Editorial Bassett: A Beginning Over 150 years ago, in 1867, Susan Fenimore Cooper—the visionary daughter of our illustrious James Fenimore Cooper—founded the Thanksgiving Hospital, the first such hospital in the Village of Cooperstown and, so it’s told, in the state. Dedicated to the “weak and suffering among the population of Otsego County and the adjoining counties,” it had 16 beds. At the time Cooperstown was a small rural community with 1,600 people. Established in appreciation of the end of the…
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Editorial Applause Film festivals have been around for a century, and now, in the 21st, they have come into their own. They are meeting places for filmmakers and audiences who are interested in the world in its variety, different approaches to life and in film as an art form, a medium and a tool of social expression. Global digitalization has given film festivals an exceptional tool for crossing the communication channels from the most distant places and, with multiple languages,…
Letter from Brian Maher Miller Will Be Fierce Advocate for 121st As Supervisor of the Town of Montgomery I can say firsthand that I have been proud to call Brian Miller my New York State Assembly representative. While I know many of the folks reading this letter may be voting for Brian Miller for the first time, rest assured he will represent you well. He works hard, he listens and he has been a fierce advocate for issues that have…
Editorial BOO! In 1959 Louis C. Jones, a celebrated folklorist who was at the time director of the New York State Historical Association in Cooperstown, published “Things That Go Bump in the Night,” a compendium of stories about ghosts who roamed New York State and beyond. “It is a great privilege to live in a town which the dead have not deserted,” he writes. “Walk the streets of Cooperstown…on a moonlight night and [you will see] a village where the…
Editorial Noble Barns The Swart-Wilcox House, the oldest in Oneonta, is looking for a 19th-century English barn to replace the original one destroyed by fire in 1968. Upstate New York is rural. Its towns, villages, and cities are spread out and difficult to reach. There are fields and forests and lakes. For most of its over-200-year history agriculture has been, and still might be, the main industry. Upstate New York is beautiful, bucolic, serene, clear, compelling. Rolling hills encircle cool…
Editorial In Honor of Rural Women This Saturday, October 15, the world will recognize, as it does every year, the importance of the contributions of rural women and girls, including indigenous women, who live and work in remote and rural, often poverty-stricken, communities of the world. These strong women and girls play a key role in enhancing agricultural development, managing natural resources, adopting climate-resilient agricultural approaches, and planning against malnutrition and food insecurity. The International Day of Rural Women was…
Editorial Goodbye Columbus? On October 8, 2021, President Joe Biden proclaimed October 11 as Indigenous Peoples’ Day. At the same time, he acknowledged Columbus Day as a federal holiday that would continue to recognize the contributions of Italian-Americans. This exercise was, in part, designed to placate a growing constituency in a widening “cancel culture” that opposes a celebration for a man who was nothing short of beastly to the indigenous populations that he and his Spanish patrons conquered and enslaved.…
Editorial The Great Turkey Hunt September is pretty much behind us, with its very warm and, at other times, quite chilly days and nights, and some torrential rains. It’s been like most of the Septembers around here, only the temperature fluctuations this year have been more drastic, and the thunderstorms have been more ferocious, felling trees and scattering branches and scaring children and dogs. And now, as we run smack into the pumpkins and foliage and the eventual Jack Frost…
Editorial Re-Charge! A little over a year ago The Freeman’s Journal put forth an editorial on the subject of electric vehicle chargers, which were at the time pretty scarce within the Village and, in fact, even outside the Village. The reason we explored the local availability of these chargers was, of course, that our tiny historic Village has been, and is, the destination of myriad urban baseball, sports, scenic and music explorers whose mode of transportation to Cooperstown is increasingly…
Editorial A-maize-ing Grace Last weekend, along with everyone who happened to venture out-of-doors the evenings of Friday and Saturday, we witnessed the September full moon — one of the most spectacular events on the lunar calendar. Called the Harvest Moon, as it appears the closest to the autumnal equinox, which falls on September 22, it is the moon that, before electricity, provided farmers with three days of extended daylight hours by which to harvest their crops. According to Native American…