Necrology. 



179 



JAMES C. COOPER. 



By J. T. LOVEWELL. 



IN the past year our Academy has lost another valued member, 

 James 0. Cooper, who died at the home of his daughter, in 

 Los Angeles, Cal., September 15, 1911. 



Mr. Cooper was born near the city of Baltimore, Md., June 16,. 

 1S32. His early education was very rudimentary, consisting of 

 four winters in the common schools of Maryland in the early for- 

 ties of the last century. At an early age he went to sea on a mer- 

 chant ship and spent five years before the mast. He went around 



Cape Horn to California in 1849, and there the lure of gold dis- 

 covery led him to give fourteen months to placer mining on the 

 North Fork of the American river. He returned to Baltimore in 

 1851, and was for a while reporter on the Daily A7'gus of Balti- 

 more, and later on Forney's Philadelphia Press. Subsequently he 

 was connected with an engineer corps in the ^location survey of a 

 railroad up the Shenandoah valley in Virginia. 



On invitation of his uncle, Peter Cooper, who had a glue factory 

 in Brooklyn, N. Y., he went there and worked three years in tha 

 factory of his uncle. This uncle was the builder of the first locj- 

 motive in America, but is better known as the philanthropist who 

 founded Cooper Institute in New York city. In 1855 our Mr. 

 Cooper married Miss Virginia V. V. F. Porter, of Brooklyn, and 



