Norman Gridley Cooper was born on July 5, 1838, in Waterloo, New York, to Levi and Jane Cooper. His father was a tailor who owned $300 of personal property by 1860. The family lived in Fulton, New York, until the 1850s, when they moved to Red Creek, New York. By 1860, he was working as a jeweler.

 

He enlisted in the Union army on May 4, 1861, and he mustered in as a private in Company E of the 24^th New York Infantry on May 17. According to his service records, he was 5 feet, 11 inches tall, with brown hair and light eyes. He was wounded near Groveton, Virginia, on August 29, 1862, and Confederates captured him soon afterward. He was eventually exchanged, and he rejoined the regiment on December 17, 1862. He was promoted to 2^nd lieutenant on February 17, 1863, and he mustered out on May 29, 1863.

 

He settled in Burr Oak, Michigan, after leaving the army, and he married Lucelia Quereau around 1867. They had at least two children: Ethel, born around 1874; and Leon, born around 1877. By 1870, he owned $1,000 of real estate and $2,500 of personal property. They moved to Sturgis, Michigan, in the 1870s, and Cooper worked as a fire and life insurance agent there. He applied for a federal pension in January 1884 and eventually secured one. He was a member of the Grand Army of the Republic, and he attended several veterans’ reunions. He served as president of the Michigan Society of the New York State Veterans, and he delivered a lecture on the “Life and Times of Abraham Lincoln” in February 1900.

 

They moved to Brooklyn, New York, in the 1890s. He supported the Republican Party, and he published an endorsement of President William McKinley in the election of 1900. “I despised the Copperheads when I served in the army,” he explained, “and my disgust is strong for their successors.” William McKinley and vice presidential candidate Theodore Roosevelt, he continued, had “not only stood in the pathway of bullets and shells but they also stand for honesty and patriotism in the highest national sense. I will vote for them because they have been tried and found true.” His wife died in 1910, and he passed away of heart disease in Oberlin, Ohio, on February 4, 1913.

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