Preface
Cooperstown will celebrate the seventy fifth anniversary of its founding in June, 1957. The town began in 1882 founded by the Cooper brothers, bonanza farmers.
To quote the first editor of the Cooperstown Courier, Mr. E. D. Stair, “it is a kind of a cold blooded, matter-of-fact conclusion that Griggs County and Cooperstown without (R.C.) Cooper would be equal to the play of Hamlet, with Hamlet omitted."
We of Cooperstown and Griggs county are deeply in the debt of Mrs. Myrtle Porterville, who has worked for years, finding and assembling documented facts about the early settlers in this community — where they came from, when they came, where they settled, what their homes were like, what their clothes were like, what they ate, what kind of dishes they used, how far they had to go for fuel, water and other supplies, and the countless other details which make the pioneers come alive to the present and future generations.
Mrs. Porterville got her information from various sources - from assessors' lists, mortgage, records, old newspapers, photographs, and from dozens of personal interviews with people who could tell her firsthand about the habits and personalities of the early settlers and about the homes they lived in.
Nearly all of the information to be used in the history book being put together by the jubilee committee comes directly from Mrs. Porterville's notes.
She has generously allowed the Sentinel-Courier to use her material for this series. Much of it has never been published before. Her manuscript, prepared as a scholarly work at the request of NDAC professors, is well documented with footnotes citing the sources of her information. Except where the information in the footnotes is necessary for the sense of the narrative, they will be omitted in this series. This will be the only major departure from the manuscript.