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![[Flag of Cooperstown, New York]](../images/u/us-nycoo.gif)
image by Masao Okazaki, 31 December 2023
See also:
The first flag of the village was designed by Oliver Wasson, a recent
graduate of Cooperstown Central School, and was adopted by the Village Board of
Trustees on January 23, 2023.
The proposal and adoption of the flag
appear in the newsletter Village Voices:
https://www.cooperstownny.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/2023-02.pdf
The
description of the flag by its designer in the NAVA magazine Vexillum 24:
The field of the flag offers multiple different interpretations: the blue
(representing our lake) and the green (representing our natural beauty) can be
seen as a top-down view of Cooperstown, where Otsego Lake, source of the
Susquehanna River, stretches to the village. The subtle home plate design points
to Cooperstown as the “home plate of baseball” (according to a now-discredited
legend, the sport was invented in Cooperstown by Abner Doubleday). The
background can also be seen from the perspective of looking out at the horizon
of the lake, with the green being the valleys surrounding our village and lake.
Of course, the home plate could be on a baseball field of green—the
interpretation is based on what one sees in it.
The architectural column
gives the flag a very distinguished, scholarly look, representing Cooperstown’s
museums and rich cultural history (the column is a very common architectural
element in our village). The column itself has three different components,
representing the Baseball Hall of Fame, the Fenimore Art Museum, and the
Farmers' Museum. The column, a significant symbol representing the arts,
literature, and medicine that dates to the ancient Greeks, has a wave-like trim
that furthers the imagery of the glimmering lake. Lastly, I chose the column as
a good symbol for the field of the flag as it represents our community and
everyone’s impact. The gray “keystone” shows how our community culture supports
our village. It also represents Council Rock, a large boulder on the shore of
Lake Otsego that has a prominent place in the novels of James Fenimore Cooper.
It can be seen as a baseball diamond.
Masao Okazaki, 31 December
2023