The Glimmerglass Historic District is notable not only for its remarkably intact 19th and early 20th century architecture clustered around the lake, but even more so because it was among the first national historic districts to recognize the singularly beautiful natural landscape as integral to the community’s development over time.  Otsego Lake and its hillsides, the ancestral lands of the Haudenosaunee, have inspired countless artists and writers since William Cooper first laid claim to its southern shore. His son James Fenimore Cooper’s The Leatherstocking Tales, with its vivid poetic descriptions of forest, lake, and fen, attracted travelers and tourists to the region beginning in the second half of the 19th century, leading to the development of the camps, inns, boardinghouses, and parks that we know today.

Cooper was arguably the first American novelist to espouse the notion that nature was not something to be feared or tamed or exploited, but to be respected as critical to human survival. His descendant Henry S.F. Cooper, Jr., founder of Otsego 2000, argued that Cooper’s novels sparked the environmental movement at a time when industrialization was emerging as nature’s biggest threat.

Now, nearly 200 years after the novelist first coined “Glimmerglass” in The Deerslayer, this exhibit celebrates 25 years of the Glimmerglass National Historic District, placed on the New York State and National Registers of Historic Places in 1999 as a remarkably intact 19th century cultural landscape. The exhibit showcases works by contemporary local artists inspired by Otsego Lake, juxtaposed with historic images taken by William G. Smith and Arthur “Putt” Telfer, who together chronicled daily life in Cooperstown and on the lake for nearly a century, from 1850 to 1950. Thank you to all who submitted photographs for the community art installation, confirming the lake’s special hold on all who experience it.

We invite you to reflect on what Otsego Lake and its views inspire in you.