Cooper House

Family legend states that three Wilds brothers arrived in America from Wales sometime near the middle of the eighteenth century. One settled in Virginia, while another settled in Maryland. A third remained in Maryland for a time, but soon moved to Delaware's Duck Creek Hundred, where he took up a large tract. The three are supposed to have made a strange agreement. In order to avoid confusion in possible reports of misfortune traveling by the slow and unreliable mails, they chose to spell their names differently. One became Wild, another Wyles, and the third, Nathaniel, the patriarch of the Delaware family, Wilds.

Nathaniel Wilds cleared his land and built a home, possibly the older section of the present Cooper House. The house's owner dates that section from 1794, but since Nathaniel died in 1800, it is either an earlier product, or a second home that he built in his later years. Wilds also erected the first school house in what became Duck Creek's District 9, a substantial log house which bore his name for years. Five generations of his descendants received their education there.

When Nathaniel Wilds died in 1800, he willed to his son, Nathaniel, "250 acres of the home plantation and all the belongings thereof." Nathaniel and his brother John divided their father's personal property.

James D. Wilds was born on the land his grandfather had taken up, as his father had been. He bought another farm, however, in 1851, where he apparently had been living since his marriage in 1830. James cast his first vote, for John Quincy Adams but later became a Democrat. He served in the Delaware House of Representatives in 1840.

James' son, David S., was the third generation of Wilds to be born on the farm. At twenty, after a desultory academic career, he became manager of a part of his father's farm, and bought a portion of the land from his mother after his father's death in 1863. The farm and the house were owned by Dr. W. N. Cooper in 1898: the house has since borne his name.