Hawaiian Mission House
Group Tours Village

Members of the Hawaiian Mission Houses Historic Site and Archives visited Cooperstown on October 21 as part of the commemoration of the Second Company Bicentennial in New Haven, CT, and Princeton Theological Seminary in Princeton, NJ.

Fourteen members of a Second Company of missionaries from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions left from New Haven in November 1822 on a whaling ship and arrived in Honolulu and the Sandwich Islands—now known as the Hawaiian Islands—in April 1823. They were accompanied by four men from the mission school at Cornwall, CT. Included in the group were the Rev. and Mrs. Charles Stewart, early residents of Cooperstown, and Betsey Stockton of Princeton.

In Cooperstown, the mission group visited Lakewood Cemetery, where the Stewarts and Betsy Stockton are buried, and the Fenimore Library, where the Stewart papers are preserved. The visit included a walking tour of the early 19th-century neighborhood in the village that would have been familiar to the Rev. Stewart and his family when they lived here. He retired in 1862 after a distinguished career as a missionary and military chaplain and returned to Cooperstown, where he died in 1870.