Henry J. Cooley, one of Carroll County’s pioneers, was born in Rutland County, Vermont, February 13, 1851, he being the eldest of eight children of George and Eunice Cooley, natives of Vermont and New York respectively and now residents of Audubon, Iowa. Henry J. Cooley was reared to agricultural pursuits, his youth being spent in assisting his father clear their frontier farm and bring it under cultivation. The parents left Rutland County, Vermont, and settled with their family in Guthrie County, Iowa, in 1857, where the father entered 160 acres of land, and erected a log cabin with puncheon floors. They experienced many of the vicissitudes of pioneer life. They used ox teams in breaking their prairie, and their principal meat was wild game, which was very plentiful in those days. Two years later the family removed from Guthrie to Carroll County, settling in Newton Township, where the father bought land for $1.25 per acre, which he improved from a state of nature. While living on this farm their trading and milling was done at Des Moines. Henry J. Cooley, the subject of this sketch, remained at home with his parents till attaining the age of eighteen years, when he was married to Alvia Monroe, a native of Ohio, and a daughter of John and Nancy Monroe, who were natives of Ohio and pioneers of Carroll County, Iowa. To this union were born four children—Willard H., Fred L., Carrie M. and Effie F. After the marriage of our subject his father gave him a horse, and after buying another one he rented part of the old home place, where he followed farming for four years. He then purchased eighty acres on section 19, Sheridan Township, which he traded two years later for forty acres of land on the same section, on which he resided two years. He then traded his land on section 19 for forty acres on section 16, where he resided until 1882, when he went to Oregon. He remained there but a short time, when he returned to Carroll County, Iowa, and engaged in dealing in coal and grain at Audubon. His wife being in feeble health he went with her to California in October, 1885, where she died October 31, 1885. November 28 he returned to Iowa, and soon after was again bereaved by the death of his daughter Effie. In the spring of 1886 he went to the Black Hills, Colorado, returning the following June to Carroll County, when he began clerking in a mercantile establishment at Dedham, where he has since resided. Mr. Cooley is a member of the Methodist Episcopal church. Politically he is a Republican.

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