2024 Report to the Community
Otsego 2000 is committed to the health and well-being of the land, resources, and people of our beautiful region. The 2024 Report to the Community highlights our work in environmental stewardship, historic preservation, Otsego Outdoors, Glimmerglass Film Days, and the year-round Cooperstown Farmers’ Market.
Our environment is highly interconnected; agriculture, economics, land-use planning, town planning, and historic and cultural preservation all contribute to the environment. While we believe growth and change are both desirable and inevitable, Otsego 2000’s task is to try to guide our environment – which includes not only Otsego Lake, but also the local towns, villages, hamlets, streets, and highways – along what we hope are more intelligent pathways. While Otsego Lake is the centerpiece, we are just as concerned with its surroundings, natural and built. All are inseparable. Otsego 2000’s environmental defense work focuses on protecting the Otsego region’s communities from sprawl and large-scale development that would negatively affect air, water, and soil quality, as well as disrupt our agricultural rural character and quality of life.
Glimmerglass Historic District Celebrates 25 Years of Protection
September 2024 marks the 25th anniversary of the listing of the Glimmerglass Historic District on the National Register of Historic Places. Encompassing 15,000 acres and 1,475 buildings, sites, structures, and objects, the Glimmerglass HD was at the time the first and largest historic district in New York state to center its natural setting — Otsego Lake and its hills as viewed from shore — as the unifying element in its statement of historic significance.
Originally part of the Haudenosaunee territories, the region was settled by white settlers in the second half of the eighteenth century, led by William Cooper, father of the famous novelist, James Fenimore Cooper. Cooper's novels marked the Romantic period in American literature, and were the first to depict the natural world not as something to be conquered, but to be respected.
With the advent of turnpikes, and then rail, travelers sought out the settings described in Cooper's novels, spurring development of hotels, inns, and entertainments to accommodate the crowds.
Otsego 2000 was founded to combat a major utility power line that would have encroached on this cultural landscape, largely unchanged since the mid-19th century. Following the success of defeating the power line, Henry S.F. Cooper, Kent Barwick, Hugh MacDougall and other board members of Otsego 2000 at the time, as well as attorney Robert Poulson, led the effort to establish the Glimmerglass Historic District as an additional layer of protection for the region's historic, cultural resources, and by extension, environmental resources.
Local preservation consultant Jessie Ravage took on the research and writing of the nomination. This was no small task -- documenting and mapping (by hand!) over 2,000 buildings, structures, and features across 15,000 acres in 4 municipalities. But the effort paid off immeasurably as the region faced difficult challenges.
Otsego Lake
Since 1999, our region has had a number of energy infrastructure and other ill-advised development projects that we have been successful in deterring, thanks in no small part to the protections
afforded by the Glimmerglass Historic District's listing -- indeed, negative impact on historic and cultural resources in the Marcellus and Utica Shale regions was listed as one of the reasons the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation banned fracking.
Today, the benefits and protections afforded by the Glimmerglass National Historic District are evident. State and federal infrastructure projects must avoid or mitigate any negative impacts on the district’s resources, while property owners with historic buildings benefit from increased property values and a 20% NYS historic tax credit for home maintenance and repairs. Heritage tourism brings money into our Main Streets, and even attracts new residents and entrepreneurs.
Over the next year, Otsego 2000 will be marking the Glimmerglass Historic District’s 25th anniversary with a series of walks, talks, and events to tell its story to a new generation, starting with a celebratory ice cream social in September. Sign up for our email list and follow Otsego 2000 on Facebook/ Instagram to be in the know.
Read the full Otsego 2000 Report to the Community