A cement-block garage, built for a Cooper Street undertaker c. 1939-50, stands on the site of two earlier rowhouses similar to others that remain standing on Lawrence Street. The earlier houses date to the period c. 1847-54, when they were built on land purchased by Jesse Townsend, a bank clerk. In 1847, Townsend acquired property extending from Cooper Street to Lawrence Street, and like several of his neighbors he added houses facing both streets. At 423 Cooper Street, Townsend and his wife, Elizabeth, raised a family that grew to include five children as Jesse Townsend rose to the position of cashier at one of Camden’s key institutions, the State Bank of Camden. The smaller rowhouses on Lawrence Street were rented to tenants. During the 1860s, the Townsends sold their house and the pair of rental properties separately to new owners. They moved to 215 Cooper Street, closer to the bank, in 1862; five years later, they sold the pair of Lawrence Street houses to investors from Cumberland County.
430 Lawrence Street
City directories document people living in the 400 block of Lawrence Street beginning in 1854, although absence of house numbering prior to the 1860s prevents identifying tenants by address in the earliest years. The earliest known tenants of 430 Lawrence Street, in 1860-61, were a family of three headed by a coach painter, Richard S. Humphreys. A former hotel operator in Mount Holly, Burlington County, Humphreys moved to Camden sometime during the 1850s. He was a white man, 53 years old in 1860, and lived at 430 Lawrence Street with his wife Evaline, a white woman 39 years old, and their 5-year-old son, Harry. Later in life, Harry Humphreys became a prominent lumber merchant in Camden, served briefly on the city council, and helped to establish parts of the city’s park system while a member of the Camden Parks Commission.
Another family of three, headed by a hatter named John Gamble, lived at 430 Lawrence Street between 1865 and 1867, when the property owner Jesse Townsend put this house and adjacent 428 Lawrence Street up for sale. Townsend had previously sold his Cooper Street-facing house (423 Cooper) and moved closer to the State Bank of Camden, where he worked. When he advertised the Lawrence Street houses for sale in the West Jersey Press, Townsend described their potential as investment properties: "Two Small Houses / For Sale Cheap / The subscriber offers for sale two small Brick Houses, No. 428 and 430 Lawrence Street, Camden, N.J. These houses contain five rooms each, are well built, have range in kitchen and hydrant water in yard, and will be sold so as to net from 10 to 12 per cent per annum clear of taxes. A portion of the purchase money may remain on mortgage.” The two houses quickly sold to a couple living in Cumberland County and remained rental properties.
Larger families resided at 430 Lawrence Street during the 1870s and 1880s. In 1870, perhaps for just one year, a 32-year-old tugboat captain named David Hallinger headed a household of seven. A white man born in Bucks County, Hallinger had come to Camden in 1864. By 1870 his household included his wife Mary (a white woman 31 years old, the daughter of a Cape May County shipbuilder), and four children ranging in age from 7 months to 11 years old. Living with them, perhaps to assist with the infant, was a domestic servant, Telitha Stiles, a 54-year-old white woman. Hallinger and his oldest son, Hiram, in later life became active in Camden real estate development. Hiram Hallinger’s projects included houses still standing in the 700 block of Washington Street, built in the 1890s as part of the new neighborhood that emerged around Camden’s City Hall at that time. By the time Hiram Hallinger died in 1935, he was regarded as one of the city’s “pioneer builders.”
Tenants of 430 Lawrence Street during the late nineteenth century included widows who worked to support themselves and their families. Althea Ogden, a white woman who rented the house for at least two years (1877-78), had been married to a Pennsylvania clothing manufacturer with substantial wealth, and they had two children by the time he died in 1863. By 1870, she had moved to Haddonfield, New Jersey, where she worked as a librarian; she was then 36 years old with a 15-year-old daughter and 9-year-old son. The circumstances that brought her to Lawrence Street are not known, but by that time her daughter had married, and her son could contribute income from his work as a paper hanger. By 1880, she and her son moved to another house on South Fourth Street. The next tenant at 430 Lawrence Street, also a widow, headed a household of six people and took in washing to earn her living. Sarah Dorsey, a white woman 43 years old, may have lived at this address for only one year. Because her presence coincided with the 1880 Census, a record of her family economy survived: Her three oldest sons (ages 20, 18, and 14) worked in labor, coach painting, and farming. The next youngest child, a 10-year-old daughter, attended school, and the youngest child, a 4-year-old son, had not yet reached school age.
An air of the supernatural hovered in 430 Lawrence Street for several years later in the 1880s when another widow, Anita Smith, may have supported herself by fortune-telling or had a female boarder who did. Throughout 1886-88, when Smith appeared in city directories at this address, ads in local newspapers advertised the availability of a “reliable medium” at the same location. The services and clientele were best described in this classified advertisement in 1888: “Circles Sunday and Wednesday Evenings. Reliable consultations daily. Ladies only. 430 Lawrence St., bet 4th and 5th Cooper and Penn St.”
An incident in 1892 provides a rare glimpse into the contrasting circumstances between narrow Lawrence Street with its small rental rowhouses and the adjacent blocks of more prosperous Cooper Street and Penn Street. As reported in the Camden Morning Courier, a “Mrs. O’Conner” living at 430 Lawrence Street fell into dire straits because her husband—“a man of ability and education” who “held a good position in Philadelphia”—had been sentenced to jail. The privileged residents of Penn Street took notice when the woman and her two children, one of them an infant, became ill. Mrs. O’Conner “was too proud to throw herself on the charity of her neighbors,” the newspaper reported, “but a few charitable families on Penn Street learning of her sad case visited her and found her and her children suffering for the necessities of life.” The neighbors assisted and paid her doctor’s bills for a month, but the newspaper noted that the woman and her children faced a future of dependence on the Overseer of the Poor.
Occupations among the frequently-changing tenants during the early 1890s included driver, polisher, shoe cutter, and clerk. By 1894, 430 Lawrence Street became home to a news dealer, Charles W. Dreher, a son of German immigrants. Dreher and his wife, Hattie, had gained some notoriety in Camden when they married in 1891. At that time, Charles was 16 years old and swore to a minister that he was 21 in order to marry a woman nearly 10 years older. The couple rented 430 Lawrence Street between 1894 and 1898 and left Camden several years later. The groom’s mother was reported to be bitterly opposed to the marriage; in the 1900 Census, she claimed to have only one child, a 17-year-old daughter still living at home.
Like several of the other houses on Lawrence Street, during the first decade of the twentieth century 430 Lawrence became home to Black tenants. Isaac Brown, a Black man who rented the house between 1900 and 1907, worked as a railroad porter and messenger, and shared the home with his wife, Elizabeth. Discrepancies in census records and the existence of multiple individuals with the same names obscure the details of their lives, but one or both of the Browns had family connections with Black migrants from southern states. Living with them on Lawrence Street during 1900 and 1901, a Black woman named Lizzie Harris (possibly a relative or boarder) worked as an ironer. In the 1900 Census, Lizzie Harris was recorded at a different Camden address as 20 years old, born in Virginia, and unable to read or write. She was newly married to John Harris, a 24-year-old day laborer who had also been born in Virginia.
Tenants at 430 Lawrence Street reflected the fluidity of Camden’s population during the early twentieth century, as industries grew and the city attracted new residents from across the nation and abroad. While some tenants were born in New Jersey, others showed how a more mobile population led to marriages and families that would have been unlikely in earlier eras. John S. Sheidell, a bartender who rented 430 Lawrence Street between 1911 and 1920, was a white man born in Pennsylvania; his father was also born in Pennsylvania, but his mother was born in New York. Sheidell’s wife, Gertrude, was born in Colorado to a mother born in Pennsylvania and a father born in Nevada.
By the 1920s, the Cooper Street-facing house behind 428 and 430 Lawrence Street had become a funeral home and residence for the operator, Charles Hiskey. The Lawrence Street houses remained rental properties for a succession of tenants during the 1920s and 1930s, with tenants at 430 Lawrence Street who included a chauffeur for the nearby F.W. Ayer/Wilfred Fry family on Penn Street and a widow who had immigrated from Ireland in 1910. However, in 1939 Hiskey bought both of the adjoining rowhouses and built a concrete-block automobile garage in their place. The garage changed hands in concert with 423 Cooper Street through a series of owners in the later twentieth century, including a doctor who had his office in the Cooper Street building during the 1960s and 1970s. Rutgers University first gained title to the properties in 1984 and in the early 1990s, after demolishing 423 Cooper Street, entered into a partnership with a redevelopment firm. The project included renovations of 321 and 411 Cooper Street and the potential for new construction in place of 423 Cooper. However, by 1998 that project faltered. With the garage still standing on the site of the Lawrence Street rowhouses, Rutgers regained title to the property again in 2005.
A cement-block garage, built for a Cooper Street undertaker c. 1939-50, stands on the site of two earlier rowhouses similar to others that remain standing on Lawrence Street. The earlier houses date to the period c. 1847-54, when they were built on land purchased by Jesse Townsend, a bank clerk. In 1847, Townsend acquired property extending from Cooper Street to Lawrence Street, and like several of his neighbors he added houses facing both streets. At 423 Cooper Street, Townsend and his wife, Elizabeth, raised a family that grew to include five children as Jesse Townsend rose to the position of cashier at one of Camden’s key institutions, the State Bank of Camden. The smaller rowhouses on Lawrence Street were rented to tenants. During the 1860s, the Townsends sold their house and the pair of rental properties separately to new owners. They moved to 215 Cooper Street, closer to the bank, in 1862; five years later, they sold the pair of Lawrence Street houses to investors from Cumberland County.
428 Lawrence Street
The absence of house numbering prior to 1861 prevents identifying tenants by address in earlier years, but city directories document people living in the 400 block of Lawrence Street beginning in 1854. The earliest who can be identified with certainty at 428 Lawrence Street were members of the extended family of a blacksmith, John A. Brown, who lived at this address between 1861 and 1867. When documented in 1860 at their previous address, they were a household of nine people. Brown, a white man 47 years old, born in New Jersey, headed the household with his wife, Debra, a white woman 44 years old, and they had five offspring ranging in age from 9 to 22. Their oldest daughter worked as a dressmaker, and their oldest son as a journeyman hatter. Also in the household were plasterer Van T. Shivers and a 2-year-old child, Lorenzo Shivers, who may have been a son-in-law and grandchild of the Browns. By 1863 the Browns left the Lawrence Street address, but Shivers stayed until 1867.
In 1867, the owner of the adjacent 428 and 430 Lawrence Street rowhouses, Jesse Townsend, put them up for sale. Townsend had already sold the associated Cooper Street-facing house (423 Cooper) and moved to another Cooper Street house closer to the State Bank of Camden, where he worked. When Townsend advertised the Lawrence Street houses for sale in the West Jersey Press, he described their potential as investment properties: "Two Small Houses / For Sale Cheap / The subscriber offers for sale two small Brick Houses, No. 428 and 430 Lawrence Street, Camden, N.J. These houses contain five rooms each, are well built, have range in kitchen and hydrant water in yard, and will be sold so as to net from 10 to 12 per cent per annum clear of taxes. A portion of the purchase money may remain on mortgage.” The two houses quickly sold to a couple living in Cumberland County and remained rental properties.
Tenants moved in and out of the 428 Lawrence Street rowhouse frequently for the rest of the nineteenth century. Their occupations reflected the range of skilled trades then in demand in Camden, including building trades (mason, carpenter, bricklayer); crafts (tinsmith, caner, weaver); and clothing-related occupations for women (tailoress, dressmaker). Tenants at 428 Lawrence Street also included a railroad brakeman and people working in office jobs (clerk, stenographer). Most tenants during this period, to the extent that they can be identified, were white and born in New Jersey or Pennsylvania, although some had parents who were immigrants. In large families, adult children worked outside the home, but younger sons and daughters attended school.
By 1900, 428 Lawrence Street and several others nearby became homes to Black families with members who migrated from the South in the decades following the Civil War. James T. Reid, a Black man born in North Carolina, migrated to Philadelphia by 1890 and then, after marrying and starting a family, moved to Camden by 1899. The Reid family rented 428 Lawrence Street between 1899 and 1903. Reid worked as a butler and waiter while at this address and later as a gardener and odd-jobs laborer. In 1900 on Lawrence Street, the Reids were a household of six people: James Reid, 34 years old; his wife, Mary, a Black woman 34 years old, who was born in New Jersey; and four daughters ranging from 1 to 8 years old. While at this address, the Reids added two sons to their family.
One of the sons born to the Reid family while they lived at this address became prominent in later years as the first Black judge appointed for the Camden County courts. Edward A. Reid, born on May 29, 1902, later graduated from Camden High School, Howard University, and the Howard University law school. He returned to Camden to practice and served as a borough solicitor and municipal judge for the predominantly Black community of Lawnside, as an assistant Camden County prosecutor, and ultimately as Camden County Juvenile and Domestic Relations judge. For a time he had his law office at Sixth and Cooper Streets, not far from his first home in Camden; by the time he died in 1967 he lived in the nearby Northgate Apartments, then a recently built luxury high-rise. Active in community affairs including the NAACP and United Fund of Camden County, in 1965 Reid received a community service award from the AFL-CIO.
Racial and ethnic diversity continued to be present at 428 Lawrence Street in the early decades of the twentieth century. In 1905-06, the tenants were Joseph Mallay, a chef who had been born in Japan in 1860, and his wife, Elizabeth, a Black woman whose parents had been born in Virginia. Several tenants later, in 1910, three occupants of 428 Lawrence Street had ancestral connections with western Europe: Andrew Wiliams, 38 years old and working as a cook in a canning factory, was a son of a German immigrant; his wife, Margaret, also 38 years old, immigrated from Ireland. They shared the home with a widowed woman of the same age, Clara A. Stewart, a daughter of German immigrants who worked as a trimmer in a lace factory. By 1915, a couple both born in England occupied the home: Thomas H. Hewley, 33 years old, a steamfitter, his wife, Florence, age 37, and their 4-year-old son Thomas. By 1920, a young couple who were both Irish immigrants lived at 428 Lawrence Street with their infant daughter.
Tenants of the early twentieth century sought employment by placing ads in local newspapers. Women sought to do washing at home, and at times they offered rooms for rent even though the house totaled only four or five rooms. A baker advertised his skills at making bread; another sought work “of any kind.” In 1912, an advertisement described an occupant of 428 Lawrence Street as well as his skills: “Middle-aged, fairly educated, temperate man, wants position of any responsible nature; thoroughly understands reading of blueprints and handling of men.”
After years of frequent turnover of tenants, 428 Lawrence Street gained relatively long-term renters during the 1920s when it became home to the family of a shipyard worker, Frank J. Read, and his wife, Eva. They had been married about ten years when they moved from another rental a few blocks away on Mickle Street. Both of the Reads were children of immigrants, in his case from Ireland and in her case from Austria. When they moved to Lawrence Street, Frank Read was 31 years old and Eva was 27; while at this address, their family grew from three children to six, and the household may have included one other adult lodger or relative, an Irish immigrant widow, Sara Colley.
By the 1920s, the Cooper Street-facing house behind 428 and 430 Lawrence Street had become a funeral home and residence for the operator, Charles Hiskey. The Lawrence Street houses remained a rental property for a succession of tenants during the 1930s, but in 1939 Hiskey bought them and then built a concrete-block automobile garage in their place. The garage changed hands in concert with 423 Cooper Street through a series of owners in the later twentieth century, including a doctor who had his office in the Cooper Street building during the 1960s and 1970s. Rutgers University first gained title to the properties in 1984 and in the early 1990s, after demolishing 423 Cooper Street, entered into a partnership with a redevelopment firm. The project included renovations of 321 and 411 Cooper Street and the potential for new construction in place of 423 Cooper. However, by 1998 that project faltered. With the garage still standing on the site of the Lawrence Street rowhouses, Rutgers regained title to the property again in 2005.
The two-story, four-room brick house at 422 Lawrence Street likely dates to the early 1850s, when other similar houses are known to have been built in the same row. The absence of house numbering limits the identification of tenants by address prior to 1861, but city directories documented people living in this block of Lawrence Street beginning in 1854. The earliest tenant of 422 Lawrence Street who can be identified from public records was Charles Storm, a hat finisher, who rented the house in 1860-61. Storm, 42 years old in 1860, was a white man born in New York who headed a household of six people at this address: his wife, Ann, a white woman also 42 years old, who was born in Philadelphia, and four children ranging in age from 2 to 22. The oldest daughter, Catharine, worked as a dressmaker.
By 1862, a veteran of the Civil War headed the family who rented 422 Lawrence Street. Montraville Williams served as a drum major with the Third New Jersey Volunteer Infantry. Born in Massachusetts in 1832, Williams was educated at the private, nonsectarian Leicester Academy and worked as a bootmaker before relocating to Camden in the mid-1850s. While working as a cordwainer (shoemaker), in 1855 he married Pennsylvania-born Fanny Riley in Camden’s Third Street Methodist Episcopal Church. By the time of the 1860 Census, they lived in Camden and their family had grown to include three daughters, the oldest 11 years old (apparently born to one of the parents prior to their marriage) and two younger girls ages 1 and 3.
By the time he went off to war, Montraville Williams identified his occupation as musician, and his military role as a principal musician meant that he trained drummers who beat cadences for troops in the field. During his enlistment from May 1861 until October 1862, his unit participated in the defense of Washington, D.C., and advanced into Virginia and Maryland with the Army of the Potomac. Williams mustered out of service following the Battle of Antietam with an unspecified disability. At home, meanwhile, Fanny fought battles of her own. She dealt with the death of their 2-year-old daughter Ella, who contracted smallpox and died in November 1861. Sometime within the next year, she and her surviving girls moved into the 422 Lawrence Street house, and she gave birth to another daughter there in October 1862, around the same time her husband returned from the war.
Disruptions and losses continued for the Williams family during the next six to seven years at the Lawrence Street address. In 1863 another of their daughters, six-year-old Ida, died of scarlet fever while on a visit to her father’s hometown in Massachusetts. By 1869, Montraville apparently left the family and Camden. Fanny appeared alone at 422 Lawrence Street in the Camden city directory in 1869, an indication of the absence of a male head of household. Thereafter, she moved to other addresses in Camden as she sought to support herself and her daughters as a tailoress and music teacher. She struggled in later life, including the public embarrassment of an eviction for nonpayment of rent that was reported in two Camden newspapers in 1888. Montraville, meanwhile, moved west. He may have lived in Chicago for a time, and he was later rumored to be in California. He died in Pueblo, Colorado, in 1905. That year, his long-estranged wife filed for a widow’s pension based upon her husband’s service during the Civil War.
Migrants to Camden: From Europe, the South, the Midwest, and Puerto Rico
Industrialization and immigration to Camden are evident in the next series of tenants at 422 Lawrence Street. By 1870 a miller named Joseph Webster headed a household of six people, including two grown daughters who worked in a shoe factory. By 1880, an immigrant from Germany, Charles Kemmick, worked as a gardener and headed a family of four including his wife Caroline, whose parents were German immigrants, a 4-year-old son, and infant daughter. Occupations represented among the often-changing tenants of 422 Lawrence Street during this period included laborers, shoe cutters, drivers, bookkeepers, and a clerk.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, 422 Lawrence Street had Black tenants for the first time – among the few Black residents at this or any other house in the Lawrence Street row. Records may not account for the full extent of these African American households, but they document the presence in 1896 of Martha Woolford, a Black widow who had recently been employed as a domestic at nearby 407 Cooper Street. After a short tenancy by a white family, the next two renters between 1899 and 1903 were Black food service workers. John and Addie Davis, a married couple in their late twenties, had both been born in Virginia and migrated by 1894 to Philadelphia. By 1899 they were in Camden and renting the house at 422 Lawrence Street. John Davis worked as a baker. The next tenant, a caterer, had been a lodger with another Black family in Camden prior to moving to Lawrence Street with one young son. At their previous address in 1900, Lena Duvall had been recorded as 40 years old, born in Delaware, and her son Leo was then three years old. The Census takers did not find Lena’s husband of eight years at home, although he apparently lived at least intermittently with his family in both locations. In 1901, he was accused of bigamy in Philadelphia after marrying another woman, and Lena crossed the river to present documentation of her marriage in court. She remained on Lawrence Street until 1903.
The fluidity of Camden’s population as industry expanded on the city’s waterfront is reflected by the tenants at 422 Lawrence Street by 1910, when a packer working at the Victor Talking Machine Company headed the family at this address. Charles L. Rhodes, a white man 54 years old, had been born in New York. His wife of seventeen years, 51-year-old Marietta, had been born in Georgia. They had one son, Arthur, who was sixteen years old in 1910 and attending school. The expansion of shipbuilding on the Delaware River also brought tenants to 422 Lawrence Street: throughout the 1920s, it became home to a family headed by a riveter, Albert Adams, a white man who was born in Ohio to parents who had immigrated from France and Germany. Forty years old in 1920, his household included his wife, Mabel, who was five years younger, also born in Ohio but to parents who had both been born in Virginia. Mabel’s mother and brother lived with the couple; her brother also worked in a shipyard on the Delaware. While Mabel’s brother moved on at some time during the 1920s, the rest of the family stayed on Lawrence Street through at least 1930.
The house at 422 Lawrence Street remained a rental property through the Great Depression, although the identities of tenants are scarce because Camden did not publish city directories between 1931 and 1940. In 1940, the tenants included Charles Smith, a white man who worked as a church janitor, and his wife, a presser in a factory. Thereafter, however, the occupants of the house reflected the rising presence of Puerto Ricans in Camden. From 1943 until at least 1950, Puerto-Rican born Santos and Lucy Martinez headed a family of six at this address; at some point, they also purchased the home. The 1950 Census recorded Santos as 47 years old, white, and working as an electrician in a shipyard; Lucy, ten years younger than her husband, also white, operated a sewing machine in a dress factory. Their children, all of whom had been born in Puerto Rico, included four at home ranging in age from 15 to 21, in addition to an oldest son attending William Penn College in Iowa. Margarita, the oldest of their offspring at home, worked as a mender in a hosiery mill, and a nineteen-year-old son was a pin boy in a bowling alley. Another son, Nestor, turned eighteen in 1950, enlisted in the Army, and departed that year for basic training at Parris Island, South Carolina.
The history of 422 Lawrence Street next appears in the public record in the 1970s, when periodic missed tax payments put the property at risk of sheriff’s sale. In 1978, Santos and Lucy Martinez, who by then lived in suburban Woodlynne, sold the house Eric and Ellen Eifert, who then lived at 418 Lawrence Street. The Eiferts, who later purchased 418 and 420 Lawrence Street as well, sold all three properties to Rutgers University in 2007.
The house at 211 N. Fifth Street is a testament to Camden’s urban development during the 1850s and 1860s, after the city gained new status as the seat of government for Camden County. Built c. 1857 at the back of two Cooper Street lots owned by Thomas Wharton Dyott Jr., a Philadelphia wholesaler of patent medicines, the three-story brick residence was among the first to be built north of Cooper Street as Cooper family heirs sold their lands for development. If Dyott and his family occupied the new house facing Fifth Street, as city directories suggest, the household included Thomas Wharton Dyott Jr., a white man in his late 30s; his wife, Sarah, also in her 30s; four children ranging in age from 8 to 16, and possibly two Irish immigrant domestic servants (who were with the family in 1860, at their next address).
Dyott commuted from Camden to his patent medicine business in Philadelphia, a remnant of a much larger enterprise developed by his father (for whom he was named). The elder Thomas Dyott had immigrated England in 1805, opened a drug store, claimed to be a doctor, and became one of the nation's leading purveyors of patent medicines. In need of bottles for his remedies, by the 1820s the elder Dyott also established a thriving complex of bottle-making factories in the Kensington section of Philadelphia. That venture grew into a company town called Dyottville but collapsed in bankruptcy after a run on its bank during the panic of 1837. The patent medicine business remained active during the 1850s as T.W. Dyott & Sons. The wholesaler marketed remedies such as “Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup” for quieting babies and cures for rheumatism, liver ailments, and other maladies.
Civil War Veteran, Public Servant
When Dyott sold his Camden properties in 1860 and returned to Philadelphia, the house at 211 N. Fifth Street conveyed to a nearby neighbor on Cooper Street, retired merchant David Vickers. By 1862, it became the home of Vickers’ daughter, Hannah Gibson, and her family. For the next two decades, the Gibson family infused 211 N. Fifth Street with experiences of the Civil War, public service in government, entrepreneurship, and family life in Camden. When the Gibsons moved in, the household included Henry C. Gibson, a white man in the wholesale paint business, in his late 40s; Hannah, also white, in her late 30s; and their three children, who in 1860 ranged in age from 17-year-old James to Lillie, age 9, and Hannah (in some records, Anne), age 3; and domestic servants. The young daughters grew to adulthood in the Fifth Street house. Between 1878 and 1880, the household also included Hannah’s younger brother, David Vickers.
The Gibsons’ move to Fifth Street coincided with Henry Gibson’s return from military service during the Civil War (he previously served in the Florida Seminole Wars). In May 1861, Gibson led 101 men from Camden to Trenton to muster into service with the Third Regiment – Infantry – New Jersey Volunteers. The regiment joined a reserve division at the First Battle of Bull Run in July and engaged in the Battle of Munson’s Hill in August. Gibson returned to Camden to staff a recruiting office and concluded his military service in August 1862; shortly thereafter his son James enlisted and served until 1864. After the war Henry Gibson served as a Republican member of the Camden Board of Chosen Freeholders, and he was among the incorporators of the New Jersey Chemical Works, a manufacturer of chemicals and fertilizers located on Cooper Creek.
The women of the Gibson family—Hannah and her daughters—left few traces in the public record. Hannah Gibson became owner of the home following the death of her father in 1865. The domestic labor of running the large household was borne at least partially by female domestic servants, but the Gibson women apparently did not act on this advantage to pursue public activities outside the home. The Gibsons’ domestic servants included Catherine Powell, an Irish immigrant who could not read or write, who was recorded with the family in 1860 while they still lived on Cooper Street. Their domestic workers at 211 N. Fifth Street included Anna Maria Ballet, who in 1875 was convicted of stealing about $50 worth of clothing from the Gibson house and sentenced to one year in state prison. In 1878, the Gibsons employed Anna A. Lloyd, whom the Camden city directory identified as “colored.”
Following the death of Henry Gibson in 1875, the house at 211 N. Fifth Street became an important instrument of security for his widow and daughters. They remained in the home until 1880, and Hannah Gibson derived income by renting the building out to tenants while living in other nearby houses until her death in 1895.
Men’s Club House
During the late 1880s and early 1890s, 211 N. Fifth Street served as a club house for two white men’s clubs, first the Camden Republican Club (1887-89) and then the Camden Wheelmen (1889-94). Both organizations remodeled and redecorated the interior to suit their purposes and comfort, and both employed Black men who lived in the building and did custodial work (one also operated a barber shop).
The “tastefully fitted up club house” of the Republicans was “the finest in the city,” according to the Camden County Courier. In addition to the parlor, library, reception room, and kitchen on the first floor, on the second floor the Republicans installed pool and billiard rooms, a card room, and a barber shop. (The resident barber was Charles H. Griffin, a Black man whom city directories also identified as a janitor.) At the time, the house had a veranda on its south side, which provided a stage for political and social events in the yard.
In 1889, the Republicans gave up their lease and moved to still larger and grander quarters at 312 Cooper Street (later the Alumni House for Rutgers-Camden). Taking their place at 211 N. Fifth Street were the Camden Wheelmen, a sports and social club rooted in the bicycle craze of the late nineteenth-century. The Wheelmen kept many of the amenities from the Republicans but also used a back room on the first floor for their “wheels” and turned part of the third floor into a gymnasium. The third floor also included quarters for a janitor, identified in city directories as Levin J. Saunders, a Black man who also worked as a messenger for the Pennsylvania Railroad. His son Clarence, also a messenger, was listed at the 211 N. Fifth Street address for several years, raising a question of whether more of the Saunders family may have also lived on the third floor. According to Census records, Levin Saunders was married and with his wife, Elizabeth, had at least three sons and one daughter. Saunders remained employed by the Wheelmen (renamed the Carteret Club in 1893) at their later locations on Penn Street and Cooper Street.
The men’s clubs of 211 N. Fifth Street demonstrated the racial disparities of Camden of their era, with prominent white men with leisure time served by Black male employees. Further elements of racism were evident in activities of the Wheelmen, who in addition to their many sporting pursuits put on minstrel shows for public audiences in Camden and other nearby venues. A popular form of entertainment for white audiences, minstrel shows in the nineteenth century featured white performers in burnt-cork blackface makeup who ridiculed the mannerisms of Black people. Members of the Wheelmen produced and performed in these shows during their years on Fifth Street. During this period, the League of American Wheelmen also barred Black riders from membership.
Boarding House
The death of the longtime owner of 211 N. Fifth Street, Hannah Gibson, in 1895 led to a sheriff’s sale of the building and opened a period when subsequent women owners and tenants operated boarding houses at this address. Their boarders also were primarily white women, who represented the spectrum of life circumstances and economic strategies available to them in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Elizabeth Peterson, a white widow who had been working as a sewing machine operator, obtained a mortgage and purchased 211 N. Fifth Street in 1899 from another widow who had acquired the building at the earlier sheriff’s sale. Born in England, Peterson had immigrated to the United States in 1886. During her ownership, 211 N. Fifth Street also became home to her adult daughter and a changing cast of boarders who included a widowed woman who worked as an editor and a single woman who worked as a forewoman. The boarders also included female employees of the Esterbrook Steel Pen Company, then one of Camden’s most prominent industries, and a woman who made her living by dressmaking.
By 1910, the boarding house keeper at this address was Isabel Dubois, a white widow then 60 years old, who rented the building and made it home for her 86-year-old mother and two adult daughters. One daughter, Edna, worked as a legal stenographer, and the other, Isabel, as an accountant for the Victor Talking Machine Company. The boarders in 1910 included a 70-year-old widow with an independent income, a single woman who worked as a title clerk, and another single woman employed in candy manufacturing.
The ownership of 211 N. Fifth Street passed in 1911 from Elizabeth Peterson to Anna Janke, a white widow whose husband had been a bank clerk and a veteran of the Civil War. While city directories indicate residents with different surnames living together with Janke between 1911 and 1914, some were relatives (including her sister, Anna Platt). Janke’s social activities, reported in Camden newspapers, suggest a middle-class life not common for boarding house keepers. When Janke bought the home, the Camden Morning Post noted the sale and her intentions to thoroughly renovate – perhaps a sign of transition back to a single-family home or at least fewer occupants. Janke hosted card parties and was active in the New Era Club, which promoted college education for women and proper hygienic care of babies. Another woman who lived in the Janke home, Harriet Branson, hosted meetings of the Beethoven Club.
Medical Office
The next transition for 211 N. Fifth Street aligned it with nearby Cooper Street’s evolution into a location for medical professionals. The transformation had been underway since the 1880s, when Cooper Hospital opened nearby. Residences serving dual purposes as doctor’s homes and offices included 211 N. Fifth Street’s neighbor on the corner of Fifth and Cooper. There, at 429 Cooper Street, surgeon Edward A.Y. Schellenger lived with his family and maintained his practice between 1898 and 1917.
The house at 211 N. Fifth became a doctor’s home and office in 1915, when Dr. Alfred I. Cramer Jr. purchased the building from Anna Janke. Cramer, who was white, listed the Fifth Street home in city directories as the business address for his practice as an eye surgeon. It also became the family home for Cramer’s wife, Annie (a member of the locally prominent Browning and Doughten families) and their three sons and one daughter ranging in age from two months to seven years old. The Cramers made “extensive improvements” to the home, according to local newspapers. They employed two domestic servants, a sign of their economic and social standing. In 1915 the servants were Nellie McCabe, an 18-year-old Irish immigrant who cooked for the family, and Winifred Lyons, a 19-year-old daughter of Irish immigrants employed as a nurse. One of the previous owner’s tenants, a single woman who worked in the garment industry, also remained in residence with the Cramer family.
Cramer, a graduate of Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, was affiliated with Cooper Hospital and active in Camden’s public health movement to combat the spread of disease in poor neighborhoods. He also invested in real estate, which was the primary business of his extended family. In the late nineteenth century Cramer’s father, Alfred I. Cramer Sr., and brother Joseph had transformed farmland adjacent to Camden into Cramer Hill, a neighborhood for local shipyard workers. The development was later annexed into the city and remains a neighborhood of Camden.
Real estate considerations may have played a role in Dr. Cramer’s investment in the Fifth Street home and the Cramer family’s subsequent move to suburban Moorestown in 1924. Cramer bought 211 N. Fifth Street shortly after legislatures in Pennsylvania and New Jersey began planning for a bridge or a tunnel between Camden and Philadelphia. Those plans came to fruition in 1926 with completion of the Delaware River Bridge (later renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge), which terminated in Camden a few blocks north of 211 N. Fifth Street. The bridge project triggered a wave of real estate speculation in North Camden and a booster campaign to transform Cooper Street from a residential street into a commercial district. Amid these disruptions, many wealthy families moved from Camden to suburban Merchantville, Haddonfield, or (like the Cramers) Moorestown. Automobiles helped to make the moves not only possible but preferable for their owners in need of garages and parking spaces.
The Cramer family retained 211 N. Fifth Street as an investment property, and it remained Dr. Cramer’s office location until his death in 1929. Inherited by his wife, Annie, the building reverted to multiple-family use as an apartment building from the 1930s into the 1940s. The tenants in those years included married couples and single women, their occupations ranging from school teachers to clerks, skilled tradespeople, and factory workers. The building also continued to house a medical practice: from at least 1931 through 1943, the office of another eye surgeon, Dr. George J. Dublin. While maintaining the office on Fifth Street, Dublin, a World War I veteran, lived in the Parkside section of Camden with his parents, who were Russian immigrants in the retail clothing business. In 1937 Dublin also bought a house across the street from his office, at 214 N. Fifth, but in the years after World War II he married and joined the post-World War II suburban migration to Cherry Hill.
Renovations and a Jewish Family Home
By the 1940s, 211 N. Fifth Street was more than eighty years old and deteriorating, like many other houses of similar vintage in North Camden. In 1937, the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) “redlined” the blocks north of Cooper Street and west of Tenth Street as “hazardous” based on perceived negative characteristics of the housing stock and residents. The stigma affected even the most substantial homes, like 211 N. Fifth, by branding the area as high-risk for mortgage lenders.
Nevertheless, in 1945 a new owner saved 211 N. Fifth Street from its declining state and remodeled it to serve as his family home with two medical offices on the first floor. Dr. Charles Kutner began renting in the building in 1943, then bought the home and started renovating in 1945 when he returned from three years’ military service during World War II. Kutner, the son of Jewish immigrants from an area of Poland under Russian control, grew up in South Camden among six siblings. His father worked as a baker. Although his parents spoke only Yiddish when they arrived in the United States and could not read or write, Charles graduated from high school, then Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, and by 1926 had his medical degree from the University of Maryland. While attending medical school in Baltimore he met his future wife, Leah Friedlander, who was also Jewish. They married in 1927 and returned to Camden, where they had two daughters. Dr. Kutner became active in public health initiatives, especially the fight against tuberculosis in Camden public schools, and Leah Kutner participated in Jewish woman’s organizations. They joined the Jewish country club, Woodcrest, in Cherry Hill.
The Kutners’ renovation of their new home preserved the building but altered its original form and nineteenth-century character. They removed the dilapidated third floor, making 211 N. Fifth Street into a two-story structure without its original roofline and cornice. Inside, the resulting living quarters on the second floor had varied levels, somewhat like the split-level designs that were becoming popular for suburban family homes. They divided the first floor into two medical offices, one for Dr. Kutner and the other rented to Dr. Walter Crist, who maintained his practice in Camden while living in West Collingswood. The Kutners also solved the problem of parking space for an automobile by buying an adjacent small rowhouse on Lawrence Street and converting it into a garage. A new two-story, brick-faced concrete structure at the rear of both buildings connected the garage with the Fifth Street house.
The Kutners and their daughters lived at 211 N. Fifth Street through the rest of the 1940s and 1950s, the period when Rutgers University began other buying other nearby properties. After their daughters were grown, Charles and Leah Kutner stayed until at least 1962, when urban renewal demolition began to clear nearby blocks to create the Rutgers-Camden campus. They later lived in suburban Cherry Hill, but Dr. Kutner commuted daily to his medical practice at 211 N. Fifth Street until 1989 and rented the rest of the building to commercial and medical tenants. The occupants during the 1970s included First Harlem Management Corp., which specialized in management and technical assistance for minority entrepreneurs.
Real Estate and Rutgers
When the Kutners sold the property, following the death of Leah Kutner in 1989, 211 N. Fifth Street became one among many Camden properties owned by real estate investors Alfred and Ninfa DeMartini of Cherry Hill. The building housed legal and real estate offices until 2005, when Rutgers purchased it together with a package of other properties in the area of its expanding campus: 526 Penn Street, 423 Cooper Street, and 428-430 Lawrence Street. The building subsequently served as offices for Disability Services, Communications and Events, and the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities (MARCH) before becoming home to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in 2021. The building’s long history as a family home, men’s club house, boarding and apartment house, and site of medical practices was reconstructed in 2022-23 by graduate students in the Rutgers-Camden Department of History.The office building at 315 Cooper Street reflects Camden’s transitions and needs during an era of industrial decline. Built in 1966, the building first served as headquarters of the Amalgamated Food and Allied Workers Union Local 56, creating a tie between Cooper Street and Camden’s longstanding role in the food processing industry. In the 1980s, the building became home to the Camden County Juvenile Resource Center (later known as the Camden Center for Youth Development). The modern building took the place of a c. 1855 Greek Revival-style home owned by prominent Camden residents, including John W. Mickle, the namesake for Mickle Street and the former Mickle School. During a period as a rental property in 1870-71, the residence served as home to the Collegiate School of Camden, a private school. From the 1920s through the 1940s, before it was demolished for construction of the office building, the house at 315 Cooper Street was a hub of men’s club activity as headquarters for the Camden Club and later the Moose Lodge.
During the 1850s, the north side of Cooper Street began to fill with houses as Cooper family heirs sold their land for development. Among this first generation of structures in the 300 block, 315 Cooper Street ranked as one of the largest and most substantial. A double-lot, brick, Greek Revival residence, 315 Cooper Street first served as home for a retired physician from Cape May, Joseph Fifield, and his wife, Lydia. After Lydia Fifield’s death in 1858, the home was owned briefly by Albert W. Markley, a recent president of the Farmers’ and Mechanics’ Bank in Philadelphia (who lived at other times at 218 and 420 Cooper Street).
The 315 Cooper Street house gained a notable new connection in 1861, when it was purchased by John W. Mickle, whose family roots extended to seventeenth-century settlement in the region that became South Jersey. Mickle, a retired sea captain with extensive investments in turnpikes, railroads, and ferry operations, lived a scant few months in 315 Cooper Street before his death later in 1861. But he brought with him an extended household that included widows of his brother and nephew, who remained in the home through the end of the 1860s. John W. Mickle’s memory lived on in Camden through the naming of Mickle Street and the John W. Mickle School. Mickle was honored not only for his prominence in business but for his public service in the New Jersey State Assembly and in the convention that drafted the New Jersey Constitution of 1844. His survivors also recalled his seafaring days carrying trade between the Port of Philadelphia, Europe, and South America. His distinctions included transporting Princess Charlotte of France to join her father, Joseph Bonaparte, while he lived on an estate in Bordentown, Burlington County.
Collegiate School and Boarding House
The heirs of John W. Mickle rented 315 Cooper Street to tenants beginning in 1870, although family members returned to live there intermittently when it was not otherwise occupied. For about two years beginning in 1870, the home became a girls’ boarding school. The Ladies’ Department of the Collegiate School of the City of Camden at 315 Cooper was an extension of a private day school that Reverend Martin L. Hoffer, a Presbyterian minister, had been running since 1868 in a former Odd Fellows’ Hall at Fourth and Market Streets. Hoffer, who lived in Beverly, Burlington County, had previously operated a boys’ boarding school in Beverly and a military boarding school for boys in Allentown, Pennsylvania. His Collegiate School in Camden offered instruction in classical and commercial subjects for boys and girls (in separate classrooms). Viewed by the West Jersey Press as “important step in the permanent growth and prosperity of our city,” Hofford’s school on Market Street and its boarding school extension at 315 Cooper nevertheless proved to be short-lived. By 1874 he moved to other ministerial posts. The girls’ boarding school, acquired by new teachers and with a different name, continued two years longer nearby at 312 Cooper Street. The Collegiate School on Market Street, after a brief closure, reopened on Market Street under a new principal.
After the departure of the Collegiate School, the owners of 315 Cooper Street continue to offer it for rent or for sale: “A three-story brick house ten minutes’ walk from the ferry,” read an advertisement in the Camden Morning Post in 1879. “Contains all conveniences; heated throughout; stationary wash stands in bed rooms; two water closets; two kitchens; stationary wash tubs; underdrained; dry cellar.” For about five years, 1878 to 1883, 315 Cooper Street became a boarding house operated by Mary A. Lanning, who lived there with her husband and adult son, as many as seven boarders, and two servants. Recorded in the 1880 Census, the boarders included a lawyer, a bank teller and his wife, a sea captain and his wife, and a hardware dealer. The servants were Susan Boyer, a Black woman who was widowed, and likely her son John, age 12. Neither of the Boyers could read or write.
Family Home
The house at 315 Cooper Street became a family home once again in 1883, when a dispute among heirs of John W. Mickle led to a court-ordered sale of the property. For the next 26 years, 315 Cooper Street was owned and occupied by attorney Peter V. Voorhees, his wife Louisa Voorhees, their son James Dayton Voorhees, and usually three to four domestic servants. They previously lived several blocks away at 430 Linden Street, part of the 1870s development known as Linden Terrace.
The names of the new residents of 315 Cooper reflected the depth and breadth of their family histories. Peter V. Voorhees had a family lineage that traced to seventeenth-century Dutch settlement of Long Island, New York. Peter V., born in New Brunswick in 1852, graduated from Rutgers College in 1873 and then moved to Camden to study law with his uncle, Peter L. Voorhees. The younger Voorhees followed his uncle’s specialization in real estate law and became, among other roles, a representative of the Cooper family trust. In 1881, he married Louisa Clarke Dayton, whose family history extended to seventeenth-century English settlers of Boston. Later generations lived in Somerset County, New Jersey, and Louisa’s father, a lawyer, moved to Camden after graduating from Princeton College. Louisa’s uncle, William L. Dayton, served in the United States Senate and in 1856 was the young Republican Party’s candidate for vice president of the United States. Honoring Louisa’s family legacy, the Voorhees’s son was called by his middle name, Dayton.
Peter V. and Louisa Voorhees had been married about two years when they moved to 315 Cooper Street with one-year-old Dayton. A second child, a daughter named Elsie born in 1883, died just before her first birthday while the family vacationed at Lake Minnewaska, New York. A death notice in the Philadelphia Times stating that she died “suddenly” suggests an accident or other unexpected cause, but the details were not publicly disclosed. Thereafter, they remained a family of three as Peter prospered as a lawyer, Louisa engaged in charitable activities, and Dayton grew up at 315 Cooper Street and went on to college at Princeton.
The domestic workers in the Voorhees household included Celina (or Selina) Kammerer, who stood apart from other domestic help on Cooper Street through an unusually long term of service and her nationality. While most white domestics on Cooper Street were Irish immigrants or native-born, Kammerer was born in France. No evidence exists to explain how she came to be employed in the Voorhees household or why she stayed so long, but she was present throughout their time at 315 Cooper Street. Public records reveal only that Kammerer was born between 1850 or 1860, that her mother was French and her father either French or Prussian, and that she immigrated to the United States in 1866. Most other domestic servants who worked for the Voorhees family were Irish immigrant women, but by 1900 the family also employed a Black butler, Jesse Bailey. Born in Virginia in 1850, Bailey likely came to Camden as part of the emerging wave of Black migration out of the South to northern cities.
In addition to the large home on Cooper Street and domestic servants, the affluence of the Voorhees family enabled extended summer vacations to the Jersey Shore, Maine, the Adirondacks, and Florida. Like others of their social and economic standing, they had leisure time and resources for tourism to resorts by rail. During the 1890s, they also traveled by ocean liner to Europe and from the West Coast by sea to Japan.
At home, Peter V. Voorhees’s legal work included handling the Cooper family’s sale of their Cooper Street land between Front and Second Street for use as a public park—later known as Johnson Park. At the pinnacle of his legal career, between 1900 and 1905, he served as an appointed lay judge of the New Jersey Court of Errors and Appeals. Like other men of his station, Voorhees maintained a network of positions on local boards of directors, including the Camden Republican Club (at 312 Cooper Street, across from his house), the Camden City Dispensary (which provided medical care to the indigent), the West Jersey Title and Guarantee Company, and the First National Bank. He served as a vestryman of St. Paul’s Protestant Episcopal Church on Market Street. (He was not, however, connected with the 1899 creation and naming of Voorhees Township, which took its name from then-governor Foster McGowan Voorhees.)
The Voorhees family remained at 315 Cooper Street until the 1906 death of Peter V. Voorhees from multiple ailments that followed a serious bout with pneumonia the previous year, and the 1909 death of Louisa Voorhees from unspecified diseases. This ended the era of single-family ownership at this address. Dayton Voorhees, who served in World War I and then became a professor of politics at Princeton University, did not return to the family home. By 1915 it was rented out and divided between two households, one headed by James Buckelew, the superintendent of the West Jersey and Seashore Railroad Company, and the other headed by Lewis Larsen, a salesman. By 1920, the tenants were real estate dealer William P. Hollinger with his wife, Frances; three young children; and two domestic servants, a married Black couple James and Susan Taylor.
A Domain of Men
During the 1920s, Cooper Street experienced transition from a residential to commercial thoroughfare, largely through the efforts of real estate interests who anticipated a business boom coming with the 1926 completion of the Delaware River Bridge (later renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge). While many former residences on Cooper Street became apartments or office buildings, 315 Cooper Street gained a new purpose as a club house for Camden’s professional men.
The Camden Club came into existence through the efforts of a Camden undertaker, Fithian Simmons, who lived at 319 Cooper Street, next door to the vacated Voorhees home. The club filled two voids: on a personal level, Simmons poured his energy into the club following the death of his wife, Alverta, during the influenza epidemic in 1919. For Camden’s elite, the club offered a gathering place for men following the demise of the Camden Republican Club, which had been an anchor of men’s sociability on Cooper Street for decades. Supporters of the new Camden Club contributed $1,000 each to raise the funds to transform the Voorhees “mansion,” as the Morning Post described it, into a “luxurious clubhouse.” Membership required a $100 initiation fee and the same amount each year in annual dues.
With Simmons serving as president, the Camden Club sought to be the equivalent of the leading clubhouses for men in Philadelphia. The remodeled building offered a restaurant open day and night; parlors and reception rooms; rooms for billiards, card-playing, and other games; and four bedrooms on the third floor. By all outward appearances, the club thrived during the 1920s and celebrated its tenth anniversary with a dinner at 315 Cooper Street early in 1931 with “members and guests comprising leading business, professional and political notables,” the Morning Post reported. By that time, Simmons remained involved as president emeritus.
The Camden Club’s finances were not secure enough to survive the Great Depression, however. After purchasing the building for $14,000 in 1920, the club had taken out a mortgage for $100,000 to finance its ambitious remodel. By 1938, the club had fallen into default on the mortgage and owed thousands in back taxes to the City of Camden. With numerous prominent individuals and companies implicated as bond holders for the club, the building went up for sale to settle its debts.
Another fraternal organization in similar straits benefitted from the Camden Club’s demise. The Loyal Order of the Moose, Lodge 111, founded in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1888, had been active in Camden since 1909. The local lodge had opened a grand new headquarters on Market Street in 1929, but it fell into default on the mortgages and receivership by 1934. Having lost ownership of its hall to banks, the Moose Lodge opted in 1939 to buy the former Camden Club at 315 Cooper Street. For the next twenty-five years, the clubhouse became the hub of social and service activity for the men’s Moose lodge and the auxiliary Women of the Moose. Sports banquets, movie nights, dances, and other events were occasionally punctuated by police attention to liquor sales on Sundays and the presence of slot machines. Like other fraternal organizations of its time, the lodge restricted its membership to white people only, a limitation not overturned by Moose International until 1973.
Union Headquarters
By the 1960s, Cooper Street stood at the edge of an urban renewal zone. Between 1962 and 1964 Rutgers University created a new Camden campus through demolition of houses in the blocks between Cooper Street and the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, between Third and Fifth Streets. Although Cooper Street was spared wholesale destruction because of its perceived commercial value, the longstanding houses at 315 and 319 Cooper Street fell to demolition. Both became the sites for new union headquarters buildings, with 315 the site of a new, modern office building built in 1966 for the Amalgamated Food and Allied Workers Union, Local 56. Next door at 319 Cooper Street stood another strikingly modern structure built in 1960 for the International Union of Electrical Workers, Local 103. Together, the buildings created ties between Cooper Street and two of Camden’s longstanding industries, food processing and sound recording.
The Amalgamated Food and Allied Workers Union Local 56 – Meat Packing Division purchased 315 Cooper Street as the previous longtime occupant, the Moose Lodge, moved to temporary new quarters farther east on Cooper Street at the Walt Whitman Hotel. Formed in 1940, by the 1960s Local 56 represented workers in fisheries, canneries, farms, grocery stores, and food processing plants throughout New Jersey and at the General Foods plant in Dover, Delaware. Its work included organizing migrant labor in South Jersey, which in 1967 prompted a visit to Cooper Street by a delegation of Vietnamese tenant farmers escorted by the U.S. Department of Labor.
Later known as the United Food and Commercial Workers, Local 56 remained at 315 Cooper Street until 1982, when it opted to leave Camden for a building in Pennsauken that offered more space and easier, more ample parking.
Youth Services
By the time of the union’s departure, the economic and social circumstances of Camden had produced needs for greater social services for residents experiencing poverty, homelessness, or other effects of the sharp decline of industry in the late twentieth century. Responding to the needs of youth in these conditions, a nonprofit organization, New Ventures Management, purchased 315 Cooper Street and made it the headquarters for the Juvenile Resource Center (JRC). The center, led by former Camden school board member Stella Horton since its founding in 1978, provided juvenile offenders with alternatives to incarceration, including an alternative school, counseling, and employment programs.
The JRC continued its work on Cooper Street for decades, changing its name in 2003 to the Camden Youth Development Center (CYDC) after receiving a $1.2 million grant from the William Penn Foundation to join forces with the Camden City Youth Services Commission. Surrounded by that time by buildings purchased by Rutgers University, in 2012 the CYDC also gained an executive director, Felix James, with connections to Rutgers as a graduate of the university’s law school in Camden. Continuing operations in the 2020s, the CYDC stated its mission as “embracing and using the assets of young people to meet their needs and successfully address the complex work they must do to transform their communities and neighborhoods.” Its services encompassed leadership development, tutoring, employment preparation, college preparation, and “providing emotional, social, spiritual, physical, and cultural proficiencies.” Evolving from the original JRC focus on alternatives to incarceration, the CYDC in the 2020s stressed civic engagement as a pathway to success.
Camden and Philadelphia Newspapers (Newspapers.com and Genealogy Bank).
Camden City Directories (Ancestry.com).
Camden County Property Records.
New Jersey State Census, 1885-1915, and U.S. Census, 1850-1950 (Ancestry.com).
New Jersey Office of Cultural and Environmental Services, Historic Sites Inventory No. 0408205 (315 Cooper Street), 1985.
Prowell, George R. The History of Camden County, New Jersey. Philadelphia: L.J. Richards & Co., 1886.
The double-lot home built at 311 Cooper Street in 1870 was among the most substantial on the block, similar in scale to the surviving structure on the northeast corner of Third and Cooper. In contrast to its neighbors, the three-story house described as “handsome” by the West Jersey Press set a new standard for materials with its façade of Chester County green stone, “which is just now attracting the attention of capitalists and builders.” The style of the home was Second French Empire, distinguished by a mansard roof that resembled other new houses then under construction in North Camden.
The first family to live at 311 Cooper Street moved from a rowhouse in the next block (229 Cooper Street) and remained in their new residence for more than three decades. William E. and Caroline Lafferty came to Camden from Wilmington, Delaware, where they were married in 1849. William Lafferty, 46 years old in 1870, worked as superintendent of the New Jersey Chemical Company, a Camden manufacturer of fertilizers and other chemicals. The Lafferty household included Caroline, 40, and William and Caroline’s three daughters, ranging in age from 5 to 20. (A fourth daughter had died in the 1850s at the age of 4.) The Lafferty family typically employed two domestic servants: in 1870 they were Black women who were born in Delaware; by 1880, they were Irish immigrant women.
The Lafferty daughters followed divergent paths. The oldest, Cecelia, had a developmental disability that Census takers in 1880 defined as “dementia.” While a teenager in the 1860s, she spent at least two years at the Moravian Seminary for Young Ladies in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; by 1880, she was institutionalized at the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane. Also known as Kirkbride’s Hospital, the facility with finely landscaped grounds in West Philadelphia was regarded as the best standard of care for its time. The next daughter in age, Emily, finished high school but did not pursue a profession or trade. The youngest, Minna (Minnie), attended the Preparatory School of Swarthmore College but did not continue to college there; she later reported completing four years of college. In 1892 she married a lumber merchant, William Stroud, and followed the path of many former Camden residents by living in Merchantville and Moorestown. The Stroud household included a son and Minna’s sister Emily, who did not marry.
The Lafferty family apparently lived a quiet life on Cooper Street, unlike many of their neighbors who played leading roles in political, civic, and social organizations. William E. Lafferty was steadily a vestryman at St. Paul’s Protestant Episcopal Church for thirty years and served as its treasurer. His service later merited a memorial window in the church.
Members of the Lafferty family lived at 311 Cooper Street until the deaths of William (in 1904) and Caroline (in 1908). During their years in the home, the environment around it changed markedly with the construction of an adjacent house at 305 Cooper Street. That house, built in 1885 for Dr. Henry Genet Taylor, filled the double lot to the west and attached to the existing houses on both sides (303 and 311). The three houses formed an unusual row of substantial houses built at different times in contrasting styles.
Coal Connections
When advertised for sale in 1908, 311 Cooper Street was described as a “handsome stone front residence” with solid walnut interior finishing. Its next owners, from 1910 to 1919, came to Camden from the west-central Pennsylvania coal-mining town called Glen Campbell (so named for the Glenwood Coal Company and its superintendent Cornelius Campbell). The new residents of 311 Cooper Street, Samuel L. and Margaretta Clark and their children, had deep business and family ties with their hometown that they maintained throughout their years in Camden.
Samuel L. Clark, a coal merchant, was 30 years old when the family arrived on Cooper Street; Margaretta was 31, and their three sons ranged in age from 5 to 9. The family employed two domestic servants, documented in the 1910 Census as Isabella Bryson, age 18, and Florence Burley, 16, both born in Pennsylvania. A year after the family came to Camden, the Clarks had an additional child, a daughter, born in 1911. The Clarks sent their children to the private Camden Friends School, and in the case of their oldest son, David, to Penn Charter School in Philadelphia to prepare for his later entry to Princeton.
The advent of the automobile helped the Clarks maintain their connections in the Pennsylvania coal region. Shortly after buying 311 Cooper Street, they added a brick garage at the back of their property, facing Lawrence Street. They motored each summer to Glen Campbell, where Samuel Clark retained roles in businesses run by his brother, Joseph Clark, a future Pennsylvania state senator. The Clark family controlled the First National Bank of Glen Campbell and a number of companies engaged in extraction of coal, gas, oil, and other natural resources.
The Clarks lived at 311 Cooper Street until 1919, when they advertised the home for sale, stating “Reason for selling—Business in Philadelphia; have purchased a home over there.” They moved to Merion, in the fashionable Main Line suburbs west of the city; Samuel Clark later served as president of one of the Clark family companies, the Royal Oil and Gas Corp., which had offices in the Philadelphia National Bank Building.
Apartment Conversions
The Clarks advertised their home for sale as a single-family residence, calling it a “most desirable home,” with 14 rooms, three baths, electric lights, and vapor heat. But in 1920 Cooper Street was on the cusp of a transition toward a commercial corridor with a greater density of residents living in apartments. The Helene Apartments, Camden’s first rental apartment building for upper class tenants, had opened in 1912 at the nearby southeast corner of Cooper and Third Streets. Although several more years would pass before the most concerted push to convert North Camden houses into apartments, in 1920 that transition came to 311 Cooper Street. Work began in December 1919, and by 1920 the new “Kinney Apartments” offered “seven complete housekeeping” units in the “best residential section, five blocks to ferry.” The tenants included white-collar professionals and businesspeople, including an insurance agent, a variety of salesmen, a physician, a clergyman, and a corset maker.
A more intensive redevelopment of Cooper Street occurred later in the 1920s, reflecting aspirations for a business boom in Camden following completion of the Delaware River Bridge (later renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge) in 1926. To create a larger, more modern apartment building at 311 Cooper Street, a real estate company demolished the stone façade of 1870 and replaced it with a Georgian-revival style brick front; a rear addition extended the building to the full depth of the lot. The result was a 32-apartment building with units of one, two, or three rooms, all with baths. The Segwyn Realty Company called the new building the Bloom Apartments, named for the company treasurer Hyman Bloom. Through at least 1950, the building continued to attract business and professional tenants, including a significant number of public school teachers and employees of RCA. By the 1960s, Spanish surnames among the tenants reflected the increasing presence of Puerto Ricans in North Camden during the decades following World War II.
The apartment building had a resident superintendent until at least 1959, but in later years fell into disrepair and financial difficulties. Corresponding with Camden’s post-industrial decline, the building began to appear in legal notices related to back taxes by the mid-1980s. Still, surveyors for the Camden Bureau of Planning considered the building to be a historically significant structure in 1985 as they prepared to nominate Cooper Street as a historic district. “Though this building experienced an extraordinary alteration to its front façade, it remains an integral and significant element to the streetscape,” the structure survey form noted.
The Cooper Street Historic District achieved National Register status in 1989, but conditions at 311 Cooper Street deteriorated. In 1995, the Courier-Post described the building as a “dilapidated apartment complex” when reporting on the stabbing of a homeless man in a hallway. A resident elsewhere in the 300 block of Cooper Street told the newspaper that “the apartment complex is no stranger to drunks and alcoholics who are rowdy.”
Another transformation for Cooper Street was afoot by 2000, when administrators of Rutgers-Camden saw opportunities to increase the visibility of the university by buying properties adjacent to its existing campus. The Camden campus had been created through urban renewal demolitions in the early 1960s, but Cooper Street’s buildings had been spared because of their perceived commercial value. By 2000, 311 Cooper Street, which was then on the city’s foreclosure list, became viewed as a prospect to be renovated into a graduate student dormitory. The university encountered objections from officials and residents concerned about the loss of a taxable property to a tax-exempt state institution. But ultimately Rutgers purchased the building for $100,000 and stated intentions to spend an estimated $1.5 million to restore and convert it to student housing.
By 2002, Rutgers proposed instead to demolish the apartment building, which was authorized following public hearings. Two decades later, 311 Cooper Street consisted of a fenced lawn with a modular office structure at the back of the property.
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).
National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, Sen. Joseph O. Clark House, Glen Campbell Borough, Pa., 2011.
New Jersey Office of Cultural and Environmental Services, Historic Sites Inventory No. 0408204 (Bloom Apartments, 311 Cooper Street), 1985.
327 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 middle 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 a Civil War soldier who became an officer of the U.S. Colored Troops, a prominent physician, and a journalist who became a United States Congressman. Since 2018, this building combined with the adjacent 329 Cooper Street has housed the Rutgers-Camden Department of Childhood Studies.
As Cooper family heirs sold their land for development in the 1850s, they used two adjoining lots at 327 and 325 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 327 became the middle house of a row of three similar residences at the northwest corner of Fourth and Cooper Streets. The house, built between 1852 and 1855, was rented out by its first owners, who lived in Burlington County.
Civil War Family
The earliest tenants of 327 Cooper Street who can be documented are the Trimble family, who moved to this address by 1858. The Trimbles lived in Philadelphia before moving to Camden, but they had roots that extended to Chester County, Pennsylvania, and Baltimore, where family members went into the shipping and mercantile business. The head of the household on Cooper Street, Joseph Trimble, descended from those Baltimore merchants. He joined his father and grandfather’s business, and he and his wife Sarah, who married in 1840, started their family in Baltimore. By 1847, however, they moved to Philadelphia, and by 1852 they were in Camden.
The Trimbles filled their rented home at 327 Cooper Street with as many as 13 residents. The 1860 Census recorded Joseph, 45 years old, as an importer of soda ash (sodium carbonate), a chemical that would have been useful to South Jersey’s glassmaking industry. Sarah, 43 years old, by this time had borne ten children, seven of whom lived with the family, ranging in age from 2 to 18. Joseph’s brother James and his wife, Jane, both age 40, also lived at 327 Cooper Street, and the extended family employed two domestic servants: a Black woman, Asha Bocha, age 60, who was born in Maryland, and a white woman, Mary Murphy, an Irish immigrant 45 years old.
While the Trimbles lived at 327 Cooper Street, the Civil War rocked Camden and the family. Joseph Trimble, an early adherent of the Republican Party, plunged immediately into home front support for the Union. He joined the Camden Relief Society to collect and distribute funds to support the families of men who enlisted as soldiers; in 1862 he served as its president and hosted at least one meeting at his home. Trimble also served as a lieutenant in Camden’s regiment of the Home Guard, formed to defend New Jersey from aggression. Sarah Trimble, meanwhile, became a leader of the Ladies’ Soldiers Aid Society, which collected old clothing to be remade into bandages and other items for sick and wounded soldiers. She invited donations to be sent to her home. Joseph Trimble’s brother James did commissary work for the Union army.
The Trimble family also had a son of military age, their oldest, Armon, who was 19 years old when southern forces attacked the federal Fort Sumter in South Carolina. Armon soon enlisted for three months’ service as a private with the New Jersey Third Infantry Militia, which deployed to Washington and guarded trains carrying provisions to Union troops. He re-enlisted in 1862 as a second lieutenant with the Third Cavalry of the U.S. Army, a regiment then fighting Confederates as well as Native Americans in New Mexico. Armon joined the unit there, but it soon moved east to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and from there to St. Louis and Memphis, where he received notice in February 1863 that his services were no longer needed. Apparently not content to be idle during wartime, Armon next joined the Thirty-Third Regiment, Pennsylvania Infantry Militia, for emergency service during Robert E. Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania, serving from June 26 to August 4, 1863, a period that spanned the Battle of Gettysburg.
In his final act of Civil War service, Armon Trimble applied to become one of the white officers being placed in command of U.S. Colored Troops (USCT). After appearing before a board of examiners in Washington, at 22 years of age he gained appointment as a first lieutenant of the Twenty-Eighth Infantry Regiment USCT. His unit suffered heavy losses in the campaign at Petersburg, Virginia, and was among the Union forces to enter Richmond after the city fell. The regiment took charge of prisoners in Richmond, and thereafter redeployed to Texas, where Trimble and the rest of his troops mustered out in 1865.
While Armon Trimble was away in service, the rest of the Trimble family moved back to Philadelphia. It had made such a mark in Camden that a testimonial dinner held at the West Jersey Hotel in 1863 saluted Joseph Trimble as “a public man and a politician in the cause of justice, right, and humanity.”
The Lure of Science
After the departure of the Trimbles, 327 Cooper Street ceased to be a rental property. In 1864, the earlier owners from Burlington County sold the house to Sarah S. Moody, the daughter of a Philadelphia tailor who had been married for ten years to Edward F. Moody, a bank clerk and cashier. Sarah Moody’s family had local roots that extended to the American Revolution, when a direct ancestor fought at the Battle of Red Bank; her husband’s were similarly deep but in Boston, Massachusetts, where he was born. Edward Moody and his father, Paul, relocated to Philadelphia by the late 1840s. While Edward Moody held a series of clerk and cashier positions with Philadelphia banks, he and his father moved to Camden. They lived in the 200 block of Federal Street, close to the most direct ferry crossing to Philadelphia, when Edward and Sarah married in 1854.
By the time they bought the Cooper Street house, the Moodys had one son, 5-year-old Edward Jr., and another, Nicholas, was born after the move. Edward’s banking career progressed to his election as cashier of the New Republic Bank in Philadelphia in 1869 and of the Fourth National Bank of Philadelphia in 1871. The luxuries of the Moody household included a gold watch and a piano, and by 1870 the family employed a domestic servant, a Black woman who was born in Delaware, Louisa Wiggins, who was 20 years old. That year the Census recorded Edward as 39 years old, a bank agent; Sarah Moody, 35 years old, keeping house; and the boys Edward Jr., 11, and Nicholas, 3.
Edward Moody was also known locally as “Professor Moody” for his vocational devotion to science. He had been attending meetings at Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute since at least 1862, and he frequented the amateur scientific societies that formed in Camden in the late nineteenth century. This may account for his brief service as chief engineer of the Camden Water Works during 1872-73. But he was better known for his lectures and demonstrations of experiments in settings that included the Franklin Institute, the Wagner Free Institute of Science, and the Camden Microscopical Society. Promoting one of his talks on chemistry in 1874, the New Republic newspaper in Camden commented, “what has rendered his discourses so entertaining are his experiments, which are not only invariably successful, but so clearly and distinctly explained that even those who have a very limited knowledge of the science can understand and appreciate them.”
In 1873, after his stint with the Water Works, Edward Moody went to work for the newly founded Camden Safe Deposit Company. He remained with the company for the rest of his career, but in 1883 the Moodys sold their Cooper Street house and moved to Philadelphia. They continued to maintain ties in both cities, however, and returned to Camden in the 1890s.
City of Medicine
The growth of Camden in the decades after the Civil War drew increasing numbers of physicians to the city, among them the owner of 327 Cooper Street for the next 13 years, Dr. Alexander M. Mecray. His path to Camden followed a common pattern of an aspiring physician from a rural county who trained at a Philadelphia medical school and then found Camden to be a promising setting to begin practice. The opening of the new Cooper Hospital in 1887 encouraged the trend.
Alexander Mecray was born in 1839 in Cape May County, New Jersey, where his father was a river pilot and proprietor of the Delaware House hotel. The younger Mecray’s path to medical practice took him first to study in Camden with his brother-in-law, Dr. Alexander Marcy, and from there to the University of Pennsylvania medical school. During the Civil War, he worked as a medic at Satterlee Hospital in Philadelphia. After his service concluded, he married a woman with similar family ties to the region’s maritime activity, Lydia Etris, the daughter of a Philadelphia ship joiner.
Alexander and Lydia Mecray moved to Camden when he started his practice by purchasing a drug store at Fourth and Pine Streets in 1865. He became active in the Camden city and county medical societies and served on the board of managers for the Camden Dispensary, which provided medical services to the indigent. She bore three children and engaged in charitable activities, including raising funds for the dispensary and for the Women’s Park Association for Children. Mecrays were, therefore, well established in their professional, civic, and family life by the time they moved to Cooper Street in 1883.
Cooper Street was becoming an increasingly prestigious address during the 1880s, spurred by a more attractive streetscape accomplished by moving curbs on both sides of the street 12 feet toward the center. This created space for small front lawns and gardens for the length of the thoroughfare, which benefitted the older rowhouses built in the 1850s as well as the newer, architect-designed homes that began to appear in the 1880s. Among the Mecrays’ neighbors on Cooper Street were longtime associates in the medical community, J. Orlando and Elizabeth White, who lived in the house next door (329 Cooper) and Henry Genet and Helen Taylor, who had been their neighbors on Market Street and a few years later built a new home at 305 Cooper.
The Mecray household when they moved into 327 Cooper Street included Alexander, then 43 years old; Lydia, 35; a 17-year-old son, James, and two daughters, 13-year-old Julia, and 4-year-old Anna. When documented in the 1880 Census at their previous home on Market Street, the Mecrays employed a Black woman as a domestic servant: Emma Savage, who was 25 years old, illiterate, and born in Virginia. Her presence reflects the increasing population of African Americans moving to Camden and Philadelphia in the decades following the Civil War. There is no record of whether she worked for the family after they moved to Cooper Street, but the Mecrays continued to employ domestic servants throughout the years in their new home. They had others in their household as well: for a time, a widow and two daughters who may have been relatives; a German roomer who advertised private lessons in German, classics, and mechanical drawing; and Alexander Mecray’s father, James.
When Cooper Hospital opened in 1887, Alexander Mecray was among the first physicians appointed to its staff. The Mecray family continued to live at 325 Cooper Street through the 1890s, but they also acquired a farm in Maple Shade, Burlington County. In 1899 they put 327 Cooper Street up for sale and moved to the country.
Publishing and Politics
The next transfer of 327 Cooper Street made it the eventual home of a United States Congressman. Francis (Frank) F. Patterson Jr., 32 years old in 1900, was firmly entrenched in Camden circles of newspaper publishing and Republican politics. The son of a newspaperman, he had been around journalism since he was a boy in Woodbury doing odd jobs for printers and selling papers. After his father bought the Camden Courier, he became a typesetter at the age of 15 and city editor at 18. Moving in and out of jobs as a reporter and editor in Camden, Philadelphia, and Baltimore during his 20s, he found his way into politics as a protégé of Camden’s Republican power broker, David Baird. He edited the paper that Baird and other Republican organization leaders bought in 1894, the Camden Evening Telegram, and gained a share of ownership. In 1899 he joined with his brother Theodore and two other partners to merge the Telegram with another Camden paper, the Post, to create the Post-Telegram—which they sold to a syndicate headed by Baird.
By the time Patterson, his wife Isabel, and two-year-old son (also named Frank) moved into 327 Cooper Street, the newspaperman had taken his first explicit step into politics by serving one term in the New Jersey Assembly. Next, in 1900, his loyalty to the Republican Party was rewarded by an uncontested nomination to serve as Camden County Clerk, a position he held for the next two decades while he and Isabel raised their family on Cooper Street. Three additional children were born at home by 1910. That year, the U.S. Census recorded the household as Frank Jr., age 41; Isabel, age 37; and the children Frank 3d, age 12; Robert, 9; Isabel, 6; and Mary, 5. The Pattersons also employed domestic servants, in 1910 two Black women, both 29 years old: Addie Trader, who was born in Maryland, and Laura Anderson, born in Delaware. In addition to the servants, the Pattersons’ affluence gave them the ability to send their children to private Quaker schools (the boys to Penn Charter in Philadelphia).
While serving as County Clerk, Patterson remained publisher of the Post-Telegram and in 1911 served a one-year term as president of the Camden Republican Club across the street from his house, at 312 Cooper Street. His influence widened to banking circles as he became president of the Pyne Point Building and Loan Association and the West Jersey Trust Company. Isabel Patterson joined other Camden women in raising funds for charitable causes such as hospitals and the Red Cross. The era of the First World War touched the Patterson family as Frank Jr. served on the local draft board and his oldest son enlisted in the Army. Frank 3d served in the Quartermaster Corps in Newark during 1917-18, but he encountered his greatest risk during the global influenza pandemic that reached Camden in 1918. The first of the Patterson family to contract the illness was his mother, Isabel, then Frank 3d also contracted the disease while home on leave. Both survived.
Patterson’s next reward as a Republican loyalist came in 1920, when he was elected to the United States Congress from the First District following the death of the incumbent, his North Camden neighbor William J. Browning. Although dividing his time between Camden and Washington, Patterson remained deeply engaged in local matters, for example urging that the envisioned location for the new Delaware River Bridge be shifted northward so that it would not cut through the lumberyard of his longtime political patron, David Baird. His habits of attention to local politics soon played a role in his political demise. He easily gained re-election to Congress in 1922, but by 1924 he had a challenger who called attention to his minimal impact on the national stage. He lost his seat in Congress in 1926 to that challenger, Charles A. Wolverton, a former prosecutor and state assemblyman who ultimately served sixteen terms representing the First District.
By the time Patterson’s tenure of Congress ended, the Pattersons also departed the house at 327 Cooper Street. Like other many affluent Camden residents during the 1920s, in 1925 they moved to Merchantville, thus ending the era of 327 Cooper Street as a single-family home.
Rooming House
Cooper Street during the 1920s experienced transition brought on indirectly by construction of the Delaware River Bridge. Anticipating an economic boom for Camden, boosters and real estate interests sought to redevelop Cooper Street as a commercial corridor, akin to New York’s Fifth Avenue. Many nineteenth-century rowhouses underwent conversions into offices or apartments, while others slipped into a period as rental properties. This was the case of 327 Cooper Street, which for more than two decades provided financial support for a rooming house operator, Lillian Hertlein (often Anglicized as Hertline).
Hertlein, a single woman in her late 30s, had been living across the street in an apartment at 408 Cooper Street when she saw the opportunity to rent the former Patterson home. She paid $85 a month rent, placed ads in the newspapers, and by 1930 had filled the house with lodgers and one person who also paid for meals in addition to a room. The residents recorded in the 1930 Census reflected an array of working-class employment in Camden: factory workers, construction contractors, and a store manager. Two were employed at the enormous RCA-Victor complex at the foot of Cooper Street, one as an assembler of “talking machines” and the other as an electrician for radios. The mix was similar by 1940, although her roomers then included a family of three, including a seven-month-old infant. By 1940, Hertlein owned the home.
At some point in the 1940s, a man who came to live in Hertlein’s rooming house also became her husband. John F. Britt was a veteran of the First World War who had served with the 110th Machine Gun Battalion in France, earning a Purple Heart medal. When he filled out his draft registration card for World War II in 1943, he listed 327 Cooper Street as his address and Hertlein as a friend who would serve as his emergency contact.
Britt and Hertlein were married by 1947, when the Camden Courier-Post noted that “Mr. and Mrs. John F. Britt, of 327 Cooper Street…are at their summer home at Beach Haven Crest.” Like the earlier owner of their house, the new couple shared an interest in Republican politics, and both served as members of the local Republican Party committee. They became leaders in the local chapter of the Military Order of the Purple Heart and its auxiliary, and they formed a club to collect and repair toys to give to children in county shelters at Christmastime. John Britt worked as a machinist for the Scott Paper Company, a job he held for twenty-eight years.
The Britts lived on the first floor of 327 Cooper Street and rented out apartments on the second and third floors. They owned the building until at least 1954, and in their later years lived close by near Fourth and Market Streets. Reflecting the changing character of Cooper Street, an ad offering 327 for sale in 1953 described it as an “income property” with eight apartments. For sale again in 1958, it was described as vacant and “available for conversion to offices.”
Puerto Rican Neighborhood
When a new landlord advertised apartments at 327 Cooper Street in 1959, the ad promised renovated, three-room units and called attention to their location in a “Puerto Rican neighborhood.” The tenants with Spanish surnames who lived at this address in the late 1950s and early 1960s represented the Puerto Rican presence in North Camden that had been growing since the Second World War. During the war, the Campbell Soup Company had recruited workers from the island to keep its factory in operation. Housed at first near the plant on the Delaware River waterfront, the new Puerto Rican residents of Camden subsequently found apartments in nearby neighborhoods, started businesses and community institutions, and raised families. The ad for apartments at 327 Cooper Street documents one landlord’s recognition of the likely tenants for a building on Cooper Street in 1959.
The owners of 327 Cooper Street during this period were Saul and Frances Artis, a dentist and his wife who also bought the adjoining rowhouse at the northwest corner of Fourth and Cooper Streets (329). 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.
The Artis's Cooper Street buildings served as Saul’s office as well as rental apartments. 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 the house adjacent to 327 Cooper Street, 329, into modernized offices and apartments.
While the Artises invested and remodeled, in the nearby blocks to the north Rutgers University carried out an urban renewal plan that replaced the adjacent rowhouse neighborhood to the north with a campus of new buildings. Appreciating the growth of the university in their backyard, by 1981 the Artises donated their buildings to Rutgers; 327 Cooper Street served as a home for the Rutgers-Camden Department of Social Work, the campus’s first Hispanic Affairs Office, and the Bursar’s office. Since 2018 the building, joined with 329 Cooper Street and named the Artis Building after the donors, has housed the Rutgers-Camden Department of Childhood Studies.
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.
Ferries 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 325 Cooper Street.
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 massive foundry 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, 327. 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 327 Cooper Street became home to the Rutgers-Camden Department of Childhood Studies.
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.
Prior to the 1850s, the undeveloped land in the vicinity of Third and Cooper Streets, stretching northward to Pearl Street, was known as “Carman’s Field.” William Carman, a prosperous and prominent operator of a sawmill and lumber yard on the Camden waterfront, controlled more than 10 acres that had descended through the Cooper family to Carman’s wife, Mary Ann Cooper, who died in 1841. The house on the northeast corner of Third and Cooper Streets, later numbered 303, is a product of the sale, division, and development of the Carman land in 1852.
While still owned by Carman, the later location of 303 Cooper Street had a two-story wood frame house occupied during the 1840s by a maker of water pumps, Joseph Vautier, the son of a French immigrant to Philadelphia. Vautier was remembered decades later for the pump that stood in front of his house, which was regarded as a source of excellent water during the cholera epidemic of 1849.
Development of the Carman property displaced Vautier, who moved his family from Third and Cooper to another house to the west beyond Seventh Street. In 1852, a broker named Solomon Stimson acquired the double-width lot at Third and Cooper from a group of investors who had acquired the entire Carman field. In June 1853, the Philadelphia Public Ledger observed him “erecting a large and very tastily arranged dwelling on Cooper Street, which will be an ornament to that rapidly improving section of the city.” Stimson covered the old well with flagstones and ran the water through pipes to serve the new home.
Wealth and Status
Solomon Stimson’s house was double the width of the rowhouses recently constructed in the rest of the block, and it reached beyond them in architectural style with features such as its brownstone foundation and hooded windows. It was similar in size but also fancier than the home recently completed in the 400 block of Cooper Street for George W. Carpenter (401-03 Cooper Street), a lumber merchant who later entered into a manufacturing partnership with Stimson.
The source of Stimson’s wealth and his reasons for being in Camden are unclear. He came from a rural area of Saratoga County, New York, north of Albany, but by 1850 was in Camden, 30 years old, and heading a household that included his wife Flora (28 years old, also born in New York); a one-year-old son, James; his younger brother John, 25 years old; and two domestic servants who were Irish immigrants, Ann and Bridget McLeod. The Stimson brothers both reported their occupations as “brokers,” but brokers of what? It’s possible that their connections with Camden were formed through the lumber industry, given Solomon Stimson’s association with George Carpenter, his purchase of part of the Carman land, and his later return to upstate New York, a timber region.
By 1860, Stimson and Carpenter were in business together as Stimson and Carpenter, manufacturers of tape and webbing at Front and Pearl Streets. (They also both served as trustees of the Second Presbyterian Church, newly founded at Fourth and Benson Streets.) A glimpse of the Stimson family’s material possessions emerged from a burglary in 1864, which netted “about $800 worth of plate, jewelry, ornaments &c.,” the Camden Democrat reported. In 1866, the Internal Revenue Service taxed Stimson on possessions that included a carriage, two gold watches, and a piano.
The Stimson family’s reasons for leaving Camden in 1867 are as unclear as their arrival. They returned to Saratoga County, New York, where Solomon Stimson listed his occupation as “lumber.”
A Judge, Eventually
The next owner of 303 Cooper Street, Isaiah Woolston, had just been elected to the Camden County Board of Chosen Freeholders when he purchased the house from Solomon Stimson. Woolston, 50 years old, had a checkered career in and out of businesses that included lumber, poultry, and wholesale liquor. It was in the wholesale liquor business in Philadelphia that “he rapidly accumulated capital,” according to his later obituary in the Camden Morning Post. In Camden, he accumulated political capital as well, holding public office and serving as a director for enterprises that included the Camden Safe Deposit and Trust Co. and the Camden and Amboy Railroad. He was a founder of Trinity Baptist Church.
Woolston and his family occupied 303 Cooper Street for the next three decades, including a ten-year period when he advanced his political career to the position of lay judge of the Court of Common Pleas. Woolston, who had been born in the vicinity of Vincentown, Burlington County, headed a household of four sons with his wife Sarah, originally from Freehold, New Jersey. The family employed Black domestic servants, some of whom are known from Census records: in 1870, Eliza Duncan, 45 years old, who was born in Maryland and unable to read or write; in 1880, Mary E. Hines, 18 years old, also from Maryland and illiterate; and in 1885, Annie Burton, whose age and family history are unknown. A white domestic servant, Laura Dickenson, also came from Maryland and worked in the Woolston home in 1894. Later in the 1890s, the Woolstons advertised a preference for a “German girl for general housework.”
With the benefit of domestic labor for housework, Sarah Woolston engaged in charitable activities. She served on the board of managers for the Camden Home for Friendless Children, which had been organized by prominent Camden residents in 1865. Located on Haddon Avenue above Mount Vernon, it was an altruistic endeavor that also revealed prevailing attitudes toward the poor. While providing shelter, health care, and education to “destitute friendless children,” it also sought to place them out with families to learn trades or useful occupations. The home was also segregated, which prompted the creation of a separate institution for Black children, the West Jersey Orphanage for Colored Children, in 1874.
While living at Third and Cooper, Judge Woolston added real estate investment to his variety of business and political activities. In 1878, he purchased a large tract of then-undeveloped land in the vicinity of Fourth and Penn Streets and resold it to a builder. The property had a frontage of 200 feet on Fourth Street, approximately the later site of the Robeson Library of Rutgers-Camden. Houses filled the block until they were demolished in the 1962-64 urban renewal project that created an enlarged campus for Rutgers.
The four Woolston sons, ages 8 to 14 when they moved into 303 Cooper Street, grew to adulthood at this address. One son, Charles, had a condition that Census takers in 1880 recorded as “insane” and “idiotic.” He died in 1887 at age 30, “very suddenly in Trenton of apoplexy,” raising the possibility that he lived in a state facility. Another son, Clarence, became pastor of the East Baptist Church in Philadelphia and developed expertise in children’s Bible study. Harry Woolston went into the coal business in Camden but also embraced the bicycle craze of the 1890s by starting the Woolston Bicycle Enameling Company. Albert Woolston, a clerk during his father’s judgeship, entered the real estate business.
The Woolston family’s ownership of 303 Cooper Street ended with the death of Isaiah Woolston in 1899 and Sarah Woolston in 1900. The family sold the home to a real estate agent, who advertised, “I will sell the handsome residence at the northeast corner of Third and Cooper Streets, at an exceedingly liberal price provided that a contract is made within ten days.”
Banking and Medicine
For the first two decades of the twentieth century, 303 Cooper Street continued to be home to prominent Camden business leaders. The next two owners were both presidents of the Central Trust Company, a bank founded in 1891 by local businessmen including Abraham Anderson, a canner who had been a partner in the business that later became Campbell Soup. The bank grew quickly to assets of more than $1 million by the time its then-president, Alpheus McCracken, bought the former Woolston home at Third and Cooper Streets.
McCracken rose to business prominence in Camden through the carpentry trade. Born in 1843 in Morris County, New Jersey, McCracken apprenticed as a carpenter by the age of 16. Three years later, he enlisted in the Army and fought for the Union during the Civil War; his unit, the Thirty-First Infantry Regiment of New Jersey Volunteers, saw action at the Battle of Chancellorsville. He moved to Camden from Bordentown, New Jersey, in the 1870s following the death of his first wife, which occurred just one month after the birth of their second son.
Camden’s prominence in the lumber business and railroads proved advantageous for McCracken, as he gained employment as a lumber inspector for the Pennsylvania Railroad’s lines in New Jersey. By the 1880s, he was investing in construction-related businesses, the Richman Fire Escape Company and the Fay Manilla Roofing Company. Although not among the organizers of the new Central Trust Company, he was on its board of directors by 1893 and succeeded Abraham Anderson as president in 1897. Three years later, he moved from North Second Street to 303 Cooper Street, which was closer to the bank at Fourth and Federal.
During their five years in the Cooper Street house, the McCracken family included Alpheus and his second wife, Lillian, a daughter, and two sons. The family also employed Black domestic servants who were born in the South, an indication of the increasing presence of African Americans in Camden at the turn of the twentieth century. In 1900 just before the move to Cooper Street, they employed Mary Hill, a Black woman identified by Census takers only as born in “the South,” who could neither read nor write. In 1905 their household on Cooper Street included a young widow, Rosa Hayden, a 24-year-old Black widow who was born in Virginia, also unable to read or write. Living with her was a 15-year-old Black youth with the same last name, Frederick Hayden, who was attending school.
For reasons not publicly explained, in 1906 the McCrackens moved to Vineland, turning over their house at Third and Cooper to an associate for the nominal sum of $1. The new owner, homeopathic physician Harry H. Grace, was acquainted with Alpheus McCracken through their mutual involvement in the Camden Republican Club (then at 312 Cooper Street) and shared enthusiasm for automobile touring, a new pastime for the wealthy. Grace and his wife, Ellen, established their home and his medical practice at their new address; in 1910, they employed two Black domestic workers, 21-year-old Sadie Hughes and a “house man,” 22-year-old Lorne Flemming (in some records Flemming Green or Lemmond Green), who were both born in Virginia.
During this period, Harry Grace also became involved in management of the Central Trust Company, elected to the board of directors in 1908 and then succeeding McCracken as president of the bank in 1915. Grace’s transition from medicine to banking occurred after his own health scare, which was not publicly identified but necessitated traveling to Frankfurt, Germany, for rest and to “take the celebrated baths in the hope of being restored to his wonted health and vigor,” the Camden Morning Post reported. The journey put Grace and his wife in Europe during the summer of 1914, as the First World War began to unfold following the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand. This apparently cut short the intended treatment of complete rest, as the Graces returned from Europe to Atlantic City, not Camden. Within weeks they traveled again, this time to Rochester, Minnesota, where Grace underwent surgery by one of the renowned Mayo brothers, who soon founded the Mayo Clinic.
A year after the surgery, a celebration at the Union Club in Philadelphia marked Harry H. Grace’s ascendance to the presidency of Central Trust Bank, where Alpheus McCracken remained chairman of the board. By 1917, however, Grace left Camden for Atlantic City, where he continued to work in banking. McCracken resigned as chairman of Central Trust in 1918, citing ill health, and later lived in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania.
The Strenuous Life
Unlike many homes on Cooper Street, 303 did not undergo conversion into an office building or apartments during the 1920s, the period of construction of the Delaware River Bridge (later renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge). As long as it continued to be owned by physicians, which continued into the 1950s, it remained a family home while also including an office for the doctor. This was the case for Dr. Edward Pechin, who bought the property in 1920 (moving from a house immediately behind it at 300 Penn Street). The household that year included Pechin, then 42 years old; his wife, Anna, 38; and their daughter Dorothy, 13. Like their predecessors at this address, they employed a Black domestic worker, 18-year-old Mary Blackson, who was born in New Jersey to parents born in Delaware. They also employed a white maid, 23-year-old Mary Gleaves, who was born in Maryland.
Pechin, who was born in Philadelphia, had come to Camden as a youth to work in a drug store owned by his brother. While his brother maintained the pharmacy, Pechin proceeded to medical school at Jefferson College in Philadelphia, where he graduated in 1903. During that period he appears to have embraced the “strenuous life” philosophy espoused in 1899 by Theodore Roosevelt, who implored men to set aside lives of ease and become strong, individually and for the nation. In Camden, this took the form of the Camden Light Infantry, which formed in 1900, with Pechin participating as a lieutenant by 1904. The group devoted itself to military-style training, and members regarded their participation as cultivating not only physical fitness but also, in the words of a captain of the corps, “habits of mind, self-control, and reverence for the law.”
Focusing his practice on internal medicine and treatment of tuberculosis, Pechin became a member of the Board of Managers of the Camden Tuberculosis Hospital. Some traces of devotion to an active life continued: in 1911 he sprung to the rescue of a woman who tripped in the path of an approaching freight train; in 1918 he was reported to be close to collapse from overwork while treating patients at Cooper Hospital during the influenza epidemic. Known for tirelessly responding to patients, day or night, he later contracted the flu and pneumonia, which permanently sapped his strength.
It came as a “severe shock,” the Camden Morning Post reported, in 1925 when Pechin contracted spinal meningitis. At age 47, he died several days later despite a dozen of his fellow physicians working in shifts to try to save his life with treatments that included spinal taps and brain surgery. His wife and daughter kept vigil. A year later, they left the house at Third and Cooper and relocated to Haddonfield.
Jewish Home
The next long-term owners of 303 Cooper Street, Dr. Max Ruttenberg and his wife, Anna, came to a neighborhood that had transformed during the 1920s to include a significant Jewish presence. Jewish entrepreneurs were active in renovating 50-year-old rowhouses into apartments during the period of real estate speculation that occurred in anticipation of the Delaware River Bridge. A cluster of Jewish-owned businesses, including a tailor shop, a delicatessen, and an automobile dealership, developed just a block away from Third and Cooper in the 200 block of Penn Street. Although Camden’s Jewish population centered more prominently in other parts of the city, the Ruttenbergs were not the only Jewish family in the vicinity of Cooper Street.
Moving from their previous home on State Street in 1933, the Ruttenbergs were a family of five: Max, who was an ear, nose, and throat specialist, was 42 years old, and Anna was 36. They had been married twelve years and had three children, a son Bertram, 10 years old, and two daughters, 8-year-old Ruth and 4-year-old Serita. Their Jewish heritage was rooted in Russia. Max had been born there and immigrated to the United States with his family in 1900, when he was 8 years old, during a surge of new arrivals from southern and eastern Europe. Anna was the daughter of a Philadelphia rabbi who immigrated from Russia, as did her mother.
In addition to their ties to extended family in both Camden and Philadelphia, the Ruttenbergs participated in networks of Jewish civic, social, and faith activities. Anna, a college graduate and a teacher before her marriage, was one of the organizers of the Camden chapter of Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America; she served as chapter president in 1932. Shortly after moving to Cooper Street, in 1934, Max Ruttenberg was elected president of the Jewish Welfare Society, which raised funds to encourage self-reliance of the poor and to provide free medical and legal advice. The family’s religious life centered on Congregation Beth-El, which had been established in the Parkside neighborhood of Camden during the 1920s. Bertram Ruttenberg had his bar mitzvah there in 1935, followed by a reception at home.
The Ruttenbergs lived at 303 Cooper Street for a little more than two decades, from 1933 until 1955. During this period Max Ruttenberg, who had degrees in dentistry from the University of Pennsylvania and in medicine from Temple University, joined the faculty of the Penn Graduate School of Medicine. The children grew up, attended college, and married. During the Second World War, Bertram Ruttenberg—by then a medical school graduate—served in Guam with the U.S. Army medical corps. Bertram’s sister Ruth in 1945 married a Philadelphia medical student who then served in the Army and later in the Air Force.
Max and Anna Ruttenberg remained at 303 Cooper Street until the doctor retired in the early 1950s. They spent their later years primarily at the Jersey Shore, and their departure from Cooper Street marked the end of its era as a single-family home.
Service to Camden
After the Ruttenbergs moved from Camden, institutional and office uses of 303 Cooper Street reflected the changing social landscape and needs of the city. In 1955, the Campbell Soup Fund bought the building and presented it to the Camden County Community Chest and Council, an organization that raised and administered funding for “health, welfare, and character-building agencies and the USO.” The new headquarters was intended as a memorial to Arthur C. Dorrance, a president of the Campbell Soup Company and the first president of the Community Chest before his death in 1946. A plaque placed in the building acknowledged his service.
The Community Chest, later known as the United Fund, operated at 303 Cooper for nearly two decades, until moving to 408 Cooper Street in 1972. Its relationships with social service agencies positioned the building to play a role in responding to the city’s needs in the wake of the Camden riot of 1971. After tensions between police and Camden’s growing Puerto Rican population ignited violence, an ad hoc group of social service leaders met at this location on August 27, 1971, to discuss ways of being more useful to the community and to plan responses to future emergencies. Leading the effort were Angel Perez, director of Community Organization for Puerto Rican Affairs, the Rev. Edward Walsh of Catholic Charities, and Ronald B. Evans, chairman of the Camden chapter of the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE).
The departure of the United Fund in 1972 led to a period of ownership by Edward Teitelman, a psychiatrist and historic architecture enthusiast who also owned the distinctive nineteenth-century home next door (305 Cooper Street) and other buildings on Cooper Street and nearby. During the 1970s and 1980s, the building housed psychiatry practices and a Veterans Vocational Guidance Center (which lost its funding during federal budget cuts in 1980). The address appeared periodically in legal notices for overdue taxes through 1990 and came into the hands of Rutgers University in 2001 through purchase from a trustee for Edward Teitelman. Thereafter it served as an office building for the Chancellor and other senior administrators of Rutgers University-Camden.
Francis Berger, Genealogical and Memorial History of the State of New Jersey (New York: Lewis Historical Publishing Company, 1910).
Camden City Directories (Camden County Historical Society, Ancestry.com).
Camden County Property Records.
Camden and Philadelphia Newspapers (Newspapers.com and Genealogy Bank).
U.S. Census, 1850-1950, and New Jersey State Census, 1885-1925 (Ancestry.com).
Register of Officers and Men of New Jersey in the Civil War, 1861-65 (Ancestry.com).
Nathanial B. Sylvester, History of Saratoga County, New York (Philadelphia: Everts & Ensign, 1878).
Priscilla M. and Franklyn M. Thompson, "Central Trust Company," National Register of Historic Places.
407 Cooper Street is a contributing structure of the Cooper Street Historic District, listed on the New Jersey and National Registers of Historic Places, and notable as the home of a nineteenth-century descendant of the Cooper family. The district's nomination for the National Register identifies significance in part for the presence of Camden’s “most intact examples of nineteenth-century houses” and their embodiment of “the street’s change from residential and professional to commercial.” The house at 407 Cooper Street embodies this change through its history as a single-family home that transitioned to medical offices and apartments during the 1920s as affluent families moved to suburban towns during the construction period for the Delaware River Bridge (later renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge). In 2000, Rutgers University acquired the building, which became home to the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminal Justice.
Among the many building lots that heirs of the Cooper family sold on the north side of Cooper Street during the 1840s and 1850s, they retained one: the lot at 407, which remained undeveloped until construction of a three-story brick rowhouse in 1871. By that date, the lot had continued to pass through the family to William B. Cooper, who leased the house to another tenant for several years before retiring from farming in Stockton Township and moving into Camden in 1876 when he was 62 years old.
The Cooper Family and Legacies of Slavery
Descended from the first European landholders of the area that became Camden, William B. Cooper was born in 1814 in a house built by his grandparents in Delaware Township (later known as Stockton and still later developed into the Cramer Hill section of Camden). In the tradition of his Quaker family, he attended the Newton Friends School and later the Westtown Boarding School in Chester County, Pennsylvania. He returned to New Jersey and joined his father and brother Benjamin in farming the Cooper land.
According to an 1886 history of Camden County, the two brothers and their father were “in the days of slavery … devoted friend[s] of the refugee slaves, and would do anything to comfort and protect them.” Research by the Camden County Historical Society has identified the Camden area as “Station A” on the Underground Railroad in New Jersey, and the Coopers’ Stockton Township property afforded an especially conducive location on the Delaware River opposite Petty Island. In earlier years, however, the extended Cooper family had benefitted from enslaved labor and the slave trade. The Historical Society’s research documented sales of enslaved people at Camden ferry landings, including the Cooper Point ferry that William B. Cooper’s father leased to a Philadelphia operator. Two such transactions took place while the lease was in effect (1762-64) and one after it ended. During the late eighteenth century, another member of the family, Marmaduke Cooper, is known to have held fourteen slaves on another plantation (where his home, Pomona Hall, became a museum).
Those Cooper connections with slavery took place before William B. Cooper was born, but his life nevertheless entwined with the hierarchies of race that prevailed in the nineteenth century. In Stockton Township and at 407 Cooper Street, his household had both white and Black residents. At the head of the household were William and his wife, Phoebe, a descendant of another Quaker settler family, the Emlens; living with them was William’s older sister, Elizabeth. For the work of the household, they employed Black domestic servants, most consistently a woman in her 50s, Mary Ann Christmas, who moved with them from the farm to the city.
Apart from the Coopers, Christmas headed her own household in Stockton Township, documented in the 1880 Census as including four children, among them a 9-year-old daughter already in domestic service with the Cooper family and a 12-year-old son working as a waiter in a hotel. An 11-year-old son was attending school; an 8-year-old daughter was not. The household also included a nephew, Joseph Dean, who at 23 years old could not read or write; he worked as a coachman for the Coopers and joined his aunt at the new house at 407 Cooper Street. Although separated from her own household, while in the Coopers’ employ Christmas amassed wages enough to purchase property in 1883. The lot and single-story frame house, in the vicinity of Twenty-Ninth Street and Mitchell Streets in Cramer Hill, remained the family home for at least two decades.
In their elder years in Camden, the three Coopers of 407 Cooper Street became known for their support of charitable causes. All three played roles in managing and supporting the West Jersey Orphanage for Colored Children, which had been founded in 1874. Although an altruistic endeavor, the institution existed within its benefactors’ beliefs about the welfare and potential of Black children. The orphanage provided education and health care, but it also sought to “bind out” children over the age of 12 to enable them to learn trades or other employment.
The Cooper household diminished in the 1880s with the deaths of Elizabeth in 1883, Phoebe in 1887, and finally William in 1888 at the age of 75. His bequests reflected the range of and character of his civic interests: Cooper Hospital received the largest bequest, $50,000, followed by $15,000 given to the Friends’ Asylum for the Relief of Persons Deprived of the Use of Their Reason, located in the Frankford section of Philadelphia. The West Jersey Orphanage received $2,000, as did the City Dispensary and the Home for Friendless Children. To the servants of his household, he left $6,000.
Fruit Merchant
The next occupants of 407 Cooper Street, from 1888 until 1897, linked the home with merchant activity in Philadelphia and the pursuit of exotic fruits for the growing cities on both sides of the Delaware River. Eugene B. Redfield, who was in the produce business with his father at the Dock Street Market in Philadelphia, was about 30 years old when he purchased 407 Cooper Street as a home for himself and his wife, Lydia. They employed Black servants, including Martha Woolford and Thomas Jefferson.
Redfield & Son brought fruit and vegetables into Philadelphia from warmer climates in the South and West, then repacked and sold them to the nearby region. The founder of the firm, Eugene’s father Bradley, had started life in Connecticut but took up farming in Delaware in the late 1860s and then launched his produce business in Philadelphia in 1871. Like many of Dock Street’s commission merchants, he commuted to work from a home in Camden.
Eugene Redfield, the oldest of five siblings, moved to 407 Cooper Street around the time that he embarked on a new extension of the family business: Florida oranges. During the 1890s, the commercial orange industry was in its infancy, and Redfield found opportunity in Polk County near Tampa. He invested in land and developed a grove that over twenty years’ time developed to more than 2,000 trees, primarily oranges but also grapefruit, lemons, limes, and other novelties for northern tastes. Together with Lydia, he established a winter home in a colonial-style mansion and returned to Camden only during the summers.
The Redfields sold 407 Cooper Street and left Camden by the end of the nineteenth century. While continuing to winter in Florida, Eugene and Lydia divided their summer months between Atlantic City and a residence in West Philadelphia. In 1911, when Eugene Redfield died at his Polk County estate, Lydia took over the citrus grove and made Florida her permanent home.
Boarding House, Club House
After the Redfields departed, 407 Cooper Street changed hands several times in the first years of the twentieth century. As a rental property, from 1899 to 1902 it was a boarding house whose occupants included Samuel Hufty, the city comptroller of Camden and a veteran of the Civil War, and a physician, Paul Mecray, who soon married and moved into the house next door (405 Cooper Street). For a brief few months in 1903, the building became the club house for a fledging Union League organized by former Mayor Cooper B. Hatch. Conceived as a rival to the Camden Republican Club across the street at 312 Cooper Street, the Union League launched with fanfare in July 1903 with a lawn party for four hundred people and music by Josephus Jennings’ Third Regiment Band. The enthusiasm was not matched with sufficient funds to support the club, however, and it folded by November.
Bridges to Bridgeton
The next long-term owners of 407 Cooper Street owned the home from 1905 into the 1940s, through Cooper Street’s transition to a primarily commercial thoroughfare. The Ewell family, with deep roots in Cumberland County, located in Camden for the benefit of the medical career of Dr. Alfred Elwell, who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania medical school in 1899. The doctor’s father, Jacob, bought the home in 1905 and immediately signed the deed over to his son.
With the purchase of the home, Jacob Elwell, began to divide his time between Camden and Bridgeton, the commercial center of rural Cumberland County, about 40 miles south of Camden. He was 62 years old and a Civil War veteran whose unit fought at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. His trade was harness-making, which he had learned as a teenage apprentice and built into a prominent harness, leather, and saddle store in Bridgeton. When automobiles began to supplant horses early in the twentieth century, he saw the future and in 1911 added an auto garage to his store.
The Elwell household on Cooper Street at first consisted of two generations, Jacob Elwell and his wife Harriet, together with their doctor son and their adult daughter, Alice. In 1910 they employed a Black married couple, William and Cora Wright, as domestic servants. The Wrights, who had been married three years, had both migrated north from Virginia. They were, thus, harbingers of the larger wave of Black migration that came to northern industrial cities during the First World War.
The Elwell family experienced generational transitions while living at 407 Cooper Street. Jacob and Harriet celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary with a party back in Bridgeton in 1914. The next year, Dr. Alfred Elwell married a woman from Bridgeton, Helen Whitaker, and by 1920 their family on Cooper Street expanded to include two children. Alice Elwell also married and left the home in 1916. That year, the death of Harriet Elwell led her husband, Jacob, to move back to Bridgeton to live with another of their sons. He also died there, in 1922.
By the 1920s, Cooper Street was undergoing its own transitions related to the construction of the Delaware River Bridge (later named the Benjamin Franklin Bridge), which opened in 1926. Expecting a commercial boom for Camden, real estate interests promoted conversions of Cooper Street properties from family homes into office buildings and apartments. The Elwells were a bit ahead of the trend, as they started advertising an apartment for rent in 1918. In 1922 they joined other prominent neighbors in relocating to Merchantville, although they retained ownership of 407 Cooper Street and Alfred Elwell maintained his practice there. They rented offices to other physicians and apartments to long-term tenants such as Helen and Martha Lummis, sisters and school teachers. The Elwells themselves returned to live in one of their apartments from 1935 through 1941, when the doctor died from a heart attack that he experienced while driving in Ocean City. By that time his son, Alfred Jr., had completed medical school and was starting an internship at Cooper Hospital.
Offices and Apartments
The house at 407 Cooper Street remained a place of medical offices, dental offices, and apartments from the 1940s through the 1970s, owned for much of that time by Helen Elwell’s second husband, dentist John S. Owens. For a time during the early 1960s, it served as the Camden Free Dental Clinic. In its physical appearance and occupancy, the building continued to reflect the changing nature of Cooper Street. By 1980, its first floor had a front façade of polished stone that spanned the original house and an addition on the east side that housed an additional doctor’s office. “A rather ugly modernized first floor does little to enhance this structure,” noted historic structure surveyors from the Camden Division of Planning. Apartment tenants by the 1980s included individuals with Spanish surnames, likely a reflection of the increasing Puerto Rican population of North Camden.
Because of their perceived value as business locations, houses on Cooper Street were spared from the 1962-64 urban renewal project that created a campus for Rutgers University in the blocks between Cooper Street and the Benjamin Franklin Bridge. Rutgers, which had acquired the house next door at 405 Cooper Street by the 1970s, also purchased 407 Cooper Street in 2000. A renovation project in 2004 united the two buildings into one facility with office spaces, seminar rooms, and a student computer lab. The combined properties, turning their backs to Cooper Street by providing access through a shared back porch, became home to the Rutgers-Camden Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminal Justice.Newspapers of Camden, Bridgeton, Philadelphia, and Tampa, Florida (Newspapers.com and Genealogy Bank).
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Heatherington, M.F. History of Polk County, Florida. St. Augustine, Fla.: The Record Company, 1928.
Historical Data Systems, comp. U.S., American Civil War Regiments, 1861-1866 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 1999.
Prowell, George R. The History of Camden County, New Jersey. Philadelphia: L.J. Richards & Co., 1886.