Daily Photo – Abandoned Home in Cooptown

Cooptown is a place that was meant to be something, but never really became anything. A town with a name, a school, and a dairy factory, it had desire and ambition, sitting quietly in the valley waiting for a future that never arrived.

It was the brainchild of William Coop, a local settler who arrived in the area in the late 1800s on the back of the sawmilling industry that was booming at the time. He subdivided the land, named it “Cooptown” (literally meaning Coop’s town), and hoped an independent township would blossom. Unfortunately for William Coop, it never became much more than an offshoot of the nearby town of Little River, which is just five minutes down the road.