Now that the approach of the Dayton Centennial is exciting a special interest in the settlers and founders of the town, it should not be forgotten that Daniel C. Cooper is the pioneer who should be made most prominent and given the highest honors at our celebration. He was born in Morris County, New Jersey, in 1773. About 1803 he married Mrs. Sophia Greene Burnet, of Dayton. From the time that a settlement here was first planned by St. Clair, Wilkinson, Dayton, and Ludlow, he was acquainted with the project and inclined, it is probable, to make the new town his home. He accompanied the surveying parties led by Colonel Israel Ludlow through the Miami Valley in 1794 and 1795, and in September, 1795, by direction of the proprietors, marked out and cut through the brush from Fort Hamilton to the mouth of Mad River the wagon-road by which the pioneers ended their journey. That fall and winter he located one thousand acres of land in and near Dayton. He settled here permanently in the summer of 1796, building a cabin on the southeast corner of Monument Avenue and Jefferson Street. In 1798 he moved onto the farm, south of Dayton, afterwards the home of Colonel Patterson and General Brown, who distinguished himself in the War of 1812, and was afterwards commander-in-chief of the United States Army. He kept bachelor’s hall in his Monument Avenue cabin for a time.
It would have been a disgrace not to have preserved Newcom’s Tavern, which, when built in 1799, was the pride of all this region on account of its superiority to any other house north of Hamilton. We know that round it cluster nearly all the most interesting historical associations of the earliest period of the history of Dayton, and that it was the first tavern, store, church, court-house, and jail of the town or county. There is great propriety in naming the little pioneer landing for the Van Cleves. But it is also eminently that the square in which the library building stands should be called Cooper Park, for the generous, public-spirited man who gave it and other valuable lots to the town. Our citizens seem not to know, or to have forgotten, that several years ago the City Council voted to name this square Cooper Park, so that it is improper, whether law, gratitude, or sentiment is concerned, to call it Library Park. Cooper Park let it be henceforth and forever.
In 1801 the original proprietors of Dayton began discouraged and Mr. Cooper became titular proprietor of the town by the purchase of preemption rights, agreement with settlers, and friendly Congressional legislation. He showed his intelligence and breadth of view by the size of lots and the width of streets and sidewalks on his new plat of the town, and by his liberal donations of lots and money for schools, churches, a graveyard, market-house, and for county buildings, and to desirable settlers whom he induced to come here. He built the only mills erected in Dayton during the first ten years of its history- flour-, fulling-, and sawmills, and one for grinding corn. For several years at different periods he served as justice of the peace, president of Council, and member of both branches of the Legislature, and in every way in his power labored for the prosperity of the town, county, and State. His residence, built in 1805 on the southwest corner of Ludlow and First streets, was described as an “elegant mansion of hewn logs, lined inside, instead of plastering, with cherry boards.” To his enlarged views, foresight, broad plans, liberality, integrity, and business capacity much of the present advancement of our city is due. The impress of his wise, moderate, prudent, yet progressive spirit, laid upon the town in its infancy, has never been lost.
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