Mr. Cooper died Sept. 10, 1877, leaving behind him the reputation of an earnest, upright life, and a strong attachment to the evangelical school in the English Church. His widow still resides at St. George's Hill, with one of her daughters. Two of her sons are in the ministry, the Rev. Horace Cooper, of Lloydtown, and the Rev. Robert St. P. O. Cooper, of Chatham.
One of Mr. H. C. Cooper's brothers became Judge Cooper, of Huron, who died some years since. Another, still living, is Mr. C. W. Cooper, barrister, formerly of Toronto, now of Chicago. He was recording secretary to the B. A. League, in 1849, and is a talented writer for the press.
In 1860, soon after my return to Toronto, I was asked by my old friend and former partner, Mr. Henry Rowsell, to take charge of the Beaver Mutual Fire Insurance Company, which had been organized a year or two before by W. H. Smith, author of a work called "Canada--Past, Present, and Future," and a Canadian Gazetteer. Of this company I became managing director, and continued to conduct it until the year 1876, when it was legislated out of existence by the Mackenzie government. I do not propose to inflict upon my readers any details respecting its operations or fortunes, except in so far as they were matters of public history. Suffice it here to say, that I assumed its charge with two hundred members or policy holders; that, up to the spring of 1876, it had issued seventy-four thousand policies, and that not a just claim remained unsatisfied. Its annual income amounted to a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and its agencies numbered a hundred. That so powerful an organization should have to succumb to hostile influences, is a striking example of the ups and downs of fortune.
The summer of 1870 will be long remembered as the year of the Ottawa fires, which severely tried the strength of the Beaver Company. On the 17th August in that year, a storm of wind from the south-west fanned into flames the expiring embers of bush-fires and burning log-heaps, throughout the Counties of Lanark, Renfrew, Carleton and Ottawa, bordering on the Ottawa River between Upper and Lower Canada. No rain had fallen there for months previously, and the fields were parched to such a degree as seemingly to fill the air with inflammable gaseous exhalations, and to render buildings, fences, trees and pastures so dry, that the slightest spark would set them in a blaze. Such was the condition of the Townships of Fitzroy, Huntley, Goulburn, March, Nepean, Gloucester, and Hull, when the storm swept over them, and in the brief space of four hours left them a blackened desert, with here and there a dwelling-house or barn saved, but everything else--dwellings, out-buildings, fences, bridges, crops, meadows--nay, even horses, horned cattle, sheep, pigs, poultry, all kinds of domestic and wild animals, and most deplorable of all, twelve human beings--involved in one common destruction. Those farmers who escaped with their lives did so with extreme difficulty, in many cases only by driving their waggons laden with their wives and children into the middle of the Ottawa or some smaller stream, where the poor creatures had to remain all night, their flesh blistered with the heat, and their clothing consumed on their bodies.