In 1826, a few years since the establishment of the Moreton Bay Penal Settlement, Captain Patrick Logan named land eight miles south of the Brisbane River penal colony “Cowper’s Plains”; an area explored by Logan and by Allan Cunningham in 1828. The honour was to Dr Henry Cowper, the Assistant Surgeon of the settlement. The area that was to become known as Coopers Plains (changing the spelling of ‘Cowper’ and dropping the apostrophe), was a wide flat, ‘walled-in’ from the north and north-east by ridges that flowed off Mount Gravatt. One ridge line runs south through Sunnybank and Sunnybank Hills, up to the heights of Calamvale. Another line runs along Toohey Forest, across Nathan, arches north through Tarragindi (and the back of Moorooka) and up the Annerley ridge, and then steeps up to Dutton Park and Highgate Hill, where it turns towards the river and declines & terminates at Hill End (West End); thus separating the early Brisbane township from the flats of Fairfield, Yeronga, Yeerongpilly, and out towards Oxley, and the Coopers Plains flat which now included the suburbs of Rocklea, Archerfield, and Acacia Ridge. Historically the Coopers Plains area took more than just the flat and included the lower hills that rolled up to the Nathan & Sunnybank Ridges. The twist of fate is that the early Coopers Plains settlement which began on the flat has mostly become the region of Archerfield and Acacia Ridge. The local township, which identifies itself as the contemporary centre of Coopers Plains, has now come to exist in the hills on Orange Grove Road, with its industrial arm taking up the flat between the Beenleigh railway line and Beaudesert Road. There is no longer much of the ‘Plains’ in Coopers Plains.
Over a century and a half, the Coopers Plains centre has been moving in the north-east direction, starting with the first properties in the 1840s around what is now Mortimer Road in Acacia Ridge. Other properties opened up slightly further north where Beaudesert and Musgrave now intersect. Antecedence of the early Beaudesert Road community date to 1828 when the Cowper’s Plains convict outstation was established in an area on Stable Swamp Creek, somewhere close-by to where Musgrave Road now crosses the creek. The convict work gangs were used on the construction of the Limestone (Ipswich)-Brisbane road. When the penal colony closed down in around 1840, the outstation disappeared and a small rural community emerged .The Moreton Bay Racing Club set up their race course in the district in 1843. The community developed as a coach stop between the Brisbane Township and Beaudesert. A school opened on Beaudesert Road in 1869, and was followed a few years later by the establishment of the Rose and Crown Hotel, which served as the first local post office.
When the Coopers Plains Railway station was built around 1885 the township grew up on Henley Street. The first suburban estates provided land sales close to the railway station and mostly to the west of the railway line. The Post Office eventually moved into Henley Street. Around the same time as the Coopers Plains Railway Station community is emerging, an early landowner John Soden subdivided land on the eastern side of Orange Grove Road and the northern side of Musgrave Road, opening it for land sales as the Orange Grove Estate. By the end of the nineteen century Coopers Plains has become centred close to the railway station. In 1898 the old Coopers Plains settlement had been dissolved in the new suburb of Acacia Ridge. In 1924 the Coopers Plains Progress Hall was constructed in Rookwood Avenue. However, in only a few years the drift would continue north-east.
In the early 1930s the second Orange Grove Estate opened for land sales south of Musgrave Road and on the eastern side of Orange Grove Road heading up to the new Orange Grove Road State School on top of the hill. Shops emerged on Orange Grove Road at the bottom of the hill across from the end of Longden and Dartmouth Streets. A number of churches were constructed in the Orange Grove Road community area. In the 1920s the Station United Protestant Church was built in Beaton Street. A Methodist Church was built in 1953 on the corner of Rockwood Avenue and Coopers Plains. In 1942 the Damour Barracks was constructed on the other side of the Coopers Plains State School (renamed from Orange Grove Road State School). The retail and commercial centre on Henley Street, on the other side of the railway tracks, continued to thrive into the 1950s, but by the 1970s it was no longer the major local hub it once was. The Henley Street-Boundary Road community still plays an important part for the suburb, providing unique as well as essential services, particularly being the Post Office site. Orange Grove Road, though, cemented itself as the Coopers Plains Township. The shops on Orange Grove Road expanded in the 1970s and at one time the shops hosted an earlier petrol station on the western side of the road (a recently-built petrol station is now on the eastern side), competing with the long-standing petrol station on the corner of Orange Grove and Boundary Roads. The crowning achievement for the community was the opening of the new library in 1979.
There were other movements in the development of Coopers Plains. In the 1950s there was opening up of the land south of Boundary Road and along the railway line to Troughton Road with 300 housing commission homes constructed for Dutch immigrants. The first shops in the Banoon area on Troughton Road were opened in 1951. Troughton Road, at the south-eastern corner with Musgrave Road, was the site for many years of the Skyline (Coopers Plains) Drive-In.
The movement in the last two decades of the twentieth century has been further north-east along the line that started in the old Coopers Plains settlement around Mortimer Road back in the previous century. Within fifteen years from the time the QE II Hospital was opened on the corner of Kessels and Troughton Roads, the Queensland Scientific Laboratories and the John Tonge Centre (State Morgue) were constructed along the bushland between Middle Street and Kessels Road, creating a biological sciences hub. However, despite developments in the very north-east corner of the suburb, the lower end of Orange Grove Road retains its role as the major suburban centre for Coopers Plains, affirmed when The Village residential estate opened in 1995 on the site of the demolished Damour Barracks.