Henry Cooper was one of the earliest settlers in the area that would become Lyman, Skagit County, Washington. He arrived in the 1880s from Quebec with his cousin, Henry Cooper Leggett, traveling overland into the Skagit Valley’s frontier, an area still densely forested and sparsely populated by European settlers. Cooper initially claimed land upriver between what would later become Lyman and Hamilton, working to clear timber and prepare the ground for homesteading and farming, helping to open the valley for future settlement.

By 1882, Henry was searching for a bride and found one 3,000 miles away: Clara Augusta Bartlett, a descendant of Mayflower passenger Richard Warren. Clara’s family had connections in Sedro-Woolley through her brother, Phil Bartlett, a friend of pioneer Birdsey Minkler, who introduced Henry to the Bartlett family. Clara lived in Maine and Massachusetts before moving west, possibly working in cotton mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Henry and Clara began corresponding, and she traveled west in late 1882 via ship and the railroad across the Isthmus of Panama, arriving in San Francisco on December 1, then traveling north to Seattle. Henry and Clara were married on January 29, 1883, in Seattle, with Phil Bartlett and his wife as witnesses.

Henry first brought Clara to a log cabin he had built on Cockreham Island, which was hardly suitable for a woman from urban surroundings. Soon after, in March 1883, he and fellow pioneer Valentine Adam traded homesteads. Cooper acquired an oddly shaped property on what would become the southeast portion of Lyman. By the end of that first year, he built the first permanent house in future Lyman, a two-story home of milled lumber likely sourced from Utsalady on Camano Island.