Cooperstown, New York

A great way to beat the summer heat in upstate New York is to slather yourself in mud and refrain from strenuous exercise.

  

In Cooperstown, we passed up the dense throng of tourists at the Baseball Hall of Fame, the plethora of scary, cheap souvenir shops and sad eateries on the main drag. Instead, we opted for the Farmer's Museum, a restored historical town where the first building originated in 1796 (the Pub, of course) and the last construction was a fancy house dating from 1845.

 Enter through the impressive exhibition space where you can chart the evolution of the plow,  should you need to know it.

Exit out the other side, and you have drifted back 200 years.  Authentic historical buildings painstakingly restored include a church, a general store, a school, a pharmacist, and assorted shops.

the Weaver lady

her hand dyed wools 

Steven J. Kellogg, Blacksmith makes handmade square nails used to restore the historic buildings in the village

18th century hand tooled weapon

early printing shop in the village

Really cool artist's studio if you don't mind sharing it with turkeys. Don't worry, they'll be gone by Thanksgiving.

 too beautiful to eat

The village cheese maker looked like she walked out of a Vermeer painting

fresh milk from the village cows

When I asked the girl with the pearl earring what kind of cheese she was making, she answered "hard cheese". Oh, okay.

Across the street from the Farmer's Museum is the lovely, stately Fenimore Art Museum. It houses a folk art collection, a Native American collection and revolving shows the Edward Hopper show on now.

  This is not James Fenimore Cooper's ancestral home. That burned down in the 19th century.

"Song of Victory" 1907-1916 by John Scholl - some of the unusual folk art at the Museum

My husband, Waldemar, with former President "Abraham Lincoln" 1940-45 by Frank Moran. Abe's hands were weirdly shiny as though people had been fondling them!

Octagonal Barn on the road from Verona to Cooperstown, New York

the farm stand where we bought corn, ate it raw, and threw the cobs into the compost pile

the locals 

 Lake Otsego seen from Cooperstown - sublime, except for  the heavy metal music blasting across the lake from the local yacht club.



photography by Waldemar Kalinowski