History of Scarsdale, (Westchester County) New York United States of America

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Susan Fenimore Cooper, author, was born on the Angevine farm in Scarsdale, N.Y., April 17, 1813; daughter of James Fenimore and Susan Augusta (de Lancey) Cooper. She acted as her father's amanuensis during the latter years of his life and after his death became an author, also devoting herself to charitable works. She founded the Orphan House of the Holy Saviour in Cooperstown, N.Y., in 1873, and personally superintended the institution for many years, conducting it from the beginning in a small house with five inmates, to extensive buildings erected in 1883 sheltering and furnishing a thorough education and good homes to nearly one hundred orphaned boys and girls. This charity suggested the "Girls' Friendly Society in America," made up of women of standing and means, patrons of orphanages, each pledged to receive into her family one of the girls and to make her the special object of motherly care. Her home at Cooperstown was built from the ruins of "Otsego Hall" the ancestral mansion, within whose walls her youth had been chiefly spent. Her published works include: Rural Hours (1850); The Shield (1852); Country Rambles (1853); Rhyme and Reason of Country Life (1854); Rural Rambles (1854); Mt. Vernon; a Letter to the Children of America (1859); and William West Skiles, a Sketch of Missionary Life at Valle Crucis, in Western North Carolina, 1842-1862 (1890). She also edited Pages and Pictures from the writings of James Fenimore Cooper (1861); and Appleton's Illustrated Almanac for 1870 (1869). She died in Cooperstown, N.Y., Dec. 31, 1894.

From: Twentieth Century Biographical Dictionary of Notable Americans, Johnson, Rossiter, editor

History of Scarsdale, (Westchester County) New York

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