2 10 25 https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/files/original/bc757523838064acaee2962d13bd2b00.jpg 680147514b7d8bba098667ce3fbc7cdd Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Mason's Improved Fruit Jar Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Photograph by Jacob Lechner https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/files/original/8b635b587d2081ad83ec73a97fc2f8fe.mov d469f39d343e6990a97c1f2ab0acc320 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Mason Jar Quicktime Animation Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Artifacts Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Rutgers University-Camden Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Artifacts from the collections of Rutgers-Camden Center for the Arts. Description An account of the resource Artifacts recovered during archaeological dig prior to construction of the Rutgers-Camden dormitory at 330 Cooper Street, Camden, N.J. Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Photograph Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Mason's Improved Fruit Jar Description An account of the resource A product of the Consolidated Fruit Jar Company in late 1870s, this Mason’s Improved Jar proved to be popular and accessible to many people in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A common household item, the jar helped housewives during the time-consuming process of canning and changed the way people viewed food preservation. The storage and protection these jars provided helped mothers achieve their goals of maintaining a healthy household. These jars were mass produced until the twentieth century, which causes their abundance today. The inventor of the Mason jar, John Landis Mason, was born in Vineland, N.J., in 1832. He patented his jar in 1858. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Recovered from excavation prior to construction of Rutgers-Camden dormitory at 330 Cooper Street, Camden, N.J. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Ashley Angelucci; photograph by Jacob Lechner Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource Late nineteenth century; photograph, April 2018 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Reconstructed glass jar, 7 inches tall and 4.5 inches wide. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Rutgers University-Camden Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Collection of Rutgers-Camden Center for the Arts Relation A related resource Affleck, Richard, George Cress, Ingrid Weubber, Rebecca White, Kimberly Morrell, and Thomas Kutys. Phase II and Data-Recovery Archaeological Excavations of the Smith-Maskell Site Cooper Street Development Camden, New Jersey. Archaeological Excavation Report, Burlington: URS Corporation. 1870s 300 Block Alumni House Display Archaeology Business Domestic Life Food and Drink Vineland https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/files/original/70676b1d22a7c37a7ea832368b639f3e.jpg 1d6e5135c3793c029ad66e2a3e8a5806 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Artifacts Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Rutgers University-Camden Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Artifacts from the collections of Rutgers-Camden Center for the Arts. Description An account of the resource Artifacts recovered during archaeological dig prior to construction of the Rutgers-Camden dormitory at 330 Cooper Street, Camden, N.J. Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Photograph Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Glass Syringe Description An account of the resource In the second half of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century, doctors and patients at home relied on glass syringes to treat various conditions, including venereal diseases. Unlike hypodermic needles, these artifacts, also called “male” syringes, did not inject medicine subcutaneously. Instead, these syringes irrigated or flushed the visibly infected parts of the body. The “male” syringe entered the tip of the penis to flush the symptoms from the urethra. In addition to the discomfort, these treatments failed to cure the venereal diseases and only masked the symptoms for periods of time. Read more about this object: <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/16">https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/16</a> Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource c. 1840-1900; photographed April 2018. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource TJ Potero (Graduate Student, American Material Culture, Spring 2018); photograph by Jacob Lechner. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Recovered from excavation prior to construction of Rutgers-Camden dormitory at 330 Cooper Street, Camden, N.J. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Rutgers University-Camden Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Collection of Rutgers-Camden Center for the Arts Relation A related resource Affleck, Richard, George Cress, Ingrid Weubber, Rebecca White, Kimberly Morrell, and Thomas Kutys. Phase II and Data-Recovery Archaeological Excavations of the Smith-Maskell Site Cooper Street Development Camden, New Jersey. Archaeological Excavation Report, Burlington: URS Corporation. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Hand-blown glass syringes. Syringe #1, Barrel: 5 ½ in (L) (13.97 cm (L), Plunging Rod: 3 ½ in (L). Syringe #2. Barrel 3 ½ in (L) (13.97 cm (L), Plunging Rod: 3 ¼ in (L). 1840s 1850s 1860s 1870s 1880s 1890s 300 Block Alumni House Display Archaeology Civil War Health and Medicine Illness Men https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/files/original/e23276c1233f9493a0cc83af0bd4f3f8.jpg 54136857e0ed1917c1a8b1805625a9f9 https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/files/original/9b8812d63ff298442d4d4fcba3b1a27a.mov 3d11875108c84f4274cf83dba4de6337 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Artifacts Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Rutgers University-Camden Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Artifacts from the collections of Rutgers-Camden Center for the Arts. Description An account of the resource Artifacts recovered during archaeological dig prior to construction of the Rutgers-Camden dormitory at 330 Cooper Street, Camden, N.J. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Cosmetics Container Description An account of the resource This jar likely held cosmetics, such as a cold cream or powder. Despite missing its lid, this container still reveals details about Cooper Street’s residents. The existence of cosmetics at home suggests the means to purchase a luxury and the leisure opportunities for wearing makeup. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Recovered from excavation prior to construction of Rutgers-Camden dormitory at 330 Cooper Street, Camden, N.J. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Rutgers University-Camden Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource c. 1855-1910; photograph, June 2018 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource TJ Potero (Graduate Student, American Material Culture, Spring 2018); photograph by Jacob Lechner. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Collection of Rutgers-Camden Center for the Arts Relation A related resource Affleck, Richard, George Cress, Ingrid Weubber, Rebecca White, Kimberly Morrell, and Thomas Kutys. Phase II and Data-Recovery Archaeological Excavations of the Smith-Maskell Site Cooper Street Development Camden, New Jersey. Archaeological Excavation Report, Burlington: URS Corporation. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource brown glass jar approximately 3" tall and 3" in diameter. 300 Block Alumni House Display Archaeology Artifacts Cosmetics Glass Jar https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/files/original/97cf14c28e587ed8e3a946029390c12d.jpg 3485b0e7b2b5120ddeae3771377796ee https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/files/original/7906fecf6531221b0484a5e1b011969b.mov aa2b8ef8c0108d61692ffa32589133f7 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Artifacts Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Rutgers University-Camden Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Artifacts from the collections of Rutgers-Camden Center for the Arts. Description An account of the resource Artifacts recovered during archaeological dig prior to construction of the Rutgers-Camden dormitory at 330 Cooper Street, Camden, N.J. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Bisque Doll Head Description An account of the resource The painted features of this porcelain doll face point to the work of firms in the Thuringia area of Germany. Thuringia’s natural clay deposits made it the center of the German doll industry. This doll likely once included glass enamel eyes and a mohair wig. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Lucy Davis Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Recovered from excavation prior to construction of Rutgers-Camden dormitory at 330 Cooper Street, Camden, N.J. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Rutgers University-Camden Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource c. 1860-1890 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Lucy Davis (Graduate Student, American Material Culture, Spring 2018); photograph by Jacob Lechner. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Collection of Rutgers-Camden Center for the Arts Relation A related resource Affleck, Richard, George Cress, Ingrid Weubber, Rebecca White, Kimberly Morrell, and Thomas Kutys. Phase II and Data-Recovery Archaeological Excavations of the Smith-Maskell Site Cooper Street Development Camden, New Jersey. Archaeological Excavation Report, Burlington: URS Corporation. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Ceramic (bisque) doll head, approximately 3" tall and 2" wide. Eyes and back of head missing. 1860s 1870s 300 Block Alumni House Display Childhood Toys https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/files/original/0f7843b41cc3edd533271899a3c9d2d0.jpg ce042bf992e880bbeb68f29a40a2fd27 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Beer Bottle Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Photograph by Jacob Lechner Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Artifacts Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Rutgers University-Camden Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Artifacts from the collections of Rutgers-Camden Center for the Arts. Description An account of the resource Artifacts recovered during archaeological dig prior to construction of the Rutgers-Camden dormitory at 330 Cooper Street, Camden, N.J. Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Photograph Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Beer Bottle Description An account of the resource This bottle was used to sell and distribute beer by Charles Joly, a bottler at 9 Seventh Street in Philadelphia. Consumers paid for the beer, but not the bottle. Beer drinkers would return the bottles to the brewer or take the bottles back to get them refilled. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource c. late nineteenth century; photograph, April 2018. Relation A related resource Affleck, Richard, George Cress, Ingrid Weubber, Rebecca White, Kimberly Morrell, and Thomas Kutys. Phase II and Data-Recovery Archaeological Excavations of the Smith-Maskell Site Cooper Street Development Camden, New Jersey. Archaeological Excavation Report, Burlington: URS Corporation. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Recovered from excavation prior to construction of Rutgers-Camden dormitory at 330 Cooper Street, Camden, N.J. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Anila Ramsarran (Graduate Student, American Material Culture, Spring 2018); photograph by Jacob Lechner. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Rutgers University-Camden Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Collection of Rutgers-Camden Center for the Arts Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Glass beer bottle, 9.5 x 2.5 x 1 inches. 300 Block Alumni House Display Archaeology Food and Drink Philadelphia Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource People Description An account of the resource Residents of Cooper Street Person An individual. Biographical Text James I. Battle is the only known African American to move from a position of service to head his own household on Cooper Street. Born in Georgia in 1876, by the 1890s Battle had migrated north and settled in Camden. From 1896 until 1899, he worked as a live-in janitor for the Camden Republican Club at 312 Cooper Street. He left this job and the housing it provided in 1899, when he married another African American migrant from Georgia, Hattie Daniels. They made their home at 403 Friends Avenue for most of the first quarter of the twentieth century, but for four years (1909-1912), they returned to Cooper Street. City directories and the U.S. Census of 1910 find them at 63 Cooper Street, a three-story brick row house that they rented just east of Front Street. At that time, their house and two adjacent (61 and 65) belonged to the Victor Talking Machine Company, where James also worked as a steward. Their departure from the Cooper Street home in 1912 coincided with Victor's plans to build its new headquarters on the same site at Cooper and Front Streets. The Battles, who had no children, returned to 403 Friends Avenue until the 1920s, when they moved to Atlantic City. Time period on Cooper Street 1896-99, 1909-12 Location(s) - Cooper Street 312 Cooper Street (1896, 1897, 1898, 1899) 63 Cooper Street (1909, 1910, 1911, 1912) Location(s) - Other Atlantic City: 131 Willow Avenue (1894) Camden: 640 Cherry Street (1900) Camden: 403 Friends ' Avenue (1901, 1902, 1903, 1904, 1905, 1906, 1907, 1908; 1916, 1917, 1920, 1921, 1922, 1923, 1924, 1926) Atlantic City: 704 Arctic Avenue (1926, 1927, 1929) Occupation Janitor for Camden Republican Club (1896-1899) Steward / Waiter Birth Date October 3, 1876 Birthplace Georgia Death Date Unknown Associated Individuals Hattie (Daniels) Battle, wife, married 1899 in Camden John W. Battle, relationship unknown, co-worker at Camden Republican Club Anna Daniels, mother-in-law Sources Camden City Directories (Ancestry.com) U.S. Census (Ancestry.com) Research by Charlene Mires Posted by Charlene Mires Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Battle, James Iverson Description An account of the resource Once a janitor, James Battle may be the only African American to advance from a position of service on Cooper Street to heading his own household. 00 Block 1890s 1900s 300 Block 312 Cooper Street 63 Cooper Street Adult African Americans Alumni House Janitor Male Southern Migration Steward Victor Talking Machine Company Waiter https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/files/original/940a071ba366045ec585e356e7f866b0.jpg 52136e1b6a3bb96d7ad03cefc860084b Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Buildings Description An account of the resource Houses and other structures on Cooper Street in Camden, N.J. Place Residence, business, or other entity. Illustrations Photograph by Jacob Lechner Significance 329 Cooper Street is a contributing structure of the Cooper Street Historic District, which is listed on the New Jersey and National Register of Historic Places. The anchor of a row of three houses built in the early 1850s, it supports the district’s significance as a collection of residences representing the nineteenth-century history of Camden. It further demonstrates the district’s stated significance as an illustration of transitions from residential and professional to commercial use. Its early history as a home to large families offers a resonant connection with its later purpose as the location of the Rutgers-Camden <a href="https://childhood.camden.rutgers.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Department of Childhood Studies</a>. Architectural style Greek Revival, obscured by later renovations. Date of construction c. 1851 History When George Bockius, a leather tanner from Philadelphia, bought land at the northwest corner of Fourth and Cooper Streets in 1851, his property was in the rapidly developing fringe between settled Camden and farmland to the north that had been owned by the Cooper family since the late seventeenth century. By the time Bockius and his family moved to 329 Cooper Street, in 1853, the Philadelphia Public Ledger was taking note of the “many beautiful and elegant improvements made on and about Cooper Street.” The newspaper observed, “There are now in process of construction on it some fifteen commodious dwelling houses, and every lot on it, from the river to Sixth street, has been sold to persons who will immediately improve them.” Bockius bought enough frontage on Cooper Street – forty feet – to build two rowhouses but erected just one, leaving a side lot along Fourth Street. His house anchored a row of three similar residences, each constructed of brick, three stories high. Bockius came to this newest area of Camden from Philadelphia’s oldest. His lineage traced to the colonial-era settlement of Germantown, and his family’s tannery operated in the traditional leather district around Third and Callowhill Streets near the Delaware River. The location near the waterfront gave the tanners good access to the skins that they imported from Mexico, South America, and Asia, and their operations north of Vine Street separated the hot, noxious activity of boiling and tanning skins from the heart of the city. The Bockius tannery, a longstanding family business, specialized in morocco leather, the soft product used for gloves, shoes, and book bindings. <a href="https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/ferries/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Ferries</a> between Camden and Philadelphia allowed Bockius to move his young and growing family to new surroundings while still tending to his business. In 1849, he had married Elizabeth Frances Logan (known as Fanny), the daughter of a Philadelphia merchant. She bore two children by the time they relocated to Camden, and three more after they moved. By 1860, their household consisted of George, then 38 years old; Fanny, ten years younger, and the children ranging in age from one-month-old Peter to a nine-year-old daughter, also called Fanny. The Bockius household also employed domestic servants. In 1860 they included two women, Irish immigrant Mary Dwire, 26 years old, and Mary Sanders, 19, who was born in Pennsylvania. A third servant, a man named Orman (Armon) Barranger (variously spelled Barringer or Barrenger), was 22 years old, born in New York, and identified by Census takers as “mulatto.” When he registered for the draft in Camden in 1863, he listed his race as “coloured” and his occupation as “waiter.” As the Bockius family grew, it also experienced loss. One child, 5-year-old Maria Logan Bockius, died in 1858 from causes not made public. In 1861, Fanny Logan Bockius was 10 years old when she developed “dropsy,” the condition of swelling later called edema, which can be an indication of disease in the heart, kidneys, or liver. In the custom of the time, funerals for the children were held at home before their burial, which took place at Philadelphia’s Laurel Hill Cemetery. A relative or family friend memorialized Fanny with a poem published in the Camden Democrat, beginning: How sweetly, e’en in death, that fair young face Shone out amid the flowers clustered there; One felt, tho’ beautiful, each blossom placed To deck her form, were even still less fair. Yes, beautiful she looked, so soon to lie Enclosed within the vault at Laurel Hill; So soon removed from earth, so young to die— Yet must we bow submission to His will. The Bockius family returned to Philadelphia after the death of young Fanny. The move also coincided with the expanding business interests of George Bockius. During the 1860s he took an active role in organizing a trade association, the Morocco Manufacturers’ Exchange, and he expanded his investments to include a ferry line between Philadelphia and Gloucester City, a railroad on South Broad Street in Philadelphia, and a coal company in New York. The house at 329 Cooper Street was rented to tenants until its sale to a new owner in 1865. Wealth and Health Like the Bockius family, the owner of 329 Cooper Street for the next 15 years had ties to Philadelphia and a large family. Cooper P. Knight, a fish and provisions merchant on the Delaware River waterfront in Philadelphia, had long lived in Camden in a house on Third Street with his parents and siblings. He started his own family there after marrying Catherine Fisher, who was known as Kate, in 1859. Although the Knights were Quakers with roots in Woodbury and New Castle County, Delaware, the wedding took place in Philadelphia at the First Presbyterian Church. The Knights moved into 329 Cooper Street in 1865, filling the house once again with the activity of young children. In the 1870 Census the family consisted of Cooper, age 44, Kate, then 32; six children ranging in age from 1 to 10; and Kate’s father, James Fisher, 68. They employed two domestic servants: Anna Potts, 32 years old, who had immigrated from England, and Martha Hatton, age 18, who was born in Pennsylvania. In addition to the servants, the family had luxuries that reflected financial prosperity: a gold watch and a piano. Cooper P. Knight had sufficient wealth to join other Camden and Philadelphia investors in capitalizing an oil-drilling venture in West Virginia. The family’s fortunes at 329 Cooper Street illustrated the tenuous relationship that could exist between health and wealth in the nineteenth century. In 1874, Cooper P. Knight experienced chest pain while out riding. A doctor provided medication, but “about half-past two in the morning Mrs. Knight was awakened by the struggling of her husband and found him dying, and dissolution speedily ensued,” the Camden Democrat newspaper recounted. He died at age 49, leaving Kate a widow with six children. They remained in the Cooper Street house, although with less household help. In the 1880 Census, when the children ranged in age from 9 to 20, their one servant was a 12-year-old girl, Florence Bickington. She was illiterate without knowledge of her mother’s identity, suggesting she might have been placed out to work by an orphanage. The death of Kate Knight in 1880 left her oldest daughter, Emily, the head of the household. The siblings could not sustain tax payments on the Cooper Street home, which was seized and put to sheriff’s sale in 1882. The siblings stayed together but moved to Stockton Township, the more rural area that later developed into the Cramer Hill section of Camden. Physician’s Family The sheriff’s sale of the Knight family’s home occurred during a decade of transformation for Cooper Street. During the 1880s, the thoroughfare was increasingly favored by physicians, often recent graduates of Philadelphia medical schools who found the growing city of Camden a good opportunity for starting new practices. The trend was encouraged by the construction of Cooper Hospital, which opened in 1887. Dr. J. Orlando White, head of the next family to live at 329 Cooper Street, followed the path of many other Camden physicians but was ahead of the trend for Cooper Street. Born in Atlantic County in 1847, White came to Camden as a young man to study medicine with a member of the Cooper family, Dr. Richard M. Cooper, and then enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania medical school. By 1871, he settled his family and practice into a rented house at 326 Cooper Street (across from the Knight family then at 329). He married Elizabeth Starr, the daughter of a prominent Camden industrialist; they had one son who died in infancy and another, Jesse, who was about 10 years old when they moved across the street. In the same block, Dr. White’s widowed mother, Mary, lived with one of his sisters at <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/82" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">325 Cooper Street</a>. Although considerably smaller than the earlier families at 329 Cooper Street, the Whites still employed two domestic servants, usually Irish immigrant women. During their first years at this address, from 1883 to 1887, the household also included Elizabeth White’s father, Jesse W. Starr. Then in his 70s, Starr had made and lost a fortune as proprietor of the Camden Iron Works, <a href="https://www.philageohistory.org/rdic-images/view-image.cfm/HGSv19.1830-1831" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">a massive foundry</a> that produced pipes for the water, sewage, and gas works of growing American cities. The company held contracts and franchises from Boston to San Francisco, and Starr’s prosperity became Camden’s good fortune through acts such as the donation of a site for new city hall. The iron works foundered during the financial panic of 1873, however, and began accumulating debt that led to voluntary bankruptcy in 1878. Starr, whose personal wealth had been estimated between $2 million and $3 million, lost his home, real estate, and horses to satisfy creditors. A widower, he spent the last years of his life with his daughter at 329 Cooper Street. He died there in 1886 of “nervous prostration,” at age 77, after exhibiting indications of dementia. While the Whites lived at 329 Cooper Street, the doctor pivoted from the practice of medicine to another matter of public health, the promotion of water plants and sewage disposal plants. (Perhaps not incidentally, the public works projects he promoted required pipes, which continued to be produced by successor owners of the Camden Iron Works.) He also led a legal fight to retain his wife’s standing as the sole designated heir of Jesse W. Starr, which was contested by her three brothers. Despite the bankruptcy ordeal, the estate amounted to several hundred thousand dollars. J. Orlando White lived until 1909, and 329 Cooper Street remained home for Elizabeth White for twenty-eight years longer, until her death in 1937. Unlike other widows on Cooper Street, she did not rent rooms to boarders; nor did she follow the practice of living with adult children (her married son, Jesse, lived in Merchantville). She shared the home only with servants, usually a married couple. For a remarkably long period—at least 15 years, from 1913 to 1928—her employees were James and Lucy Harris, African Americans who were born in Virginia. In their 30s and 40s while working for Elizabeth White, their lives had spanned from the Reconstruction era in the South to the wave of migration north that became known as the Great Migration. Lucy Harris had family ties in Philadelphia—at least one nephew, who worked as a porter at the Union League. Another member of the Harris family, Robert, was employed as a butler in the home of Elizabeth White’s son Jesse. End of an Era After the death of Elizabeth White, her son and daughter-in-law placed it in the care of a housekeeper and lived there themselves between 1940 and 1943. But the era of single-family homes on Cooper Street had passed. Since construction of the Delaware River Bridge (later renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge), completed in 1926, real estate interests in Camden had pushed conversions of residences on Cooper Street into offices and apartment buildings. By the 1940s two institutions of higher education, the College of South Jersey and the South Jersey School of Law, also were a growing presence. These forces combined to chart the future of 329 Cooper Street. In 1949, the College of South Jersey purchased 329 Cooper Street from the estate of Jesse S. White. The acquisition added to the collection of buildings that the college, founded in 1926, was acquiring in the vicinity of Cooper, Penn, and Linden Streets. A short walk from Cooper Street, the former mansion of advertising pioneer Francis Wayland Ayer at 406 Penn Street had been purchased by the college in 1946 for its main offices. At 329 Cooper Street, the college embarked on a renovation to create recreation rooms and a snack bar for students on the first floor and classrooms on the second. The strategy of campus expansion soon changed, however, when the College of South Jersey and the South Jersey School of Law affiliated with Rutgers University in 1950. Although 329 Cooper Street had been so recently renovated for student use, Rutgers developed a master plan for new buildings on an expanded campus to be created by urban renewal demolition in the area between Cooper Street and the Benjamin Franklin Bridge. Cooper Street houses were spared from demolition because of their perceived commercial value, but Rutgers sold 329 Cooper Street in 1954 to a dentist and his wife, Saul and Frances Artis. Dentistry and Donation Saul Artis was among many other professionals during the 1950s and 1960s who made their living in Camden but chose not to live there – a common pattern in the decades following World War II. Saul, a graduate of Camden High School and the University of Pennsylvania Dental School, had served in the Army Dental Corps in the Panama Canal Zone. Following the war, he established his dental practice in Camden, but after marrying Frances they and their three children lived in Haddon Township. Although living in the suburbs, the Artises invested in Camden, purchasing not only 329 Cooper Street from Rutgers but also the adjoining rowhouse, <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/81" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">327</a>. The buildings served as Saul’s office as well as rental apartments for students. While other buildings in North Camden suffered from the neglect of absentee landlords, the Artises participated in the Cooper Street Association, which carried out beautification and maintenance projects. In 1960, they remodeled 329 Cooper Street into modernized offices and apartments. The project reoriented the building to place its entrance on the Fourth Street side, and the addition of an exterior stair tower allowed inside stairs to be ripped out to create more room for offices and apartments. A former stable behind the house also was remodeled and converted into an air-conditioned office. While the Artises invested and remodeled, Rutgers carried out its urban renewal plan for the adjacent blocks to the north. Appreciating the growth of the university next door, by 1981 the Artises donated their buildings to Rutgers; Saul Artis still maintained an active dental practice at 329 Cooper Street until he retired, even after it became the Rutgers-Camden admissions office. The building, named the Artis Building after the donors, also served as the campus financial services office before being renovated once again for a new purpose. In 2018, 329 Cooper Street and the adjacent rowhouse at <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/81" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">327 Cooper Street</a> became home to the Rutgers-Camden <a href="https://childhood.camden.rutgers.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Department of Childhood Studies</a>. Associated Individuals For a list of known occupants of 329 Cooper Street, visit the <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15gz3_mGk3FcNl0TPaOZAq6B1CHvOpqRcY7a99xkp_l4/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Cooper Street Residents Database</a> and scroll down to 329. Sources Camden and Philadelphia Newspapers (Newspapers.com and Genealogy Bank). Camden City Directories (Camden County Historical Society and Ancestry.com). Camden County Property Records. New Jersey State Census, 1885-1915, and U.S. Census, 1850-1950 (Ancestry.com). Prowell, George R. The History of Camden County, New Jersey. Philadelphia: L.J. Richards & Co., 1886. Note on sources: Earlier historic structures surveys placed George Bockius at 325 Cooper Street, but property deeds establish that he lived at this address, 327. Research by Charlene Mires, Lucy Davis, Melissa Bryson, and Mary Katt. Posted by Charlene Mires Send corrections to cmires@camden.rutgers.edu Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 329 Cooper Street Subject The topic of the resource Description An account of the resource Contributing structure, Cooper Street Historic District. 1850s 1860s 1870s 1880s 1890s 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s 300 Block 329 Cooper Street African Americans Apartments Atlantic County Black Migration Camden Iron Works Children College of South Jersey Death Dentists Doctors Dropsy Fish Haddon Township Heart Disease Leather Manufacturers Merchantville Philadelphia Renovations Rutgers-Camden Servants Virginia https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/files/original/b371944a6a69dc0e6345a7e81c94c62e.jpg 9ca6b9724bb3a108ca1e7b5c6f1db82c Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Buildings Description An account of the resource Houses and other structures on Cooper Street in Camden, N.J. Place Residence, business, or other entity. Illustrations Photograph by Jacob Lechner Significance 325 Cooper Street is a contributing structure of the Cooper Street Historic District, which is listed on the New Jersey and National Register of Historic Places. The west end of a row of three houses built in the early 1850s, it supports the district’s significance as a collection of residences representing the nineteenth-century history of Camden. Its past residents include Camden’s second female physician, Lettie Ward. Since 2016, offices in this building have included the <a href="https://march.rutgers.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities</a> (MARCH) at Rutgers-Camden. Architectural style Greek Revival Date of construction c. 1852-1854 History As Cooper family heirs sold their land for development in the 1850s, they used two adjoining lots at 325 and <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/81" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">327</a> Cooper Street to set an aesthetic for the future. The deeds for both properties, executed in 1852, specified that “three story brick buildings only shall be erected upon Cooper Street.” This ruled out wood-frame structures and assured houses of a size and scale that would only be affordable to similarly substantial owners. The lot later numbered 325 became the west end of a row of three similar residences at the northwest corner of Fourth and Cooper Streets. The house, built between 1852 and 1854, was rented out by its first owners, who lived in Burlington County. From Countryside to City The first known tenants of 325 Cooper Street were members of the large and prominent Browning family, whose ancestors immigrated to the region from Holland in the early eighteenth century. Maurice Browning, who rented 325 Cooper Street beginning in 1854, grew up among a dozen siblings on his father Abraham’s farm in Stockton Township, about three and a half miles from Camden. The elder Browning, in addition to farming, also played a role in the city’s growth by establishing the Market Street Ferry, which passed to his heirs (including his son Maurice) when he died in 1836. Maurice Browning, born in 1811, left the farm and pursued a career in pharmacy, working first in a drug store in Mount Holly, then studying pharmacy in Philadelphia, and then opening a drug store on Market Street in Camden. By the time he rented the house on Cooper Street, he had expanded his business activities to manufacturing and banking. With other family members, in 1840 he established the Aroma Mills, which extracted and sold dyes from woods. In 1855, around the time he moved to Cooper Street, Browning became a director of the newly formed Farmers’ and Mechanics Bank (later the First National Bank of Camden). The Browning family at 325 Cooper Street in 1860 was headed by Maurice, then in his 40s, and his wife Anna, in her 30s, the daughter of a Philadelphia merchant who also owned a farm near Haddonfield. Married since 1840, their years on Cooper Street began in sadness in 1854 with the death of their oldest daughter, Ellen, who was 14 years old. The cause of her death was not publicly reported, but in the custom of the time her funeral was held at home prior to burial in Colestown Cemetery. The Brownings had earlier lost another child, a son named Maurice after his father, who died in 1850 when less than 2 years of age. These losses left the Brownings a family of five. When documented by the 1860 Census, the children were a son, Abraham, 15 years old, and two daughters, Josephine, 6, and Alice, 3. Another son, Lehman, was born the next year, in 1861. The Brownings employed two domestic servants, both Irish immigrants: Rebecca Caffrey, 36 years old, and Catherine McMullen, 17. During the family’s years on Cooper Street, Maurice Browning joined in the enthusiasm for the new Republican Party, founded in 1854. At a mass meeting in Camden in 1856, Browning was among the local party supporters who turned out to voice support for the Republican platform and its national candidates, John C. Fremont for president and William L. Dayton for vice president. In 1862, Browning was among the original members of the Union League of Philadelphia, founded to support the Union cause during the Civil War. Camden, Philadelphia, and the World The Browning family left 325 Cooper Street by 1863, the year before the property’s original owners sold the home to Charles A. Sparks, a partner in a Philadelphia wholesale grocery and imports business. With his wife, Amelia, and their four children, Sparks lived at 325 Cooper Street during a decade, from 1864 to 1874, that proved pivotal in his career. Like other merchants with Camden and Philadelphia ties, his interests widened to investments that aided Camden’s growth and the region’s reach outward in the nation and the world. Charles Sparks had family roots in <a href="https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/locations/salem-county-new-jersey/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Salem County</a>, New Jersey, but his father (a mariner), mother, and a brother had moved to Camden by 1850. Sparks began his adult working life across the river in Philadelphia as a clerk in the wholesale grocery, importing, and exporting business of Edward C. Knight, a Camden County native, and soon became a partner in the E.C. Knight Co. While remaining with the firm, Sparks chose to live in Camden after his 1852 marriage to Amelia Ross, who was born in England, the daughter of a merchant who became an extensive landholder in Stockton and Pennsauken Townships. They moved to Cooper Street from their earlier home near Third and Market Streets. By the time of the 1870 Census their household at 325 Cooper Street included four children, a son and three daughters ranging in age from 5 to 13; Charles by this time was 43 years old, and Amelia was 40. They employed at least one domestic servant, Sarah McHale, likely an Irish immigrant. Charles Sparks' association with the E.C. Knight Co. placed him in an extensive network of trade between Philadelphia, the Pacific, and the Caribbean. Around the time that Sparks went to work for Knight, the firm expanded its trade from importing coffee from the West Indies to seagoing trade with California. As he became a partner in the company, Knight initiated imports of molasses and sugar from Cuba. At first acting as an agent for other refineries in Philadelphia, by 1870 the E.C. Knight Co. established its own refinery complex in the Southwark section of the city, with Charles Sparks in charge. Edward Knight also invested in railroads and steamship lines; in 1874, Sparks joined him as an incorporator of the <a href="http://cnhillsborough.blogspot.com/2021/03/delaware-and-bound-brook-railroad.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Delaware River & Bound Brook Railroad Company</a>, a 27-mile line reaching northward from Trenton that posed a challenge to the Camden & Amboy Railroad’s dominance of rail connections with New York. Sparks' success in business returned benefits in Camden. At home at 325 Cooper Street, he initiated interior and exterior renovations. The West Jersey Press observed in 1869 that Sparks “has made a decided and tasteful alteration, both internally and externally, in his dwelling. He has replaced the ordinary window glass with French plate, in walnut sash, giving the front a pleasing effect.” The house in 2022 retains an impressive nineteenth-century hallstand, marble fireplace, and ornately framed parlor mirror that may attest to these improvements. Sparks also invested time and funds in Camden institutions, for example serving on the board of the Farmers’ and Mechanics’ Bank (later the First National Bank of Camden) with the previous occupant of 325 Cooper Street, Maurice Browning. He served on the building committee for the First Presbyterian Church, supported the Republican Party, and became known for a fine pair of horses that he drove in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park and while on vacation in Atlantic City. The role of Amelia Sparks in these activities, or others independent of her husband, did not leave traces in the public record. She did, however, nurture a lasting connection with Camden. The Sparks family moved to Philadelphia in 1874 but kept 325 Cooper Street as a rental property. Many years later, after the death of Charles Sparks in 1904, Amelia Sparks returned to the house on Cooper Street. Then in her 70s, she spent another decade in her earlier home with one of her daughters, a niece, and servants to take care of the housework. Rental Property The Sparks family’s removal to Philadelphia in 1874 opened a period of three decades of varied tenancy at 325 Cooper Street. For most of the 1880s, the tenants were members of the Browning family who had lived at the same address two decades before—in this later era, George G. Browning, the brother of Maurice Browning and his partner in the dye industry. His household included Mary White, his mother-in-law but also mother of Dr. J. Orlando White, who lived two doors away at <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/80" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">329 Cooper Street</a>. After this return of the Brownings, the house was offered for rent or sale periodically through the economic downturn of the 1890s until it became a boarding house in 1897. For a short period until 1901, the boarding house was run by Catherine Fisler, who lived in the home with her husband, Leonard, a Philadelphia produce dealer and Civil War veteran who fought for the Union with the Pennsylvania Third Cavalry. Their household included a grown son, his wife, and a grandchild, in addition to as many as eight boarders. When recorded in the Census of 1900, the boarders reflected the coalescing population of the growing industrial city—all were born in New Jersey or Pennsylvania, but their parents had birthplaces that included Delaware, Virginia, England, and Germany. The boarders held jobs ranging from unskilled laborer to railroad conductor to white-collar professions. The last renter before Amelia Sparks returned to Cooper Street was Alfred G. McCausland, a railroad superintendent who rented the house for two years before purchasing another at 521 Cooper Street. Formerly a longtime resident of Wilmington, Delaware, McCausland and his family arrived in Camden by 1903 when the Reading Railroad transferred him from the Wilmington and Northern Railroad to the Atlantic City line. In his late 40s at the time of the move, McCausland’s household on Cooper Street included his second wife, Elizabeth (Lizzie), and two grown children from his first marriage. His son Frank also worked in railroading as a brakeman. Business and Professional Women The house at 325 Cooper Street remained in the ownership of the Sparks family until 1924, passing from Amelia Sparks to her daughter Emma and then to a niece, also named in Amelia Sparks. They remained in the home after the death of the elder Amelia in 1915 but also rented to other tenants—in 1920, a widowed designer of ladies’ gowns, Blanche Morse, and her family of four children, three of whom were adults working and adding to the household income. A daughter worked as a clerk in a department store, a son was a bank clerk, and another son a secretary for a leather company. By the 1920s, Cooper Street was experiencing a transition to commercial uses caused indirectly by the construction of the Delaware River Bridge (later renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge), which opened in 1926. Expecting an economic boom in Camden, boosters and real estate interests sought to remake Cooper Street into a commercial corridor. With many former residences converting into apartments and offices, it was therefore newsworthy when 325 Cooper Street sold in 1924 to an undisclosed buyer, “to remain as a residence,” the Camden Morning Post reported. In fact, the residence became both a home and an office for its notable new owner, Dr. Lettie Ward. She was a longtime physician by the time she purchased 325 Cooper Street, but when she became a doctor in the 1890s she was only the second woman to practice medicine in the city. A Camden native, born in 1859, Ward initially followed a more common career path for unmarried, college-educated women and became a schoolteacher and principal. She was inspired, though, by Camden’s first female physician, <a href="https://njwomenshistory.org/discover/biographies/sophia-presley/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Sophia Presley</a>, who also had begun her career in teaching. In 1894, Ward resigned her position as principal of the Jesse Starr School and enrolled in the <a href="https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/womans-medical-college-of-pennsylvania/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania</a>. Graduating in 1898, she returned to Camden to practice. Ward purchased 325 Cooper Street in 1924 after being displaced from her previous longtime home and office three blocks away, on Cooper Street near Sixth, because it stood in the path for extending a street to connect with the new Delaware River Bridge. In her new home, she had her office on the first floor, and in addition to providing health care she hosted executive board meetings of the Camden County Business and Professional Woman’s Club. For her fourteen years at this address, Ward lived upstairs from her office in a household with other unmarried women of her generation. When recorded by the 1930 Census, Ward was 70 years old and shared the living quarters with three other women, one of them her cousin Alice Hibbs, 60 years old. The other two, described in the Census as lodgers, were lifelong companions and recently retired principals of Camden schools: Laura J. Harrop, 64, and Lillie T. Osler, 63. After Ward retired and moved in 1938, Harrop and Osler also left to live with other family members and remained together for the rest of their long lives, each of them reaching 101 years of age. They were buried side-by-side in the Haddonfield Baptist Cemetery. Rooms and Apartments After Lettie Ward’s period of ownership, 325 Cooper Street followed a trajectory more typical of older rowhouses in North Camden, increasingly deteriorating yet becoming more densely populated with roomers and apartment dwellers. By 1940, a family of six rented the house and in turn let rooms to six additional lodgers. An ad offering an apartment in 1943 promised “refined surroundings,” but by 1949 a landlord was ordered by the city to install a shower and a toilet to bring the building up to code. In the 1950s, the house was marketed as a potential office location at a “reduced price” and later marketed for sale as a rooming and apartment house. Tenants at 325 Cooper Street beginning in the 1940s reflected the changing demographics of Camden, especially the growing presence of <a href="https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/puerto-rican-migration/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Puerto Rican residents</a>. The Campbell Soup Company had recruited Puerto Rican workers to Camden during the Second World War, at first housing them near the soup factory on the waterfront. As workers stayed, created lives and families, and started businesses and institutions, they became increasingly dominant in the population of North Camden. Tenants with Spanish surnames were common at 325 Cooper Street; three born in Puerto Rico were documented in the 1950 Census: Vincent Porrata, 37, a kitchen helper in a hotel; and Arthur Cruz, 29, and Ralph Maldonado, 24, both laborers for a metal specialty company. Sometime prior to 1980, 325 Cooper Street became the property of Edward Teitelman, a psychiatrist by profession but also a historic preservation activist. Teitelman purchased and maintained several of Cooper Street’s most notable houses remaining from the nineteenth century, including two others in the same block, <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/78" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">303</a> and <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/79" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">305</a>. He lived in 305 Cooper Street, the distinctive Queen Anne Revival residence designed by Philadelphia architect Wilson Eyre. By the late 1980s, however, 325 Cooper Street was appearing in legal notices for overdue back taxes. Rutgers University acquired 325 Cooper Street from trustees for Edward and Mildred Teitelman in 2001, and renovations created offices for the New Jersey Small Business Development Center of Rutgers-Camden. The building later served as home to the Rutgers-Camden Institute for Effective Education, offices for civic engagement activities, and beginning in 2016 as co-working space for the <a href="https://march.rutgers.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities</a> (MARCH). Among other activities, MARCH initiated the “Learning from Cooper Street” project to recover and raise awareness of the Cooper Street Historic District and adjoining blocks occupied by Rutgers-Camden. Associated Individuals For a list of all known occupants of 325 Cooper Street, link to the <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15gz3_mGk3FcNl0TPaOZAq6B1CHvOpqRcY7a99xkp_l4/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Cooper Street Residents Database</a> and scroll down to 325. Sources Camden and Philadelphia Newspapers (Newspapers.com and Genealogy Bank). Camden City Directories (Camden County Historical Society and Ancestry.com). Camden County Property Records. New Jersey State Census, 1885-1915, and U.S. Census, 1850-1950 (Ancestry.com). Prowell, George R. The History of Camden County, New Jersey. Philadelphia: L.J. Richards & Co., 1886. Note on sources: A structure survey prepared by the Camden Division of Planning in 1980 identified 325 Cooper Street as the "George Bockius House." Further research in property deeds has established that George Bockius lived instead in the similar house at 329 Cooper Street. Research by Charlene Mires and Lucy Davis Posted by Charlene Mires Send corrections to cmires@camden.rutgers.edu Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 325 Cooper Street Description An account of the resource Contributing structure, Cooper Street Historic District. 1850s 1860s 1870s 1880s 1890s 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s 300 Block 325 Cooper Street Apartments Boarding House Burlington County Civil War Doctors Dyes Greek Revival Grocers Merchants Philadelphia Puerto Ricans Railroad Executives Republican Party Rooming House Rutgers-Camden Salem County Sugar Teachers https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/files/original/1d735b273d6cc487e33de75b08c156ba.jpg e1ea6c03aa63880aefb919ad6ad8ecac Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Buildings Description An account of the resource Houses and other structures on Cooper Street in Camden, N.J. Place Residence, business, or other entity. Illustrations Photograph by Jacob Lechner Significance 323 Cooper Street is a contributing structure of the Cooper Street Historic District, which is listed on the New Jersey and National Registers of Historic Places. Its designers, Hazlehurst & Huckel of Philadelphia, are named in National Register documentation as among the architects whose work warranted designating the district based on its distinctive architecture. In 1980 a structure survey prepared by the Camden Division of Planning described the house as “one of the few examples of Queen Anne architecture of Camden to explore the richness of the style’s variety of forms and requisite asymmetricality.” The building also is notable for residents who played important roles in the development of Camden as a modern city, one of whom was a wounded veteran of the Civil War. Before its ownership by Rutgers, the house served for nearly 25 years as the rectory of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. Architectural style Queen Anne with elements of Colonial Revival. Date of construction 1886 History The house at 323 Cooper Street reflects transformations on Cooper Street by the 1880s, when architect-designed houses began to appear on the increasingly prestigious thoroughfare. Higher-style homes accompanied a change in the streetscape, which gained small front yards after the Camden City Council agreed to a resident’s proposal to move the curbs of Cooper Street toward the center for 12 feet on each site. In contrast to adjacent older brick rowhouses, the stone-front 323 Cooper Street was designed by the Philadelphia firm <a href="https://www.philadelphiabuildings.org/pab/app/ar_display.cfm/22158" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Hazlehurst & Huckel</a>, who were known for residential, church, and commercial architecture. One of the partners, Edward P. Hazlehurst, had worked with one of Philadelphia’s best-known architects, Frank Furness, before starting his own firm with Samuel Huckel Jr. in 1881. The partners subsequently designed another Cooper Street house (<a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/61" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">527</a>) in similar style, and they won a competition to design the Manufacturer’s Club prominently located at Broad and Walnut Streets in Philadelphia. Later, Huckel individually won a commission to remodel Grand Central Station in New York. The lot at 323 Cooper Street was available for construction in 1886 because it had long been owned by the occupants of the house next door (<a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/84" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">321 Cooper Street</a>), chemical manufacturer Joseph De La Cour and his family. The new house at 323 was commissioned in 1886 for De La Cour’s daughter Emily and her husband, Edward F. Nivin. By that time a family with five young children, the Nivins lived in the house briefly, but by 1890 with Joseph De La Cour in failing health, they put both houses (321 and 323 Cooper Street) up for sale. Networks of Power for the Modern City The first long-term owners of 323 Cooper Street, John J. and Anna Burleigh, also filled the house with young children. They had five children by the time they moved in, and three more were born during their eight years on Cooper Street – two sons and six daughters. (One other son died at some point prior to 1900.) John Burleigh, born in 1855 in Gloucester County, was the son of Irish immigrants; Anna, formerly Anna Smith, was born in Elmer, Salem County, the same year. After they married in 1874, when they were both 19 years old, they settled in Camden. When the Burleighs moved to Camden, John Burleigh was a telegraph operator, a skill he had picked up beginning at the age of 14. He gained a position as station and telegraph operator for the West Jersey Railroad Company in Elmer, Anna’s hometown. By the time they began their family life in Camden, Burleigh had advanced to chief telegraph operator for the railroad. It was an auspicious time to have knack for wires, electricity, and transportation. In the 1870s and early 1880s, Burleigh played a leading role in creating the infrastructure that made Camden a modern, industrial city. For the South Jersey Telephone Company, in 1879 he oversaw the laying of a cable beneath the Delaware River to connect Camden with Philadelphia by telephone. In 1881, he became a manager and electrician for the new Electric Illuminating Company of Camden – later the Camden Heating and Lighting Company – which led the city’s transition from gas to electric lighting. All the while, he maintained his position with the railroad, advancing to train master in 1884. His business activities expanded to electric streetcar lines, installed in the 1890s in Camden and between beach communities of the Jersey Shore. The Burleighs’ purchase of one of the most stylish new homes on Cooper Street in 1890 displayed affluence also achieved in another arena: real estate finance. During the 1880s Burleigh had been elected secretary of several Camden building and loan associations. Increasingly prominent as a financier, he became secretary of the Camden Board of Trade the same year the family moved to Cooper Street. Ultimately, in 1892 Burleigh gave up his position with the West Jersey Railroad because of the press of other business. He remained an officer with the Camden Heating and Lighting Company and the various building and loan associations that were enabling home ownership for the middle class. Going a step farther, in 1889, he was among 25 incorporators of the new South Jersey Finance Company, “to buy and sell almost anything; it will make a specialty of real estate operations, negotiations of mortgages and the like and it will have power to guarantee titles,” the Camden County Courier reported. “One of the objects of the company will be the purchase, for people without means, of homes, and permitting them to pay for the same on monthly installments until they have paid sufficient to secure a loan from one of our building associations.” Another company organized a decade later sold insurance to cover the risks of defaults on mortgages. While living at 323 Cooper Street, Burleigh’s social circles included the Camden Republican Club, then located across the street at 312 Cooper. He prevailed in euchre tournaments and joined the club on a trip to Civil War sites in Virginia. The Burleighs, a rare Roman Catholic family among the Protestants on Cooper Street, also devoted time and energy to their parish, the Church of the Immaculate Conception. John Burleigh led the project to build a Catholic lyceum (lecture hall) adjacent to the church and organized a literary society for youth. Like others of their social class, the Burleighs spent extended periods during the summer at the Jersey Shore, usually Atlantic City. The Burleighs stayed in Camden until 1898. By that time, with John Burleigh firmly established as a financier, the family moved to the fashionable railroad suburb of Merchantville. John Burleigh’s fortunes continued to climb when the General Electric Company absorbed the Camden Heating and Lighting Company, which he still managed, in 1899. At the Burleighs’ new home in Merchantville, the U.S. Census documented the family in 1900: John and Anna had been married 26 years, and their eight children ranged in age from 4 to 24. That year they employed four domestic servants: a butler, a cook, a housemaid, and a coachman. Civil War Veteran John Burleigh sold his house to a contemporary and associate: George Barrett, who was a lumber dealer but also a director of the Camden Lighting and Heating Company and a fellow member of the Board of Trade and the Camden Republican Club. While Burleigh engaged in putting electricity to work in utilities and transportation, Barrett provided necessary infrastructure, like telephone poles and streetcar rail ties. He also held elective offices, culminating in a term as Camden County Sheriff between 1893 and 1896. This also placed him in Burleigh’s realm of real estate through his duties of seizing and selling properties in default of mortgages or tax payments. Barrett, who owned 323 Cooper Street for the next two decades, was born in England in 1846 and immigrated to the United States with his parents at the age of 10. Raised in Pennsylvania, by 1878 he was in Camden and playing a role in the city’s then-dominant industry as co-owner of a sixteen-acre sawmill operation on the Delaware River waterfront between Penn and Pearl Streets. Barrett and his wife, Sarah, also from Pennsylvania, he lived during the 1880s and 1890s at 126 Cooper Street and raised three children there. The Barretts also acquired a cottage at the Jersey Shore, in Ocean City, where George was known for his boating and hunting skills, and Sarah hosted an annual fish dinner for other Camden women at the shore. Sarah Barrett participated in the women’s auxiliary groups of her husband’s organizations and joined the Camden Woman’s Club. By the time the Barretts moved to 323 Cooper Street in 1899, George Barrett was devoting his greatest energy to the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), the patriotic and fraternal organization of veterans of the Civil War. Barrett, who fought for the Union with the 126th Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment, had been among the troops in the trenches during the siege of Richmond and then occupied the city after it fell. He bore a lasting reminder of the war in the form of a limp caused by a gunshot to the knee. In Camden, Barrett was a leader in the Thomas K. Lee Post No. 5 of the GAR, and the same year he moved to 232 Cooper Street he was elected Department Commander for the New Jersey Division. Barrett coordinated planning for the national GAR encampment in Philadelphia that year, and throughout his years on Cooper Street engaged in meticulous planning and issued orders for GAR encampments and for the commemorations and parades on Memorial Day, Appomattox Day marking the end of the War, and other occasions. He supplied a 102-foot-long white pine pole for the American flag that flew at the Post No. 5 headquarters at Fifth Street and Taylor Avenue. Beyond Camden, he served on inspection committees for the Soldiers’ Home in Vineland, and he traveled to national GAR encampments in other cities. In 1913, he boarded a special train with other Camden veterans to attend the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the Battle of Gettysburg. When the Barretts moved to 323 Cooper Street, their household consisted of George, then 52 years old; Sarah, 48, and two of their three grown children, daughter Flora, 21, and son Frank, 19, who worked as a bookkeeper. The children left home when they married, but the Barretts remained until 1923. That year, with construction of the Delaware River Bridge soon to disrupt North Camden, they moved to Moorestown. Public Lives, Private Lives Demolitions for the approach to the new bridge across the Delaware River displaced the next residents of 323 Cooper Street from their earlier long-time residence in the 500 block of Linden Street. Francis and Katherine Weaver lived at 323 Cooper Street for the next decade, although title to the home was held by their adult daughter and son-in-law, who lived in Salem County. When they moved to Cooper Street in 1924, Francis Weaver was an established attorney, 63 years old, and his wife was 10 years younger. Their household included Weaver’s mother, Harriet, and his sister Anna, a retired teacher who had become blind. Servants attended to the needs of the older women, who both died while the Weavers lived on Cooper Street – Harriet in 1927 and Anna in 1934. Francis and Katherine Weaver were both public figures. In addition to his legal practice, Francis Weaver served on the New Jersey State Board of Taxation, where he presided over appeals of tax assessments. Katherine Weaver was an active club woman, devoting greatest energy to the Daughters of the American Revolution, where she was regarded as an authority on genealogical research. Her club activities extended to groups in Haddonfield and Moorestown, while in Camden she helped with the annual charity events for Cooper Hospital and hosted events for the Women’s Auxiliary of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. At St. Paul’s, located a block from the Weaver’s Cooper Street home, Katherine Weaver became involved in social work as a fund-raiser and leader for the Church Mission of Help, part of a nationwide Episcopal organization that sought to combat juvenile delinquency and render aid to young women and girls in cities. Among its activities in Camden, the mission sought to address the needs of young unwed mothers by advising them of their rights to financial support from their babies’ fathers, helping them find employment, and providing clothing for the babies. Weaver was involved with the mission from its inception in Camden in 1928 and served as financial secretary by 1932. To most outward appearances, the Weavers lived a conventional life at 323 Cooper Street, but during the 1930s they also made the news in startling ways. In 1930, their son-in-law J. William McCausland was killed in a gangland-style shooting in Salem as he carried out his duties as a paymaster for the Salem Glass Works. He was carrying $3,000 in a cash box when a car drove up and a man stepped onto the running board, aimed a revolver, and fired. McCausland fell onto the cash box, dying from the gunshot, and the robbers fled. The Weavers’ daughter, Helen, was left a widow with three children. The family made news again in 1934-35 stemming from longtime tensions within the Weavers’ marriage, centered in large part on Katherine Weaver’s frequent activities outside the home. After fighting escalated into a physical altercation, Katherine Weaver left her husband in 1934 and filed for spousal support and a divorce. The subsequent legal hearings laid bare the difficulties of the marriage, which were reported by Camden newspapers in sensational detail. Weaver lost the case, but she lived apart from her husband thereafter. Francis Weaver died at 323 Cooper Street in 1938; Katherine Weaver lived until 1962 with her daughter in Salem County. Episcopal Rectory For nearly 25 years, 323 Cooper Street next served as the rectory for nearby St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. Rev. William D. McLean, whose father was an Episcopal priest in Chicago, moved into the home by the end of 1938 with his family, including his wife, Alice (a native of Moorestown), and three children under the age of 5. They stayed until 1940, when Rev. McLean, then 33 years old, was commissioned a first lieutenant chaplain with the U.S. Army. The 1940 Census showed two other occupants of the household, a housekeeper Louisa Mitchell, 52 years old, and her husband, Joseph, 61, a watchman at the RCA radio factory. For the remaining years of 323 Cooper Street’s service to St. Paul’s, from 1940 until 1962, the rectory was home to Rev. Percival C. Bailey, McLean’s successor. Bailey, a native of Michigan, came to Camden with 22 years of experience in the ministry, including pastorates in mining districts and industrial Detroit. He had traveled widely abroad and brought his new parishioners first-hand observations of the upheavals in Germany that accompanied Chancellor Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. After the United States entered World War II, Bailey served on a committee formed by local pastors to offer counseling to conscientious objectors. Bailey, who was unmarried, employed housekeepers during his years at 323 Cooper Street and rented excess rooms to tenants. When recorded by the 1950 U.S. Census the household included Bailey, then 58 years old; a housekeeper, Viola Darcy, 50, and three lodgers: Paul E. Kennedy, 44, a railroad conductor; John Costello, 24, a restaurant dishwasher, and Matos Costello, a deck hand. The Costellos, who roomed together, were both born in <a href="https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/puerto-rican-migration/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Puerto Rico</a>, a reflection of the changing demographics of Camden in the decades following World War II. Community Health and Nutrition Percival Bailey remained at 323 Cooper Street until he retired from active ministry in 1962. From that point onward, the former residence served as an office for a series of community service organizations. The Visiting Nurses Association of Camden occupied 323 Cooper Street between 1963 and 1966 after urban renewal demolitions displaced the group from a nearby Fourth Street headquarters. From the late 1960s through the late 1980s, as Rutgers University expanded its presence on Cooper Street, various nutrition services of the New Jersey Cooperative Extension Service had a home in 323 Cooper Street. By 2002, the building housed <a href="https://www.njhi.org/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">New Jersey Health Initiatives</a>, a grant-making program of the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation, and by 2022 the former residence also included the <a href="https://camden.rutgers.edu/discover-camden/leadership/office-provost" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Provost’s office</a> for Rutgers University-Camden. Associated Individuals For a list of known occupants of 323 Cooper Street, visit the <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15gz3_mGk3FcNl0TPaOZAq6B1CHvOpqRcY7a99xkp_l4/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Cooper Street Residents Database</a> and scroll down to 323. Associated architects/builders <a href="https://www.philadelphiabuildings.org/pab/app/ar_display.cfm/22158" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Hazlehurst & Huckel</a>, Philadelphia. Sources Camden and Philadelphia Newspapers (Newspapers.com and Genealogy Bank). Camden City Directories (Camden County Historical Society and Ancestry.com). Camden County Property Records. New Jersey State Census, 1885-1915, and U.S. Census, 1850-1950 (Ancestry.com). Prowell, George R. The History of Camden County, New Jersey. Philadelphia: L.J. Richards & Co., 1886. Research by Charlene Mires, Mikaela Maria, and Lucy Davis. Posted by Charlene Mires Send corrections to cmires@camden.rutgers.edu Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 323 Cooper Street Description An account of the resource Contributing structure, Cooper Street Historic District. 1880s 1890s 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s 2020s 300 Block 323 Cooper Street Attorneys Bridge Impact Camden Republican Club Civil War Clergy Daughters of the American Revolution GAR Gloucester County Hazlehurst & Huckel Lumber Merchantville Moorestown Nurses Ocean City Pennsylvania Public Health Public Officials Queen Anne Real Estate Rutgers-Camden Salem County St. Paul's Episcopal Church Telegraph Telephone Transportation Utilities Women's Clubs World War II https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/files/original/8647158bce125025f304bbb7304b26b1.jpg 91e6ee1c16471d13f15396b3a09fe1f6 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Buildings Description An account of the resource Houses and other structures on Cooper Street in Camden, N.J. Place Residence, business, or other entity. Illustrations Photograph by Jacob Lechner Significance 321 Cooper Street is a contributing structure of the Cooper Street Historic District, which is listed on the New Jersey and National Registers of Historic Places. The Italianate rowhouse supports the district’s designation for architectural merit and offers a valuable contrast to the adjacent <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/83" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">323 Cooper Street</a> built in Queen Anne style 20 years later. The house also reflects the historic district's statement of significance that Cooper Street demonstrates "change from residential and professional to commercial." The 321 Cooper Street building began as a family home then turned to professional and commercial uses in the twentieth century. The residents of 321 Cooper Street connect this address with varieties of pharmacy and medical practice in the nineteenth century and demonstrate Camden’s role in forging connections between Philadelphia and the nearby countryside. As an office building for Rutgers-Camden, in the twenty-first century 321 Cooper Street houses the <a href="https://cure.camden.rutgers.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Center for Urban Research and Education (CURE)</a>. Architectural style Italianate Date of construction 1867 History The building at 321 Cooper Street is a survivor of a pair of Italianate rowhouses built in 1867 for two prominent Camden business and civic leaders, Joseph De La Cour (321) and Benjamin Archer (next door, <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/85" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">319</a>). An advancement in style from the nearby Greek Revival rowhouses of the 1850s, 321 Cooper Street and its neighbor inspired the West Jersey Press in 1867 to invoke a vision of home life from the song popular during the Civil War era, “Home Sweet Home.” Noting the superior workmanship and the latest home comforts, the newspaper commented, “It is by the addition of such buildings as these that will make Cooper Street in reality what it has been jokingly styled, the ‘Fifth Avenue’ of Camden.” Completing the picture, De La Cour and Archer installed iron fences on white marble foundations between the street and the side yards of their adjoining homes. Pharmacy and Public Service Joseph C. De La Cour had been the proprietor of a drug and chemical store in Camden for thirty years by the time he and his family moved to Cooper Street from their quarters near the store (Third and Arch Streets). De La Cour, whose father was French, was born in New York in 1813 but spent most of his boyhood in in Philadelphia. He went to work there as a cabinet maker, but he studied pharmacy and chemistry at night. In 1836, he bought his Camden drug store. He and his wife, Elizabeth, lived adjacent to the store in a household that grew to include two children and often other extended family members and employees. The De La Cour pharmacy expanded into a manufacturing business. The same year the De La Cours moved to Cooper Street, the druggist bought a brick building at Front and Arch Streets for an enlarged laboratory. As manufacturing chemists and pharmacists, De La Cour and his son (also named Joseph, also a pharmacist) produced and sold compounds and supplies for other drug stores. Their products included extracts, ointments, syrups, and powders of various kinds, and they became especially well known for a non-irritating adhesive plaster. The company also gained a contract to provide surgical equipment to the United States government. Joseph and Elizabeth De La Cour also devoted energy to civic and charitable activities. Joseph served as a city alderman and for many years was a member and treasurer of the Camden Board of Education. During the 1860s, the couple joined their neighbors in founding the <a href="http://www.dvrbs.com/camden/CamdenNJ-Home-Friendless-Children.htm" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Camden Home for Friendless Children</a> to provide shelter and aid to poor children. Elizabeth De La Cour joined the women of home’s Board of Managers, who raised funds and oversaw the facility as it grew to serve as many as forty children, including those who lost fathers in the Civil War. While altruistic, the home also reflected prevailing attitudes toward the poor by seeking to bind out children to homes where they could learn useful trades. At 321 Cooper Street, the 1870 Census recorded a multi-generational De La Cour household that included Joseph C. De La Cour, then 57 years old; Elizabeth, 50; their daughter Emily, 27; and their recently married son Joseph Loriot De La Cour, 32, with his wife, Mary, and 1-year-old son, Joseph Carl De La Cour. (Joseph L. De La Cour was a veteran of the Civil War, having enlisted in 1861 with a Zouave unit that deployed to Virginia and guarded railroads near Alexandria for three months; while there, they were visited by President Abraham Lincoln.) Also in the De La Cour household in 1870 were the elder Joseph’s mother, Mary Peall, 76 years old, and two Black domestic servants: Rachael Green, 42, and Tinsey Weeks, 17. During the 1870s, the father and son pharmacists were among the founders of the New Jersey Pharmaceutical Society, which sought to advance the science of pharmacy and establish professional standards through state regulations. After forming in 1874, the group achieved a state law governing the practice of pharmacy, including a requirement that drug stores be managed by registered pharmacists. Joseph L. De La Cour served as vice president and president of the society during these productive years. The composition of the De La Cour household evolved in the 1870s, first with the death of Mary Peall in 1874, at the age of 80. Around the same time, Joseph L. and his family moved to their own home on Sixth Street, but meanwhile Emily De La Cour married and brought a new son-in-law to 321 Cooper Street. With her husband Edward F. Nivin, a Philadelphia tin dealer, Emily bore two daughters, who were 3 and 2 years old by the time the 1880 Census documented the extended family. The household continued to employ two domestic servants, but in 1880 they were white, Irish immigrants: Mary McCort, 40, and Elizabeth Murphy, 25. The De La Cour family lost an anchor in 1883 when Elizabeth De Le Cour died at age of 64, two days before Christmas, from an illness that was not publicly identified. The Board of Managers of the Camden Home for Friendless Children published a tribute in the Camden Morning Post, calling her “ever ready with her time, strength and means, to help on the good work.” Elizabeth De Le Cour also held title to the family home, which upon her death became the property of her daughter, Emily Nivin. While Joseph C. De La Cour continued to head the household at 321 Cooper Street, it was increasingly a home full of Nivins, who had two more children by 1885. In 1887, De La Cour marked his fiftieth year in business while still at this address, but soon thereafter he moved in with his son on Sixth Street. When he died in 1891 at the age of 79, he was described admiringly as “one of the oldest and best-known citizens of Camden.” The Nivins built a new house in the adjoining side lot to the De La Cour home, at 323 Cooper Street, but lived there only briefly. The De La Cours’ era on Cooper Street ended in 1890, when both houses were put up for sale. Eclectic Medicine During the early 1890s, 321 Cooper Street changed hand several times, in part due to court actions related to debts of new owners. While the title transferred from one owner to the next, for about two years, in 1892 and 1893, the house gained a high-profile new use as the “medical parlor” of James Parker Finlaw. A familiar face in Camden from the portrait that appeared in his constant advertising in the local newspapers, Finlaw offered remedies for “chronic diseases of all kinds in both sexes.” In the ads, he published testimonials to his success treating everything from throat and lung diseases to hemorrhoids to “female complaints of all kinds.” He had been in the business for twenty years by the time he came to Cooper Street. Finlaw was a practitioner of “eclectic medicine,” a nineteenth-century method of healing that stressed plant-based remedies and avoided chemical compounds, over-drugging, and invasive surgery. Finlaw, born on a Salem County farm in 1847, came to this field following service in the Civil War. While still a teenager, in 1863 he had enlisted in the <a href="https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/search-battle-units-detail.htm?battleUnitCode=UNJ0002RC" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Second Cavalry Regiment of New Jersey</a>, which skirmished, fought, and foraged for two years in the middle and deep South. After the war, he apparently remained in the midsection of the country; he married a woman from Ohio, and by 1876 they settled in Hutchinson, Kansas. In Kansas, Finlaw apparently discovered eclectic medicine. He attended Kansas Eclectic College in 1879 and then returned East to attend and graduate from the <a href="https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e0-cc42-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Eclectic Medical College of the City of New York</a>. The year after he graduated, in 1885, he was back in South Jersey with a home and office on Broadway in Camden. He was a rare eclectic practitioner among the many mainstream doctors who came to Camden from the medical schools of Jefferson College and the University of Pennsylvania. Conventional medicine frowned upon the alternative practices of eclectics, but Finlaw appealed to patients with his copious advertising. A characteristic headline offered “Dr. Finlaw’s Dyspepsia and Liver Cure, Which Will Remove All Obstruction to the Comforts of Healthy Womanhood.” The ads identified him as “J.P. Finlaw, M.D.” and offered assurances that he had graduated from a “regular medical school.” Among the many published testimonials, a signed statement from the city editor of the Camden Democrat declared that Finlaw was not “a quack.” The editor went on to “cheerfully recommend Dr. Finlaw’s medicines, the dyspepsia and liver cure especially.” While in Camden, Finlaw rented offices at several locations, tending to favor places where he could advertise proximity to Cooper Hospital, the bastion of the local medical establishment. He also expanded the reach of his practice by publishing treatises and incorporating as the Finlaw Medicine Company. Shortly before moving to Cooper Street, he took an extended trip through the West, and upon his return advertised the advantages of his clinical study “of the morbid changes which take place in the human system under different climatic influences.” By moving to 321 Cooper Street, Finlaw claimed another location of medical respectability in a neighborhood populated by some of the city’s most eminent physicians. Along with the medical parlor, Finlaw’s household included his wife, Elizabeth (Lizzie), and three children who ranged in age from 10 to 14 at the time they arrived on Cooper Street in 1892. They moved again in 1893, when they bought a house on south Sixth Street, thereby regaining the opportunity to advertise a location near Cooper Hospital. They remained in Camden until at least 1900, but in later life Finlaw returned to Kansas. When he died there in 1933, he was still remembered in Camden as a “patent medicine doctor” who “had a large following who believed implicitly in his remedies.” Philadelphia Merchant Following the brief interlude of the medical parlor, 321 Cooper Street had more conventional occupants. A produce merchant who worked in Philadelphia, Richard Augustus Brice, bought the property in 1893, and it remained the Brice family home for the next 24 years. Brice, who was born in Maryland, gave up farming in the late 1870s and moved to Philadelphia to engage in the business of acquiring farm produce and reselling it in the city. Chickens, eggs, potatoes, peaches, and more arrived in Philadelphia from the farms of Delaware and Maryland for resale by Brice and his partner, Joseph E. Hendrickson, another former Maryland farmer. By 1893, the year he moved to Cooper Street, Brice had his own produce establishment near Front and Callowhill Streets in Philadelphia. The Brice household at 321 Cooper Street was headed by Brice and his second wife, Margaretta (Rice) Brice. When they married in Philadelphia in 1876, Brice was a recent widower with two young daughters. They lived briefly in Philadelphia, where Margaretta oversaw renting rooms in their Vine Street home to boarders, but relocated to Camden by 1880. They had five additional children, three of whom were still young enough to be at home and attending school in 1893. The 1900 Census recorded the household at 321 Cooper Street as Richard Augustus (he was called by his middle name), then 55 years old; Margaretta, 44, and three of their children ranging in age from 9 to 16. The family employed domestic servants, at least periodically. One, Mary Alston, lived with the family in 1902, and the 1905 New Jersey Census documented the presence of a 14-year-old Black “house girl,” May Fisher. In addition to the employment of servants, the family’s achievement of affluence was marked by their purchase of a cottage in Ocean City, New Jersey, in 1900. On Cooper Street, Brice was a rare Democrat among the many Republicans who then controlled local politics and frequented the Camden Republican Club, then at 312 Cooper Street across from Brice’s house. Brice ran unsuccessfully as a Democrat from Camden City Council in 1889, and in the 1890s he supported the “Committee of One Hundred” reform movement. In addition to fielding candidates for office, the Committee of One Hundred spurred a wide-ranging investigation of city-awarded contracts. The effort turned up little malfeasance, but its targets for scrutiny included the Camden Heating and Lighting Company led by Brice’s neighbor at <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/83" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">323 Cooper Street</a>, John Burleigh. From time to time, the Brices’ older children returned to the household. Their oldest son, Charles Augustus Brice, triggered sensational headlines in local newspapers in 1896 when he penned a suicide note after a quarrel with his father and a girlfriend. In 1904 and 1905, the same son’s then-wife sued for divorce, and the subsequent court hearings again filled news columns with the private and business affairs of the Brice family. Charles Brice was back at home with his parents and other adult siblings from 1905 until 1910. Richard Augustus Brice experienced failing eyesight in his later years and relied on his sons to carry on the produce business, renamed R.A. Brice & Son. He died in 1910, but Margaretta Brice remained at 321 Cooper Street until 1917. She then moved to the family’s shore home in Ocean City and lived there until her death in 1933. Commercial Cooper Street After the departure of the Brice family, 321 Cooper Street served as home and office for two Camden dentists: John Owens, who rented the property in 1920, and Milton J. Waas, who owned the house from sometime after the Brices left until 1926. This ended the era of 321 Cooper Street as a single-family home as construction of the Delaware River Bridge (later renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge) brought change to Cooper Street. Expecting a business boom for Camden after the bridge opened in 1926, local boosters and real estate interests sought to transform Cooper Street into a more commercial corridor of office and apartment buildings. In 1926, 321 Cooper Street conveyed to Julia M. Carey, a 26-year-old daughter of Irish immigrants who was staking out a career in real estate sales after working as a stenographer and notary. On behalf of the Bell-Oliver Corporation, she sold three Cooper Street houses—321, <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/38" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">421</a>, and 521—to investors and stayed on to manage and remodel them. In the case of 321, the investor group retained her name as “The Carey Company.” The Camden Courier-Post reported on the work of the "energetic realty lady" on September 11, 1926. Effectively block-busting a residential street into commercial uses, Carey renovated 321 Cooper Street into an apartment house, gave 421 a <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/38" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Mission-revival makeover</a> to create an office building, and converted 521 into offices for lawyers. The next occupants of 321 Cooper Street demonstrated the effects of Carey’s efforts. One of the apartments became the Be-Del Beauty Shop, which opened in the building in 1927 and offered “permanent waves and all other ranches of beauty culture work” in a “newly and modernly equipped—beautifully and comfortably appointed” salon. The apartment tenants reflected the spectrum of working-class life in Camden. In 1930, they included Julia Carey and her sister, Anna, and a railroad clerk whose wife was an officer worker in the RCA radio factory. By 1940, there were two employees of the radio factory, a shipper for a printing company, a railroad clerk, an advertising copywriter for a department store, a housekeeper, and a secretary in a public school. By 1950, the range of occupations was similar, but each apartment had at least one child under the age of 5 – evidence of the post-World War II baby boom. A tenant in the late 1950s, Betty Lichtman, operated a reading group for children. Despite the increase in population density, the apartment venture was not profitable enough to outweigh the debts for renovation. The building began to appear in notices for sheriff’s sales as early as 1929 and again in 1932 as the Great Depression bore down on Camden. Additional changes in ownership occurred until 1954, when the house was put up for auction, advertised as six apartments and six baths, located near the Walt Whitman Hotel and one block from Campbell Soup and RCA. “Excellent professional location,” the auctioneer promised. “Always 100% occupied. Long waiting list. Two apartments on each floor, private entrance, separate gas and electric meters, fire escape, all new copper piping, large yard through to Lawrence Street, detached two-car garage building.” Vintage Living By 1980, when the City of Camden surveyed and documented the ownership of historic structures on Cooper Street, the 321 Cooper Street apartment house had been donated to Rutgers University. A new campus for Rutgers-Camden had grown in the blocks between Cooper Street and the Benjamin Franklin Bridge during the 1960s and 1970s. While the campus replaced blocks of similar rowhouses through urban renewal demolition, 321 and other former residences on Cooper Street had been spared because of their perceived commercial value. The appeal and potential of Cooper Street buildings increased with the advent of federal tax credits for historic preservation projects and later in connection with a new federal courthouse annex completed at Fourth and Cooper Streets in 1994. In 1991, Rutgers entered into a partnership with a redevelopment firm, Vintage Living, to rehabilitate both 321 and <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/69" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">411</a> Cooper Street into modernized offices. The buildings’ locations across the street from the site for the new federal courthouse then under construction positioned the buildings well for legal offices, the project managers believed. Renovations proceeded, but by 1998, back taxes owed on the properties forced a sheriff’s sale and led to the title transferring entirely to Rutgers. Thereafter a building of Rutgers-Camden, 321 Cooper Street at first housed offices for the <a href="https://www.leapacademycharter.org/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">LEAP Academy</a> University School and the <a href="https://clc.camden.rutgers.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Community Leadership Center</a>. It later became home to the <a href="https://cure.camden.rutgers.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Center for Urban Research and Education (CURE)</a>. Associated Individuals For a list of all known occupants of 321 Cooper Street, visit the <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15gz3_mGk3FcNl0TPaOZAq6B1CHvOpqRcY7a99xkp_l4/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Cooper Street Residents Database</a> and scroll down to 321. Sources Bynum, W.F., and Roy Porter, eds. Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine. London: Taylor & Francis Group, 1993. Camden, Philadelphia, and Chestertown, Maryland, Newspapers (Newspapers.com and Genealogy Bank). Camden City Directories (Camden County Historical Society and Ancestry.com). Camden County Property Records. Dorwart, Jeffrey M. and Philip English Mackey. Camden County, New Jersey, 1616-1976: A Narrative History. Camden County, N.J.: Camden County Cultural & Heritage Commission, 1976. New Jersey State Census, 1885-1915, and U.S. Census, 1850-1950 (Ancestry.com). Prowell, George R. The History of Camden County, New Jersey. Philadelphia: L.J. Richards & Co., 1886. Research by Charlene Mires, Lucy Davis, and Joseph Bozzuto. Posted by Charlene Mires Send corrections to cmires@camden.rutgers.edu Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 321 Cooper Street Description An account of the resource Contributing structure, Cooper Street Historic District. 1860s 1870s 1880s 1890s 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s 300 Block 321 Cooper Street Apartments Camden Home for Friendless Children Civil War Committee of One Hundred Democratic Party Dentists Doctors Druggists Extended Family Italianate Maryland Merchants Ocean City Philadelphia Produce Real Estate Redevelopment Renovations Rutgers-Camden Veterans