Cooperstown is a small village of about 1,800 at the southern end of Otsego Lake in central New York, and it is famous for two things: baseball and James Fenimore Cooper. The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum draws half a million visitors a year to a village that could fit inside a large city park. In July, during Hall of Fame induction weekend, the population multiplies by an order of magnitude and every hotel room within 50 kilometers is booked months in advance.
The baseball connection is partly mythological. A commission in 1907 concluded — on very thin evidence — that Abner Doubleday invented baseball in Cooperstown in 1839. Historians have long since dismissed this; Doubleday almost certainly had nothing to do with the game, and baseball evolved from several bat-and-ball games in the northeastern US with no single inventor. But the museum that grew from the myth is genuinely excellent, and the town's position on the southern shore of Otsego Lake — which Cooper called "Glimmerglass" in his Leatherstocking novels — is genuinely beautiful.
Cooper himself is the less trumpeted reason to come. Fenimore Art Museum, on the north shore of the lake, holds a distinguished collection of American folk art and a substantial collection of American Indian art, displayed in a handsome building overlooking the water. The adjacent Farmers' Museum — a living history complex of 19th-century farm and village buildings — is one of the best of its kind in the Northeast. And the Cardiff Giant, the famous 19th-century hoax displayed at the Farmers' Museum, deserves to be better known.
The village itself is easy to navigate on foot. Main Street runs south from the lake, with shops, restaurants, and baseball memorabilia dealers in Victorian-era storefronts. Otsego Lake is clean and swimmable, and the surrounding Catskill foothills are beautiful walking and cycling country in summer and fall.