Mark Anthony Cooper was born on April 20, 1800, in Powellton, Georgia, United States. He came of a Virginia family which migrated to Georgia and settled in Hancock County in the heart of the black belt. His father was Thomas Cooper; his mother, Sallie Cooper, a descendant of an Italian who, having been driven out of his native land, perhaps for religious reasons, settled in Holland.
Cooper was prepared for college at a noted private academy in the neighborhood, attended the University of Georgia for a time, then migrated to the University of South Carolina, where he was graduated with the Bachelor of Arts degree in 1819. Leaving college he studied law and was admitted to the bar at Eatonton, Georgia, in 1821.
Cooper started to practise law in Eatonton, Georgia in 1821. He later moved to Columbus, Georgia. Though successful in the practise of law, his real bent was toward a business career. He was one of the few who foresaw the great possibilities that lay in the state’s natural resources and set to work to develop them, at a time when nearly everybody was interested primarily in farming. In 1833 he organized a cotton-mill company and erected near Eatonton the second water-driven cotton factory in the state. It was capitalized at $50, 000.
Two years later he sold his stock in this concern, removed to Columbus, Georgia, and organized a bank, capitalized at $200, 000. As a member of the state legislature in 1833 he was a warm advocate of the project to charter a railroad. The charter was granted to the Georgia Railroad & Banking Company, which built a road connecting Augusta with Atlanta. His work as a developer spread from cotton-milling, banking, and railroading to the production of iron. Purchasing an interest in a small furnace near Etowah, in Bartow County, he renovated and extended the plant, and supplemented it by erecting a rolling mill and a nail factory. In conjunction with this enterprise he erected a flour mill. He connected his settlement by a four-mile railway with the Western & Atlantic to Chattanooga, and proceeded to develop coal mines. The entire business, occupying some 12, 000 acres and embracing these various industries, in time became his sole property.
In 1836 he volunteered for the Seminole War, and was commissioned major of a battalion raised in Macon, Georgia. He entered the Twenty- sixth Congress (1839) as a Whig, but when Calhoun led an important Whig group back into the Democratic party in 1840, Cooper with W. T. Colquitt and others, having become dissatisfied with the growing nationalistic and antislavery tendencies of the national Whig party, followed him. Cooper was reelected to the next two Congresses, but resigned in 1843 to become the Democratic candidate for governor. He was defeated by George W. Crawford, and thereafter he took no further part in politics.
Cooper was a member of the Democratic Party.
Cooper was married to Mary Evalina Flournoy, in 1821, but his bride lived only three or four months after the marriage. In 1826 he was again married, this time to Sophronia A. R. Randle, and to them there were born seven daughters and three sons, two of whom were killed in the Civil War.
