# Hecla, Brown County, South Dakota On the flat prairie of northeastern South Dakota, near the North Dakota line, the small town of Hecla drew settlers looking to farm the open grasslands in the years after Dakota Territory opened for homesteading. For the Cooper family, it became home during the closing decades of the nineteenth century. ## The Cooper Family Oscar F. Thaddeus Cooper and his wife, Rosalthea "Rose" Angelia Lanphere, brought their growing family west from Pennsylvania. Oscar had been born in Ceres, Pennsylvania, and Rose in New York; they married in 1867 and eventually had eight children. Sometime before 1884 they settled in Brown County, and later moved into Hecla itself. It was here that much of the family took shape. Frank Nimrod Cooper was born on 2 November 1884, followed by Nettie Belle Cooper on 29 May 1886, Omar Hartley Cooper on 9 February 1889, and Gladys Aurine Cooper on 24 November 1891. By the turn of the century, Hecla held the whole household together: in 1900, Oscar and Rose were living there alongside their children Charles, Nettie, Omar, and young Gladys. The eldest of these children, Charles Calvin Cooper, had been born in Shingle House, Pennsylvania, in 1879 before the family's move. In Hecla he came of age and married Bertha Clausen on 17 October 1900. Their marriage did not last, but a son, Edwin, came from it—a half-brother whom Charles's sister Gladys would encounter again much later in life. The Cooper family's time in Hecla was a settled chapter that lasted roughly a generation. Around 1910, Oscar and Rose moved north across the state line to Cayuga, North Dakota, where Oscar died on 27 February 1911. The children scattered from there, carrying the memory of the Hecla years with them. ## Later Connections Hecla remained a fixed point for others tied to the family as well. Gladys Aurine Cooper, born in the town in 1891, was still connected to it in 1920. Sven Albert Pearson also made his home in Hecla, recorded there in 1920 and remaining until his death on 24 December 1953—the latest of the family's ties to the town, closing out nearly seventy years of connection to this corner of the Dakota prairie.