. But ultimately, she concludes, the population's "function as a service worker caste employed in hotels, private homes, and barbershops kept them from becoming fully a part of Cooperstown society." By the turn of the century, the combination of racial discrimination locally and the pull of better job opportunities and supportive neighborhoods in other parts of the country compelled nearly all of Cooperstown's African American residents to move away. Hollis' narrative rediscovers a forgotten black community in the area, while also illuminating how the hopes and failures of Reconstruction were played out in small towns throughout the North.	4
Amy Gundrum covers approximately the same time period in her analysis of Cooperstown's memorial stained-glass windows and the women who commissioned them. Even though these white, affluent women were among the most established residents in the village, their lives were severely circumscribed by the Victorian ideals of domesticity and proper Christian womanhood. Denied a voice in public affairs, they devoted their energies outside of the home to the charitable and organizational activities of their churches. Yet, as Gundrum narrates, the era's sentimentalism and highly ornamental tastes, together with the innovations in manufacturing and marketing of firms like Tiffany Studios, provided female church members with a medium of lasting public expression. Through stained-glass windows these women "memorialized their loved ones with physical monuments honoring family, piety and the domestic ideals of the era." They also anticipated a later generation's active participation in a range of social causes, including a woman's right to vote.	5
The next two essays in this collection document perhaps the most visible sign of the Gilded Age's sweeping changes: the development of much of Cooperstown's remaining farmland and forests into residential housing. Katherine Chaison describes how "dime novel king" Erastus F. Beadle, the village's other major figure in American popular literature, brought an entirely new type of home and neighborhood to Cooperstown. After selling millions of pulp novels and revolutionizing the mass market for genre fiction, Beadle sold off his business holdings and retired to his childhood home in the early 1880s. He purchased a large tract of village land and began to build homes and sell lots with a cohesive plan in mind. As Chaison observes, his vision exemplified the "suburban ideology" emerging throughout America as an anxious middle class sought security in a rapidly changing world. While suburbs typically sprang up adjacent to large cities, Beadle "straddled the urban and small town worlds and was in a unique position to mediate between them." Chaison concludes that Beadle's venture established "class-specific housing for middle-class residents in Cooperstown" who would "promote domesticity, family life, and moral behavior." Her study provides a fascinating early example in the history of suburbia.	6
New housing development was not solely defined by the tastes and anxieties of the rising bourgeoisie, however. As Kiernan Lannon describes, the village's "Irish Hill" neighborhood, located quite literally on the other side of the tracks, emerged at the same time as Beadle's development, both having been carved out of the holdings of the same former landowner. Through a close analysis of the years 1900–1910, Lannon finds that the residents of the Hill were a solidly working-class population. His use of both quantitative and material culture analysis provides a model for other local historians seeking to offer a more inclusive understanding of their communities. His research also complicates the present-day image of Cooperstown as a classless, "perfect village." Irish Hill, he concludes, "played home to a thriving working-class element, a group that in many instances made the lifestyle of the upper class possible."	7
This movement toward class stratification and distinctive communities within the village only grew more pronounced in the twentieth century, as new sources of wealth, employment, and people continued to reshape and modernize Cooperstown. John Emery wonderfully captures these changes—which, as he writes, "established big city institutions in this otherwise small place"—in his study of the local automobile market during the 1930s. "Cars of every price class were available in the village of fewer than 3,000 people," he writes. "Furthermore, consumers had a choice of brands at all levels, and local demand sustained this remarkable degree of availability." The area's "community of consumers" purchased and maintained cars even through the darkest period of the Great Depression. Emery finds the perspective of J. Harry Cook, a village car dealer, to be enormously valuable. Cook's sales record, along with interviews Emery conducted with local residents, reveal the relationships of people to their automobiles at the time. Cooperstown residents, like Americans nationwide, "now saw car ownership as essential to their lives," whether as a status symbol, a way to maintain the appearance of business stability, or for the desperately utilitarian purpose of keeping food on the table.	8
It was just as the Depression began to lift when the Baseball Hall of Fame opened its doors in Cooperstown. By that time, the village bore little if any resemblance to the frontier community depicted in James Fenimore Cooper's first Leatherstocking tale. To residents in 1939, The Pioneers' egalitarianism, rustic conditions, and cast of colorful characters, who had come by random paths to create a settlement on Otsego Lake, must have seemed as antiquated as the author's prose.	9
The essays that follow offer several distinct approaches to understanding this historical distance, between the worlds of Leatherstocking and Babe Ruth. We hope this research will spur renewed interest in the village and provide insight into the process of modernization as it was experienced by ordinary residents throughout the state, region, and country. But even more importantly, we hope these stories will inspire professional and non-academic historians alike to continue in their important work of serving the needs of their diverse communities. Cynthia G. Falk, Associate Professor of Material Culture Christopher M. Sterba, Assistant Professor of History Cooperstown Graduate Program, SUNY-Oneonta, Cooperstown, New York	10

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.