Sylvea Hollis | "The Black Man Almost Has Disappeared From Our Country": African American Workers in Cooperstown, New York, 1860–1900 | New York History, 88.1

"The Black Man Almost Has Disappeared From Our Country":
African American Workers in Cooperstown, New York, 1860–1900

Sylvea Hollis, Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, Birmingham, Alabama

The first African Americans came to the Otsego Lake region of upstate New York while serving as soldiers in the French and Indian War. A few decades later William Cooper, the founder of Cooperstown, brought slaves to work in his new village. By 1827, when the State of New York granted emancipation, the roughly two dozen African Africans in the area were free servants, who continued to work in the positions to which they were accustomed, agricultural and service-oriented labor. They and their descendants were joined by migrants from the South and other Northern states in the wake of the Civil War. Yet by the early twentieth century nearly all of Cooperstown's African American residents had either died or moved on. As James Fenimore Cooper, the grandson of the famous novelist, observed in 1921: "The Black man almost has disappeared from our country; where once he filled an important place."¹

The demand for labor brought all of these men and women to Cooperstown—enslaved, free, and recently freed; skilled and unskilled; from the North, the South and the West Indies—and ultimately compelled most to migrate elsewhere. This essay focuses on the years 1860–1900, when a total of 170 African Americans can be identified as living in the village.² It was during these four decades that the black population at first grew to its largest size and held the greatest variety of jobs, but by century's end declined to only a handful of residents with almost no representation in the local labor market.

African Americans have received mainly anecdotal attention in historical accounts of the village, county, and region in the years after the Civil War.³ More recently, two community studies have looked at black life in small towns in other parts of New York State. Kathryn Grover, in Make a Way Somehow: African American Life in a Northern Community, 1790–1965, describes how blacks living in Geneva, New York, were able to sustain themselves by understanding the perspectives, assumptions, and expectations of the local white population.⁴ Finding an important niche in service jobs, they worked as a community to establish churches, clubs, and other organizations. Myra B. Young Armstead's Lord, Please Don't Take Me in August records how in the resort town of Saratoga Springs, New York, African Americans embraced group solidarity as a survival and self-advancement technique to counter discrimination.⁵ Like the community that emerged from the Geneva experience, this population created a strong institutional foundation from which to grow.

A similar process of community building never took place in Cooperstown. During a time when the ideologies of racial solidarity and self-help were prevalent throughout African American society, local blacks did not create lasting institutions. In the end, the attraction that impelled African Americans to move to large Northern urban centers and labor markets also had the effect of depopulating small black communities in the North—communities like Cooperstown's that had persisted for over a century, through slavery, Northern emancipation, and even civil war.

Central Hotel Staff, c. 1890. Smith and Telfer Collection, Fenimore Art Museum, New York State Historical Association, Cooperstown, New York.

Hotel Workers

A photograph of seven well-dressed African American men captures much of the story of black employment in Cooperstown during the Gilded Age. To have a professional portrait taken at that time was a special treat, and the young men's appearance and expressions call to mind words like poised and proud. But the history behind the photograph has been lost, and the men's names and the details of their lives in the village have vanished. All that remains is the small inscription on the back of the print, "Central Hotel Staff."

At the same time that tens of thousands of African Americans were venturing North with hopes of greater job opportunities and freedom, Cooperstown was establishing itself as a resort town. Soon after the war's end, a number of freedmen and women found themselves working at local hotels in primarily seasonal positions. The village's largest hotels opened during the war and Reconstruction years: the Central Hotel (1862), Otsego House (1868), Cooper House (1869), and Fenimore Hotel (1873). Upstate New York was quickly becoming a major vacation area, with Saratoga Springs offering the largest clustering of hotels and leisure activities. Cooperstown's appeal to tourists, meanwhile, rested mostly on the legacy of its "great American novelist," James Fenimore Cooper, and his romantic descriptions of the lake, the village, and the surrounding region.⁶

From 1860 to 1900, a total of fifty African Americans were employed by the village's hotels, representing close to one-third of Cooperstown's entire black population during the period. Nearly half of these workers were from the South. The largest increase occurred between 1865 and 1870, when the number of black employees grew from zero to twenty-eight.⁷

A brief tour of Cooperstown's hotels from a guest's perspective illustrates the important presence of African Americans in the growing resort economy. Upon pulling onto the grounds of the Cooper House, for example, visitors were first greeted by one of the hotel's hostlers, many of whom were black. Hostlers took care of horses and hotel liveries; they often dressed in style and stood in front of the hotels that employed them, waiting for guests to arrive in coaches and carriages.⁸ A circular from the Cooper House boasts of its "superior stabling accommodations ... the stalls are well ventilated, and the best attention will be given to private horses and carriages. Carriage and Saddle Horses can be supplied at all times."⁹ James Derrick, a native of Cooperstown, was a twenty-two-year-old African American hostler at the Central Hotel. Prior to working there, Derrick had been a farm laborer.¹⁰

After being met by the hostler, a porter would then come and lead the visitors inside and take their belongings to their rooms. Porters were also used in "forwarding" or shipping patrons' luggage. Porters of both types were often black. In 1870 Augustus Derrick, the brother of James, was twenty-seven years old and working at the Cooper House.¹¹ Bellboys also assisted guests with their baggage and provided special room service attention. Hotel advertisements typically boasted of having electric bells in rooms, giving visitors access to service with the touch of a finger. Eddie E. Jones of Georgia was a twenty-year-old bellboy at the Cooper House Hotel.¹² Typical of newcomers from the South, he came alone with no other relatives in the area.

The public and private spaces of these hotels, meanwhile, were very well defined. The Central, Cooper House, and Fenimore described themselves as places for "first class patronage." As a result, there were certain aspects of daily work that patrons were not supposed to encounter. Women mostly worked in these areas. Though the majority of hotel workers were men, women participated by usually doing the less desirable tasks and dealt directly with the paying public less often than black men. As a laundress at the Cooper House Hotel, for example, twenty-five-year-old Helen Emory from Maryland probably had no direct contact with hotel guests and therefore fewer opportunities for tips. The design and architectural layout of the buildings provided boundaries for certain duties. The laundry rooms were separate facilities, and bellboys carted the fresh laundry to customers. In the kitchen, cooks like Lydia C. Parker at the Empire House Hotel handed the meals they prepared to waiters, who in turn took them to the tables.¹³

Waiters were the elite of the African American hotel staff, enjoying the greatest interaction with patrons and the best earnings. They worked primarily in the dining rooms and provided additional service if the hotel were at full occupancy. While little has survived to detail the waiters' work culture in Cooperstown, Armstead's research in Saratoga Springs is instructive. At Saratoga's United States Hotel, for example, there were three prized positions for African American waiters, with the major determining factor being previous experience. Once hired, first-timers only needed to prove themselves capable and eager at their assigned tasks in order to be rehired the following season and begin the ascent to the coveted positions of side waiter (serving special side orders), second waiter (just under headwaiter), and ultimately, headwaiter. A system like this may well have existed in Cooperstown. Unlike Cooperstown, however, some Saratoga hotels also gave their African American staff managerial positions and in doing so, a voice in the hiring process. These employees held monopolies over certain positions, and headwaiters held face-to-face interviews with potential applicants. It is unlikely that Cooperstown's black waiters were permitted the same voice. The retention rate from season to season for African American hotel workers was low in the village, and it was probably for this reason that blacks did not hold much status in any of their respective positions.¹⁴

All of these workers, whether waiters or laundresses, boarded in housing located either in or near the hotels, as lodging was provided to virtually all seasonal employees. A study of the Cooper House staff in 1870 shows that nearly all of the African American men were boarding on the hotel property. In the forty years from 1860 to 1900, only two of the black men working in hotels lived with spouses; and in only a couple of cases were there single parents living with their children. In effect, these men and women were both visitors and workers in the area. Though they may have benefited in the short term from the social nature and support of working and living together, the transient and segregated nature of their experiences served as an obstacle to their permanent residency in the area, preventing the creation of a community such as grew up in Geneva and Saratoga.¹⁵

A string of devastating hotel fires in the late 1880s through the early 1900s did not help matters, as the local tourism industry never fully recovered (until its resurgence in the later 20^th century, by which time large hotels had given way to motels as the predominant form of lodging). By 1900 only one African American hotel worker remained. He was Frank Quail, a twenty-year-old from Virginia, who worked as a bellboy in the Ballard House on Main Street. His colleagues by century's end were either first-generation European immigrants or native-born whites from New York, many of whom were women working as waitresses, an important new development in the hotels' staffing.¹⁶ This increased hiring of white staff marked the end of meaningful and expanding African American employment in the area.

Domestic Servants

Black domestic servants performed many of the same tasks as Cooperstown's hotel workers. But their relationships to the village and their employers were often more enduring and complicated. This is most poignantly seen in the experience of Betsey Stockton, who was born a slave in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1798. Stockton lived in Cooperstown for only five years, when she worked for the Stewart Family in the 1830s. She went on to have a remarkable career as a teacher, missionary, and community leader in New Jersey over the next three decades. But the personal connections she made to the Stewarts, especially with the dying mother she cared for and the three surviving children, were very strong, and it was Stockton's wish to be buried in the family's cemetery plot. Her funeral was held in Princeton at the black church she helped found, but her body was laid to rest in Cooperstown's Lakewood Cemetery.¹⁷

From 1860 to 1900, a total of twenty-five African Americans worked as domestics in the homes of white families. Most were like Betsey Stockton, Northern-born and over twenty-one years of age.¹⁸ These women were sometimes assisted by their children. Thomas Husbands, for example, worked with his mother in the Prentiss home. This was usually viewed as a last resort, however, as Reconstruction-era black families struggled to keep their sons and daughters in school and thus to avoid committing them to a life of drudgery and manual labor.¹⁹

Betsey Stockton, c. 1860. Harriet and C.S. Stewart Collection, Special Collections, New York State Historical Association, Cooperstown, New York.

As seen in the case of the hotel workers, housing accommodations as well as wages appealed to domestic servants, and many employers required live-in residence. For those servants with families, the occupation provided them with resources like hand-me-down clothing. Some domestics in affluent homes also stole items from their employers to support their families and extended communities. Jenny York was a domestic in the home of Samuel Nelson, a justice of the United States Supreme Court. She was known to be a good cook and it is reported that she would take food items from Nelson's kitchen to share with the other servants and their families.²⁰

This photograph of the Prentiss home includes the family and an unknown servant behind the house gate. Florence Peaslee Ward Collection, Special Collections, New York State Historical Association, Cooperstown, New York.

Black servants found jobs in the homes of several of Cooperstown's prominent bankers, lawyers, jewelers, merchants, and farmers. These houses were often impressive, with architectural designs that emphasized class barriers between the employers and their hired help. Back entrances and stairways, bedrooms tucked away in the rear portions of houses and attics, and service areas partitioned from living quarters by halls, pantries, and doors allowed servants to travel inconspicuously from cellar to attic and to enter and leave a house unseen. The Prentiss Family home, located at 16 Main Street, had an upstairs wine cellar that quite possibly led to an attic room for their domestic servant. The home had a large brick oven for cooking, a smokehouse, garden, stable, fireplaces in each room, and a cistern for rainwater. The domestic could move inconspicuously throughout the home in her daily work of servicing the chamber pots, preparing meals, and doing the home's general cleaning.²¹

Domestic servants in these homes faced personal scrutiny from their employers, whose paternalistic treatment more often fostered dependency than the friendship and intimacy Betsey Stockton enjoyed with the Stewart Family. At the most basic level, Victorian-era employers, typically the lady of the house, closely monitored how their African American servants dressed and behaved both in and outside of the home. Ironically, many black women took jobs to be able to gain independence and to support their families and themselves. Teenaged women especially saw servant work as an opportunity to be on their own. However, this autonomy gave way over time to dependence upon employers, often for the rest of the women's natural lives. In some cases, homes were provided to the servants at the end of their tenure. A woman referred to as "Old Mammy" was given a house in appreciation for service as a cook in the home of John M. Bowers at "Lakelands." Her home was described as being "a little yellow house 'up the road'" where she spent her declining years. Often these servants were either supported by their employers until death or became paupers.²²

One other critical aspect of their working lives that local domestic servants shared with hotel workers was the increased hiring of white help in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Once symbols of status and wealth in the Northeast, African American domestics in the wake of the Civil War found their positions now filled by European immigrants. In Cooperstown, Irish newcomers in particular became overwhelmingly visible in the homes of middle- and upper-class families.

Day Laborers

The backgrounds of black day laborers corresponded closely to those of the domestic servants of the village, both in terms of local origins and family ties. Joseph Thomas Husbands, the most widely known and depicted African American in Cooperstown's history, was a laborer in the area for his entire adult life. Commonly known as "Joe Tom," he was born a slave in 1808 in Bridgetown, Barbados, on the estate of Joseph Dottin Husbands, the British Colonial Secretary for the island. Joe Tom and his parents, Mary Best and Thomas Skinner, were brought to the Cooperstown area in 1815, where they were given their freedom. Over the next six decades, Husbands performed innumerable jobs and services for his white neighbors.²³

From 1860 to 1900 a total of seventeen African Americans were recorded as laborers in Cooperstown, with Joe Tom regularly listed among them. All of these workers were men, and all grew up in New York State. Eleven worked on farms, five were day laborers without specific employers, and one was a teamster. Most had family members in the area and were long-time residents. Twelve of the seventeen were related to at least one other laborer, and eleven lived in the village for more than a decade. This compares to only three of the fifty hotel workers from the same period.²⁴

These men acquired jobs "catch as catch can," committing themselves to work on virtually any project, any time of day, anywhere. A criticism of Joe Tom Husbands was that he often overcommitted himself. Local historian George Pomeroy Keese recalls: "[T]hat [Husbands] was unreliable is true, but rather from promising more than he could accomplish than from incapacity."²⁵ The seasonal nature of the work additionally played a role in these workers' ability to balance their availability with their skills. The summer and fall months perhaps were the more lucrative because of the variety of jobs provided by the tourism industry. Joe Tom Husbands was the most visible summer laborer, but there were additional duties of the season that needed more workers. For example, James Lucus, a thirty-nine-year-old teamster, could have been one of the men who spent time working on the plank roads outside of Cooperstown.²⁶

Joseph Tom Husbands, c. 1880. Florence Peaslee Ward Collection, Special Collections, New York State Historical Association, Cooperstown, New York.

The wives and other female relatives of laborers were mainly employed as domestics and laundresses. Their families lived in either boarding houses or rented apartments and homes. Day laborers' households tended to be shared living spaces, because their incomes were often inconsistent. The home that Madison Burhanse grew up in was fairly typical. In 1875 he and his father were both laborers, his older brother was a gardener, and his mother was probably a housekeeper. They lived in a wooden framed structure with another family, ten people in all. In 1880, Madison's occupation was distinctively listed as "farm work," and his younger brother had also become a laborer. An African American barber in the village had also moved in with them.²⁷

Portrait of Joe Tom Husbands, date unknown. Fenimore Art Museum, New York State Historical Association, Cooperstown, New York.

It was beneficial for an unskilled worker to be ever resourceful, and day laborers often specialized and established trademark jobs for themselves. In many respects Joe Tom Husbands was a self-employed entrepreneur, using his relationships in the village to maintain a livelihood, and his activities were vividly recounted by villagers. He worked as a boatman and guide for many lake excursions, and was often seen rowing the village's most prominent citizens and visitors down the length of Otsego Lake. For parties, he cooked the meals and entertained groups by playing fiddle and triangle and whistling. He also performed at village dances and on the steamer, the Natty Bumppo. On Sunday mornings, Husbands fulfilled his duties as sexton at Christ Episcopal Church. He was appointed sexton in 1837, paid a salary of fifteen dollars, and served in that capacity until 1860. Ralph Birdsall, former Rector of Christ Church relates: "Joe Tom, arrayed in Sunday finery, was a familiar figure to churchgoers, as he stood in the church porch tolling the bell with measured stroke, and inclining his woolly head with each motion to the entrance of every worshipper." Husbands died on October 1, 1881, at the age of seventy-three. A villager claimed that he "was the very soul of music, would hardly have been satisfied with a service in which not a key was struck, or note raised for one who had so often tuned his harp for others."²⁸

These patronizing comments from white neighbors suggest a critical aspect of African American life in Cooperstown. The villagers had come to know Husbands as an able and ready worker, but assigned him to a condition that prohibited him from advancing any further. In their caricatured remembrances of "Joe Tom," he was the childless (despite his having seven children to support), obedient servant, always gleeful. Contemporary African American poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar best expressed the true pain of Husbands's life: "Why should the world be over wise, / in counting all our tears and sighs? / Nay, let them only see us, while / we wear the mask."²⁹ Joe Tom and the seventeen other African American day laborers working in Cooperstown certainly wore masks to sustain themselves. To obtain steady work, they needed to be well-liked and trusted in the community. They needed to possess, as stated in Husbands's obituary, "a uniform politeness and willingness to serve in any capacity."³⁰

Frank Clark, c. 1867–1868. Smith and Telfer Collection, Fenimore Art Museum, New York State Historical Association, Cooperstown, New York.

Tradesmen

In 1872 the village directory of Cooperstown ran the name "FRANK CLARK" in all capital letters, listing him as a "Hair Dresser" with a shop located in the Iron Clad Building, at the time the most modern structure on Main Street. Frank Clark was born a slave in Alabama. He escaped bondage during the Civil War, joined the United States Navy, and served on the ironclad steamer Galena. The means by which he came to Cooperstown after the war are unknown, but he worked as a barber in the village until his death in 1896. In his obituary, the local newspaper described Clark as "a colored man who was well liked" and recognized his more than thirty years of working in the community.³¹

Clark's occupation was probably the most prized among black residents in the village. As historian Douglas Bristol has observed, "the most successful African American businessmen in the nineteenth century" were barbers. The fact that Clark was able to remain in Cooperstown with the same occupation during a time when his peers were struggling to find consistent work and define a place for themselves in the community further illustrates the lucrative business situation he had established for himself.³²

Frank Clark was in fact one of only eight African American tradesmen and skilled workers in Cooperstown between 1860 and 1900. Of these men, six were barbers: three had migrated from the South, two were from New York, and one was from New Jersey. Aside from barbers, the remaining skilled workers were New York-born Henry Williams, a harness maker, and George Sunday of Pennsylvania, a blacksmith.

Critical to their success was the apprenticeship process that each man had to undergo. To become barbers, young apprentices typically lived and worked with established tradesmen for several years. In return, the "elder" barbers received "inexpensive help in their shops" and "maintained high levels of skill within the trade and limited competition." In 1855 barber Owen Williams had the young apprentice John Williams residing with him. These tradesmen often brought their relatives into the field, and it seems likely that John was either Owen's son or a relative. By 1860, Williams had moved his family to Oneonta and his young apprentice remained to barber in Cooperstown. George Sunday and John Williams, the two tradesmen who were not barbers, also probably learned their crafts through apprenticeships, though their master tradesmen are unknown.³³

The skilled workers who had migrated to New York first settled in hotels and next in boarding houses. William Southward, Frank Clark, and George Sunday all lived in hotels when they first came to Cooperstown. Black tradesmen from the area, meanwhile, were perhaps in the best position to own property and build on their trade. Harness maker Henry Williams, for example, was described by James Fenimore Cooper's grandson as "an aristocrat among his people—tall, straight, and handsome; he hunted with the white sportsmen of the village."³⁴

Skilled work provided a more secure home and family environment than any other type of occupation for African Americans in Cooperstown.³⁵ In their homes, most of these workers were the heads of households and were able to keep their nuclear families intact. Four of the tradesmen's wives did not have to work outside of the house to support their families, in stark contrast to the spouses of hotel workers and day laborers. Jane Williams, Mary Tabout, and Mary Jackson all kept house and took care of their children, while Charlotte Medley had no occupation listed.³⁶ Perhaps most significant is the fact that the children of tradesmen were able to continue their education into their teens. George Sunday's two daughters, aged fourteen and seven, were both attending school in 1870, as were Henry Williams's fifteen- and eight-year-old sons a decade later. These children were able to attend school when most of their peers were working as domestics, servants, and laborers.³⁷

These advantages, however, did not exempt these youth from the racial attitudes of upstate New York at the time, which served as constant reminders to the children of their limited status and social position. John Jackson, Jr. carried his insecurities within him even on the playground. One of his white childhood friends recalls: "there played with us a little black boy, Johnnie Jackson, who felt his color so much that he used to say that if it would make him white, he could willingly be skinned alive." The day-to-day experiences of this child and his peers undoubtedly fostered an unhealthy concept of his identity. He obviously felt powerless because of his color.³⁸

Perhaps this, even more than the attraction of better job opportunities elsewhere, was the major reason why the numbers of skilled workers never grew in Cooperstown. Local African-American tradesmen left no apprentices to follow in their footsteps. Henry Williams and George Sunday both had sons, but neither pursued their fathers' crafts in Cooperstown. In 1896, the same year as Frank Clark's death, white barbers in the Journeyman Barbers' International Union of America started a campaign to "secure the passage of state licensing laws that allowed union members to exclude African Americans from the trade."³⁹ It is possible that there was similar sentiment in Cooperstown. As a result of the difficulties with licensing and the growing racial preferences of their white patrons, African American barbers had to rely more and more on a strictly black clientele, and Cooperstown did not have the numbers to sustain businesses that only catered to this group. Significantly, after Frank Clark's death, the furniture and fixtures of his barbershop were purchased by Schuyler M. Hunter, a white barber.⁴⁰

On any given summer day during his long working career, Frank Clark could see from the vantage point of his Main Street shop a diversity in Cooperstown's black population that has long since been forgotten. Passing by his business were the waiters, porters, and laundresses who staffed the village hotels, the domestics who cleaned and cooked in the cottages and town homes on River Street, and the day laborers who searched for odd jobs. As a native Alabaman who had migrated North and whose parents were from North Carolina and Maryland, Clark would have been able to recognize their accents and origins, and as a successful barber he probably knew many of their personal stories and aspirations.

Whether Clark participated in an effort to form a local African American church or school or fraternal order is not known. As seen in other small black communities in New York State during the period, institutions like these could have provided local workers with a center for discussion, support, and action, as well as a source of a stronger sense of identity.⁴¹ But even in the Reconstruction years when the local black population was largest, its transient core of workers employed at a small number of hotels made community-building difficult. And while there does not seem to be evidence of overt racial violence or repression, African Americans remained segregated in workplaces that were increasingly hiring white employees. Though the village's schools, housing, and churches were racially integrated, the black 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.

Only the few African Americans who had been able to secure a place for themselves in the area, men like Frank Clark and Joseph Thomas Husbands, remained through the last decades of the nineteenth century. Significantly, when both men passed away, there were few black residents still present to attend their funerals. Their friends, colleagues, and descendants had left to find job niches and more supportive communities and neighborhoods elsewhere, and the small black population of Cooperstown, which originated in the days of Northern slavery, was no more.

^1.� James Fenimore Cooper, The Legends and Traditions of a Northern County (New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1921), 98.

^2.� The remaining black residents were mostly children and a few paupers. From 1860, 1870, 1880, and 1900 U.S. Census, Village of Cooperstown, Town of Otsego, County of Otsego; and 1865, 1875, 1892 N.Y. State Census, Village of Cooperstown, Town of Otsego, County of Otsego.

^3.� Two notable exceptions are: William Crowley, "Black Images: A Catalog of Photographs of Blacks in the Smith-Telfer Collection," (unpublished paper, State University of New York at Oneonta, 1974), 9; and "African Americans in the Census," compiled by Hugh MacDougall, accessed March 30, 2006, http://www.rootsweb.com/~nyotsego/aacensus/aacensus.htm. During the period before slavery was abolished in the North, New York held more slaves than any other Northern state. For useful studies of slavery and abolition in the state and Northeast, see Myra B. Young Armstead, ed., Mighty Change, Tall Within: Black Identity in the Hudson Valley (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003); Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790–1860 (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1961); Edgar J. McManus, A History of Negro Slavery in New York (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1966) and Black Bondage in the North (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1973); and Arthur Zilversmit, The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1967).

^4.� Kathryn Grover, Make a Way Somehow: African American Life in a Northern Community, 1790–1965 (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1994).

^5.� Myra B. Young Armstead, Lord, Please Don't Take Me in August: African Americans in Newport and Saratoga Springs, 1879–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999).

^6.� Ibid., 13, 36. In addition to his novels, Cooper wrote The Chronicles of Cooperstown in 1838. Printings of this and other histories usually included a paragraph or chapter devoted to tourists. Heidi Hill, "Attractions of Cooperstown and Otsego Lake, 1870–1900" (master's thesis., State University of New York at Oneonta, 1993), 1.

^7.� 1860, 1870, 1880, 1890, 1900 U.S. Census, Village of Cooperstown; and 1865, 1870, 1892 N.Y. State Census, Village of Cooperstown.

^8.� Grover, Make a Way Somehow, 33.

^9.� "Cooper House Circular," (Cooperstown, N.Y.: 1881), Special Collections, New York State Historical Association (hereafter NYSHA) Library, Cooperstown, N.Y.

^10.� 1865 N.Y. State Census, Village of Burlington, County of Otsego, Schedule I, 22.

^11.� Grover, Make a Way Somehow, 24; 1855 N.Y. State Census, Village of Cooperstown, Schedule I, 108; and 1870 U.S. Census, Village of Cooperstown, Schedule I, 42.

^12.� 1880 U.S. Census, Village of Cooperstown, Schedule I, 43.

^13.� Armstead, Lord, Please Don't Take Me, 70–71.

^14.� Census materials for the period do not list any African Americans holding managerial occupations in the hotels such as clerk or proprietor's assistant. 1860–1900 U.S. Censuses, Village of Cooperstown; and 1865, 1870, 1892 N.Y. State Census, Village of Cooperstown.

^15.� Ibid., 35; 1870 U.S. Census, Village of Cooperstown, Schedule I, 44 and 48; 1880 U.S. Census, Village of Cooperstown, Schedule I, 36; and 1860 U.S. Census, Village of Cooperstown, Schedule I, 78.

^16.� 1900 U.S. Census, Village of Cooperstown, Schedule I, 9; Freeman's Journal, Aug. 14, 1891; Lorenzo Greene and Carter G. Woodson, The Negro Wage Earner (New York: AMS Press, 1970), 94; and 1900 U.S. Census, Village of Cooperstown, Schedule I, 9.

^17.� Constance Escher, "She Calls Herself Betsey Stockton," Princeton Journal 10, (1991), 76, 80, 86; and Thomas E. French, The Missionary Whaleship (New York: Vantage Press, 1961), 112.

^18.� Sixty percent of domestic servants were from the North. 1860, 1870, 1880, and 1900 U.S. Census, Village of Cooperstown; and 1865, 1875, 1892 N.Y. State Census, Village of Cooperstown.

^19.� Greene and Woodson, Negro Wage Earner, 58.

^20.� Daniel Sutherland, Americans and Their Domestic Servants in the United States, 1800–1925 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 27, 69, 112; and Ralph Birdsall, Story of Cooperstown (Cooperstown, N.Y.: Freeman's Journal, 1954), 304.

^21.� 1860, 1870, 1880, and 1900 U.S. Census, Village of Cooperstown; and 1865, 1875, 1892 N.Y. State Census, Village of Cooperstown; Sutherland, Americans and Their Domestic Servants, 30; and Florence Peaslee Ward Local History Collection, 16 Main Street File, (1915), 303.

^22.� Ibid., 196; Freeman's Journal, Nov. 25, 1871; and Charlotte Prentiss Browning, Full Harvest (Philadelphia, Pa.: Dorrance and Company, 1937), 197.

^23.� Gertrude Deavenport, "A History of the Miller and Husbands Families," unpublished manuscript, 1939, NYSHA. Joe Tom was named for Thomas Skinner and Joseph Dottin Husbands. See Jerome S. Handler and JoAnn Jacoby, "Slave Names and Naming in Barbados, 1650–1830," William and Mary Quarterly 53 (1996): 726.

^24.� The three hotel workers were from New York and were all documented as laborers at some point during their working careers. 1860, 1870, 1880, and 1900 U.S. Census, Village of Cooperstown; and 1865, 1875, 1892 N.Y. State Census, Village of Cooperstown.

^25.� George Pomeroy Keese, A Few Omitted Leaves of Cooperstown (Cooperstown, N.Y.: Freeman's Journal, 1918), 9.

^26.� Ibid., 13; and 1892 N.Y. State Census, Village of Cooperstown, Schedule I, Second Election District, 3.

^27.� 1875 N.Y. State Census, Village of Cooperstown, Schedule I, 48; and 1880 U.S. Census, Village of Cooperstown, Schedule I, 6.

^28.� Keese, Omitted Leaves of Cooperstown, 9; Browning, Full Harvest, 129; Samuel Shaw, History of Cooperstown, 1839–1885 (Cooperstown, N.Y.: Freeman's Journal, 1929), 63, 64; Letter from Joseph Hutchins to Joseph Dottin Husbands, April 24, 1824, Husbands-Clarke Papers, NYSHA; George Pomeroy Keese, Christ Church Records (Cooperstown, N.Y.: S. M. Shaw., 1899), 15; Handler and Jacoby, "Slave Names and Naming in Barbados," 726; 1865 N.Y. State Census, Village of Cooperstown, Schedule I, 23; and Birdsall, History of Cooperstown, 333, 334.

^29.� The University of Dayton's "Paul Lawrence Dunbar" site, accessed on Nov. 30, 2005, http://www.dunbarsite.org/gallery/WeWearTheMask.asp.

^30.�Freeman's Journal, Oct. 8, 1881.

^31.� The name of his former master and specific location of plantation are not known, only that Clark was born in Alabama and remained there during the early years of his life. His mother was from North Carolina and his father from Maryland. Clark served in the Navy from October 1864 to July 1865 with the rank of Landsman. 1880 U.S. Census, Village of Cooperstown, Schedule I, 20; and 1890 United States Veterans Schedule, Village of Cooperstown, Dwelling 168; Freeman's Journal, Jan. 30 and Feb. 13, 1896; and Otsego County Court House, Surrogates Court, Letters of Administration, No. 11, 368.

^32.� Douglas Bristol, "From Outposts to Enclaves: A Social History of Black Barbers from 1750 to 1915," Enterprise & Society 5 (2004), 594. Clark and fellow barber John Jackson were the only African Americans listed in the 1872 Cooperstown village directory.

^33.� Bristol, "From Outposts to Enclaves," 600; and 1880 U.S. Census, Village of Cooperstown, Schedule I, 20, 21.

^34.� Cooper, Legends and Traditions of a Northern County, 101.

^35.� These men had greater disposable incomes than their unskilled peers. From 1860 to 1900, three of the six African Americans who held personal property with a nominative wealth attached were skilled workers, with property ranging from one hundred and fifty to seven hundred dollars. 1870 U.S. Census, Village of Cooperstown, Schedule I, 48; 1865 N.Y. State Census, Village of Cooperstown, Schedule I, 9; and 1875 N.Y. State Census, Village of Cooperstown, Schedule I, 48.

^36.� 1860 U.S. Census, Village of Cooperstown, Schedule I, 5, 10, 88; 1865 N.Y. State Census, Village of Cooperstown, Schedule I, 42; 1870 U.S. Census, Village of Cooperstown, Schedule I, 4, 10; and 1860 U.S. Census, Village of Middlefield, County of Otsego, Schedule I, 28.

^37.� 1880 U.S. Census, Village of Cooperstown, Schedule, 1, 5; and 1870 U.S. Census, Village of Cooperstown, Schedule 1, 32.

^38.� John Jackson went on to become a fairly popular baseball player, but was traded around too much to establish himself in any town. He died impoverished in the home of his sister. Utica Observer-Dispatch, July 25, 1987. Armstead, Lord, Please Don't Take Me, 27–28, 34, 128, 139; Grover, Make A Way Somehow, 185, 251–52; and Cooper, Legends and Traditions of a Northern County, 101.

^39.� Bristol, "From Outposts to Enclaves," 605.

^40.�Freeman's Journal, March 29, 1901.

^41.� Black residents in the neighboring county of Schoharie, for example, supported an African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church and a school. Attempts were made to organize in Cooperstown, though significantly only before and during the Civil War. In each of the 1840, 1841, and 1864 Conventions of Colored Men, a delegate was sent from the village.