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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
People
Description
An account of the resource
Residents of Cooper Street
Person
An individual.
Time period on Cooper Street
c. 1876-88 (boarding)
c. 1892, 1903 (buildings)
Location(s) - Cooper Street
415 Cooper Street
514 Cooper Street (designed by Baily & Truscott for William T. Read, 1903)
538-42 Cooper Street (designed by Baily & Truscott for John W. Cheney, c. 1892)
726 Cooper Street (designed by Arthur Truscott for Lynn Truscott, 1888)
Location(s) - Other
19 Springfield Avenue, Merchantville (Truscott family home, c. 1892-1930s)
New Jersey Trust and Safe Deposit Building, Third and Market Streets, Camden (designed by Arthur Truscott, 1888)
Baily & Truscott office, 138 S. Fourth Street, Philadelphia
Drexel University, Philadelphia
Blackwood, New Jersey
Columbia, Tennessee
Occupation
Architect
Birth Date
December 4, 1858
Birthplace
Cornwall, England
Death Date
September 12, 1938, in Blackwood, New Jersey. Buried in Harleigh Cemetery.
Biographical Text
For at least twelve years, between 1876 and 1888, English immigrant Arthur Truscott boarded at 415 Cooper Street while establishing a career in architecture in Philadelphia. His work included notable buildings for Camden, including houses on Cooper Street and the New Jersey Safe Deposit & Trust Company building at Third and Market Streets.<br /><br />Truscott arrived in the United States in 1875, at the age of 18, and by 1876 he appeared in Camden city directories as a boarder in the 415 Cooper Street home of <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/44" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Jerusha Browning</a>, a member by marriage of the prominent Browning family of South Jersey. In addition to Arthur, the boarders at 415 Cooper included his two brothers, J. Lynn Truscott (four years older) and Millwood Truscott (two years younger). Arthur's brothers both established long-term, prosperous careers in the insurance industry, following in the footsteps of an uncle already in Camden: John W. Cheney. The Truscott brothers became active in the nearby St. Paul's Protestant Episcopal Church, and Lynn Truscott eventually married into the extended Browning family.<br /><br />While living at 415 Cooper Street, Arthur Truscott gained architectural training in a series of leading Philadelphia firms, including <a href="https://www.philadelphiabuildings.org/pab/app/ar_display.cfm/21576" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Wilson Bros. & Co</a>. and <a href="https://www.philadelphiabuildings.org/pab/app/ar_display.cfm/23024" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Cope & Stewardson</a>. By 1888, when he left Cooper Street, he had published house plans in <a href="https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/godeys-ladys-book/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><em>Godey's Lady's Book</em></a>, and he demonstrated his range in commercial as well as residential architecture with at least two buildings in Camden. For his brother Lynn, Truscott designed a double-lot gray stone home at 627 Cooper Street (later demolished for construction of the Walt Whitman Hotel). He also designed a four-story office building at Third and Market Streets for the New Jersey Safe Deposit & Trust Company. By 1990, when buildings associated with the banking, insurance, and legal professions in Camden were added to the National Register of Historic Places, Truscott's Victorian Eclectic building for New Jersey Trust was the oldest surviving structure designed for specific use as a bank. <br /><br />Truscott left New Jersey for about two years, 1888-90, to serve as architect for a federal arsenal in Columbia, Tennessee (also later listed on the National Register). When he returned, he formed a partnership with Philadelphia architect William Lloyd Baily, and among many other commissions for residences and churches, Truscott & Baily added four houses to the 500 block of Cooper Street: three of them the trio of Chateauesque stone townhouses for Truscott's uncle, John W. Cheney, at 538-42 Cooper Street (built c. 1892). The facades were preserved as part of the buildings for the LEAP Academy Charter School. About a decade after the Cheney project, in 1903, Baily & Truscott produced the very different red-brick Colonial Revival home at 514 Cooper Street for William T. Read.<br /><br />Truscott, meanwhile, married and designed a home for his family in Merchantville, then a suburban enclave attracting Philadelphia and South Jersey professionals, including a number of prominent architects. His household there, from the 1890s through the 1930s, included his wife, Alice, four children, his mother-in-law, and domestic servants. After the dissolution of the Baily partnership in 1904, Truscott became head of the architecture program at the Drexel Institute (later Drexel University); he was a supervising architect for Camden High School, built on Park Boulevard 1916-18, and late in his life, he worked as a draftsman for a Philadelphia firm specializing in church architecture, <a href="https://www.philadelphiabuildings.org/pab/app/ar_display.cfm/18688" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Charles Bolton & Son</a>. At the time of his death in 1938, he was living in Blackwood, New Jersey; he is buried in Camden, in Harleigh Cemetery.<br /><br /><em>Find illustrations of Arthur Truscott's work and further biographical details in "Arthur Truscott" online at <a href="http://www.dvrbs.com/people/CamdenPeople-ArthurTruscott.htm" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">dvrbs.com</a>.</em>
Associated Individuals
J. Lynn Truscott (brother); married Mary Cooper Paul Browning
Millwood Truscott (brother); married Carrie Weatherby
Jerusha Browning (head of household at 415 Cooper Street)
Margaret Browning (daughter of Jerusha Browning)
George Cole (also resident at 415 Cooper Street, 1885)
Anna Browning (also resident at 415 Cooper Street, 1885)
Kate Browning (also resident of 415 Cooper Street, 1885)
Edward P. Browning (also resident at 415 Cooper Street, 1888-89)
Alice Parry, wife (married 1889)
Arthur S. Truscott (son), served as aviator in British Royal Air Force during World War I; died from accidental gas inhalation at Truscott family home in 1935.
Alice Truscott (daughter)
W. Parry Truscott (son)
Catharine F. Truscott (daughter)
Anna G. Parry (mother-in-law)
Lolie Dangrigred (?), servant in 1900, African American born in Virginia
Dorinda Barrett, servant in 1910, African American born in Pennsylvania
William Lloyd Baily, business partner, 1890-1904
John W. Cheney, uncle (related through Cheney's wife Emily Cook; Truscott's mother was Susan Frances Matilda Cook); client, 538-42 Cooper Street
William T. Read, client, 514 Cooper Street
Sources
Banks, Insurance and Legal Buildings in Camden, New Jersey, 1873-1938, Nomination, National Register for Historic Places, U.S. Department of the Interior.<br />Berenson, Carol A., <em>Merchantville, New Jersey: The Development, Architecture, and Preservation of a Victorian Commuter Suburb </em>(Thesis, Graduate Program in Historic Preservation, University of Pennsylvania), 1984.<br />Camden City Directories, New Jersey State Census, U.S. Census (Ancestry.com).<br /> Camden Newspapers (Newspapers.com).<br />Cooper Street Historic District Nomination, National Register of Historic Places, U.S. Department of the Interior.<br /> "<a href="https://www.philadelphiabuildings.org/pab/app/ar_display.cfm/21581" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Truscott, Arthur (1858-1938)</a>, Philadelphia Buildings and Architects, Athenaeum of Philadelphia.
Research by
Charlene Mires and Lucy Davis
Posted by
Charlene Mires
Send corrections to cmires@camden.rutgers.edu
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Truscott, Arthur
Description
An account of the resource
While boarding at 415 Cooper Street, architect Arthur Truscott launched his career in Philadelphia.
415 Cooper Street
514 Cooper Street
538 Cooper Street
540 Cooper Street
542 Cooper Street
627 Cooper Street
Adult
Architects
Banking
Blackwood
England
Immigrants
Insurance
LEAP Academy
Male
Merchantville
Philadelphia
Tennessee
-
https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/files/original/b10abf82678c25d65658b12871051317.jpg
a1f973f83b5728f4de6caf2dca4e53cd
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Buildings
Description
An account of the resource
Houses and other structures on Cooper Street in Camden, N.J.
Place
Residence, business, or other entity.
Illustrations
Photograph by Jacob Lechner
Significance
401-03 Cooper Street is a contributing structure of the Cooper Street Historic District, listed on the New Jersey and National Registers of Historic Places. Documentation prepared by the Camden Division of Planning in 1980 noted, “In spite of stuccoing and alterations to the door, it remains one of the important visual links between Cooper Street’s pre- and post- Civil War development.” The scale of the house reflects the wealth and status of pioneers in Camden’s lumber industry during the nineteenth century; occupants over time included a prominent banker, a leader of the New Century Club of Philadelphia and the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, a female physician who founded a clinic for underprivileged women and children in West Philadelphia, and a future dean of Rutgers-Camden. In the 1920s the building transitioned to office and apartment use, thus exemplifying one of the Cooper Street Historic District’s stated qualities of significance, “the street's change from residential and professional to commercial." Owned by Rutgers University since the 1970s, the building became home to the Departments of <a href="https://polisci.camden.rutgers.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Political Science</a> and <a href="https://dppa.camden.rutgers.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Public Policy and Public Administration</a>.
Architectural style
Greek Revival
Date of construction
1849-50
History
<p>The double-lot residence at Fourth and Cooper Streets, originally the home of a lumber dealer’s family, is a testament to the prominence and prosperity of the lumber industry in nineteenth-century Camden. Lumber yards and sawmills began to populate the Camden riverfront in the 1830s and thrived for decades as the city’s dominant industry. Unlike Philadelphia across the river, Camden had an advantage of undeveloped river flats where rafts of cut timber could be accumulated. Timber came down the Delaware River from northern Pennsylvania and southern New York and filled Camden’s riverfront from Cooper Street north to Cooper’s Point. Lumber entrepreneurs also obtained Pennsylvania white pine after it traveled down the Susquehanna River to Marietta, Pennsylvania, in Lancaster County and to Port Deposit, Maryland. Once in Camden, the timber became the lumber and building products that railroads carried across South Jersey to build newly developing towns.</p>
<p><strong>A Business Pioneer</strong></p>
<p>The financial success of one of Camden’s lumber dealers, George W. Carpenter, can be seen in his home at 401-03 Cooper Street – a residence double the size of any other built in this block of Cooper Street during its first generation of development. Carpenter bought the adjoining lots in 1849 from an heir of the Cooper family, which had begun to sell land on the north side of Cooper Street for development. The purchase was among sixteen real estate purchases by Carpenter during the period from 1846 to 1859, a pace of investment enabled by his success as a lumber dealer. Carpenter, who was born in Massachusetts, had migrated to New Jersey sometime before 1830, the year he married Susan Heigh in Cumberland County. By 1841, together with a partner he was operating a lumber mill on Front Street near the riverfront.</p>
<p>As it rose during late 1849 and early 1850, the new house attracted attention from the Philadelphia <em>Inquirer</em>, which called it "one of the handsomest mansions any where near Philadelphia," and from the Philadelphia <em>Public Ledger,</em> which noted its front facade constructed of Connecticut brownstone. When they moved into their new home in 1850, the Carpenter household consisted of George and Susan Carpenter, their three sons ages 11, 13, and 14, and a sister or other female relative of Susan. The Carpenters added to their holdings in 1854 by purchasing the adjacent lot at <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/76" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">405 Cooper Street</a>, which remained undeveloped until its sale to one of their grown sons in 1868. George Carpenter’s business endeavors meanwhile extended from lumber into manufacturing, and he became regarded as “one of the business pioneers of our city,” in the words of the <em>Camden Democrat.</em> By the time of his death in 1870, he was taking an interest in the development of <a href="https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/atlantic-city/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Atlantic City</a> as a member of the Board of Directors of the Camden and Atlantic Railroad Company. His widow, Susan, remained in the Cooper Street house until 1887.</p>
<p><strong>Wealth and Activism</strong></p>
<p>A family that united two of Camden’s economic foundations – lumber and banking – became the next owners of 401-03 Cooper Street. Wilbur F. Rose, a banker, and Mary Whitlock Rose, the daughter of a lumber merchant, moved into the grandest house on the block from a smaller house across the street (406 Cooper Street) that had been in her family since before their marriage in 1869. By the time of the move in 1888, Wilbur Rose had advanced from clerk to cashier of National State Bank of Camden. The family included two young daughters, 13-year-old Elsie and 10-year-old Mary Caroline, and Mary’s widowed mother, Ann Whitlock. (A son had died in infancy.) At various times the Rose household included other extended family members and Black domestic servants.</p>
<p>With the benefits of substantial income and help to run the household, Wilbur and Mary Rose both became active in civic and charitable causes. As Wilbur Rose continued to advance to the position of vice president of the bank, he invested energy in a vast array of Camden business and charitable activities, from directorships with railroads and insurance firms to service on behalf libraries, poverty relief, and child welfare. Mary Rose, known for her interest in literature and the arts, expanded her public activities after two personal losses in 1891: the death of her mother as well as her younger daughter, who succumbed from scarlet fever at the age of 13. In keeping with the usual custom of the time, their funerals were held in the home.</p>
<p>During the 1890s, Mary Whitlock Rose became especially prominent in <a href="https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/womens-clubs/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">women’s club circles</a> in Philadelphia and nationally. She ascended to the presidency of the New Century Club in Philadelphia, a group that had formed after the nation’s Centennial in 1876, and she became a vice president of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. The New Century Club, originally devoted to literature and other cultural pursuits, had become active in progressive reform work by the time of Rose’s leadership. In speeches, Rose promoted the idea that clubs should become increasingly democratic and less defined by social class. She spoke on contemporary issues, including immigration and “The Possibilities of <a href="https://dp.la/primary-source-sets/the-new-woman" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">the New Woman</a>.” During this era, the New Century Club’s guests at its clubhouse on Twelfth Street included Susan B. Anthony and Jane Addams, the Chicago reformer who addressed the group on the subject of child labor.</p>
<p>Mary Rose’s surviving daughter, Elsie (known in adulthood as Elise Whitlock-Rose), accompanied her on trips to General Federation of Women’s Clubs meetings, and together they toured in Europe. Elise, who was educated at the Springside boarding school in Philadelphia’s Chestnut Hill section, acquired fluency in French and a passion for French culture and history. After her school days she channeled this interest into a series of books about cathedrals and cloisters of France, researched in Europe and published between 1906 and 1914.</p>
<p>The death of Mary Whitlock Rose from “a lingering illness” in 1907 left a $50,000 estate to Elise and her father, Wilbur, who remained at 401-03 Cooper Street together. They employed two domestic servants, recorded in the 1910 Census as Black women born in Delaware: Mary Harris, 19, and Rosa Johnson, 64. It was around this time that Elise Whitlock-Rose embarked on her own path of community service. In her late 20s she enrolled in the <a href="https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/womans-medical-college-of-pennsylvania/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania</a>, where she completed her M.D. degree in 1914. With another Woman’s Medical College graduate, Elizabeth F.C. Clark, she opened a clinic in West Philadelphia to serve underprivileged women and children, the Clinic of Notre Dame des Malades (Our Lady of the Sick). The clinic served patients for more than 30 years. Following the outbreak of World War I, which occurred while she was traveling in Europe with her father, Elise also sought to aid France by starting a war relief agency, which she called the Little House of Saint Pantaleon. She revived it in 1939 to help France at the start of World War II.</p>
<p>Elise Rose’s career as a physician entailed a move to Philadelphia, where she was joined by her father, who retired from business in 1912, in a home on Twenty-Second Street near Rittenhouse Square. The Rose family’s occupation of 403 Cooper Street came to an end in 1916.</p>
<p><strong>Offices and Apartments</strong></p>
<p>During the 1920s, 401-03 Cooper Street converted from a family home into physicians’ offices and apartments, a common pattern on Cooper Street during the period of construction of the nearby Delaware River Bridge (later renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge), which opened in 1926. Expecting a business boom in Camden, real estate interests promoted Cooper Street as a potential New York-style Fifth Avenue lined with offices and apartment buildings. They bought, renovated, and sold or managed numerous former residences in pursuit of this vision. (It is perhaps during this period of renovations that 401-03 Cooper Street gained its coating of stucco.) The physicians who subsequently owned 403 Cooper Street from the 1920s through the 1960s maintained practices in Camden but primarily lived in suburban Haddonfield. In addition to other doctors’ offices, tenants in the building included a dressmaker, Eva Smith, who lived in one of the apartments from 1929 until at least 1945. Her neighbors over that span of time included schoolteachers, a secretary, a boiler fireman, and a returning World War II veteran.</p>
<p>By the 1960s, students at Rutgers University were among the apartment tenants at 401-03 Cooper Street as the university expanded its campus north of Cooper Street through urban renewal demolitions in 1962-64. During this period of significant growth for Rutgers-Camden, one of 401-03 Cooper’s apartment dwellers was student <a href="https://mmarsh.camden.rutgers.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Margaret Marsh</a>, Class of 1967. Later earning graduate degrees at Rutgers and becoming a renowned scholar of the histories of women, gender, and medicine, Marsh returned to Rutgers-Camden in 1998 as Dean and later Executive Dean of the Rutgers-Camden Faculty of Arts and Sciences. She also served as Chancellor - twice, from 2007 to 2009 and from 2020 to 2021 - on an interim basis.</p>
<p>By the late 1970s Rutgers University owned 401-03 Cooper Street, which became home to the Departments of <a href="https://polisci.camden.rutgers.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Political Science</a> and <a href="https://dppa.camden.rutgers.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Public Policy and Administration</a>.</p>
Associated Individuals
For list of known occupants of 401-03 Cooper Street, visit the <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15gz3_mGk3FcNl0TPaOZAq6B1CHvOpqRcY7a99xkp_l4/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Cooper Street Residents Database</a> and scroll down to 403.
Sources
Camden and Philadelphia Newspapers (Newspapers.com and Genealogy Bank).<br /> Camden City Directories (Camden County Historical Society and Ancestry.com).<br /> Camden County Property Records. New Jersey State Census, 1885-1915, U.S. Census, 1850-1950 (Ancestry.com).<br /> Prowell, George R. <em>The History of Camden County, New Jersey.</em> Philadelphia: L.J. Richards & Co., 1886.<br /><br /><strong>Note on sources:</strong> Previous documentation estimated the construction date of this house as 1850. The revised date 1849-50 is based on the following account published in the Philadelphia <em>Inquirer </em>on September 28, 1849: "We observe with pleasure that within the last few months a very active spirit of improvement has been evident in Camden. On Cooper street, one of the handsomest mansions any where near Philadelphia, has been erected by Mr. George Alexander Carpenter, of the Flour and Saw Mills, Camden. It is now nearly completed, under the superintendence of Mr. [illegible] Hall, contractor -- Mr. J.W. Brister, bricklayer, Mr. Simpson, stone mason, and Mr. S. Sexton, cementer and plaster. The rooms of the different stories vary from 10 to 15 in height. Mr. Hoxie, we learn, was the architect." A subsequent article in the Philadelphia <em>Public Ledger, </em>January 26, 1850, noted the house was "nearly finished." This article also described the materials: "Its front, door and window frames are constructed of Connecticut borwn stone of a superior quality and dimensions."
Research by
Charlene Mires
Posted by
Charlene Mires
Send corrections to cmires@camden.rutgers.edu
Associated architects/builders
Attributed to <a href="https://www.philadelphiabuildings.org/pab/app/ar_display.cfm/51793" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Joseph C. Hoxie</a> (Philadelphia Inquirer, September 28, 1849)
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
401-03 Cooper Street
Description
An account of the resource
Contributing structure, Cooper Street Historic District.
1850s
1860s
1870s
1880s
1890s
1900s
1910s
1920s
1930s
1940s
1950s
1960s
1970s
1980s
1990s
200s
2010s
400 Block
Activism
Banking
Death
Doctors
Dressmakers
Greek Revival
Haddonfield
Lumber
Renovations
Rutgers-Camden
Scarlet Fever
Servants
Teachers
Women's Clubs
-
https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/files/original/1a58545206a4032c8a0b31422adb830d.jpg
b4d8fa46048454ef5ab9b406158ecd92
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Buildings
Description
An account of the resource
Houses and other structures on Cooper Street in Camden, N.J.
Place
Residence, business, or other entity.
Illustrations
Early twentieth-century photograph, Camden County Historical Society.
Significance
423 Cooper Street was the site of a contributing structure of the Cooper Street Historic District, which is listed on the New Jersey and National Registers of Historic Places. The district is defined as representing broad patterns of American history, including: "The buildings within the district include Camden's best remaining examples of Federal houses and its most intact examples of nineteenth-century houses as well as important office and bank buildings of more recent vintage. These buildings demonstrate the street's change from residential and professional to commercial." The latter transition was well illustrated by 423 Cooper Street, which began as a family home then became a funeral home from the 1920s through the 1960s. The house was demolished in the early 1990s.
Date of construction
c. 1847, renovated 1875.
History
<p>The house that stood at 423 Cooper Street for nearly 150 years was among the first houses built on the north side of Cooper Street as Cooper family heirs sold their land for development. When they began to divide their land into building lots in the 1840s, Camden was seeking new status as the seat of government for newly designated Camden County, formed from Gloucester County in 1844.</p>
<p><strong>Building Lives in Camden</strong></p>
<p> Jesse Townsend and his wife, Elizabeth, came to Camden in 1847, two years after they were married at the Byberry Friends Meeting in the rural northern reaches of Philadelphia. They had one infant daughter when Jesse took a job as a clerk at the State Bank of Camden, one of the institutions that marked the emergence of Camden as a city in its own right, not merely a satellite of Philadelphia across the river. The Townsends purchased the 423 Cooper Street lot and in their new house, likely a Greek Revival brick rowhouse like others in the 400 block, their family grew during the 1850s to include five children – four girls and a boy – in addition to Elizabeth Townsend’s mother, Mary Wilson. Jesse Townsend ascended to cashier of the bank. When he also entered into partnership in a flour and grain business, his business partner Caleb Parry also lived with the family for a time.</p>
<p> In 1862, the Townsend family sold the house and moved to 215 Cooper Street, closer to the bank at Second and Market Streets. New owners who lived in Woodbury rented out the house for the rest of that decade. Notably, in 1870 the tenants of the house included Richard and Mary Esterbrook, immigrants from England. Richard Esterbrook was the founder of the Esterbrook Steel Pen Company, founded in Camden in 1858 and on its way to becoming one of the world’s leading producers of steel pen nibs.</p>
<p> The house underwent a major renovation by its next owner, Frederick Rex, a bank clerk in his 20s who later became a prominent attorney. When advertised for sale by its previous owners from Woodbury, the house was described as having “six chambers, and bath room, parlor, dining room and kitchen; water and gas in the house which is in good order.” Rex apparently saw room for improvement and contracted with a builder in 1875 to “tear down, build up, and repair” the 30-year-old rowhouse. The result was a home that stood out from others on the block with Italianate details. Rex then sold the house to the family who also lived there with him, feed and flour dealer Charles C. Reeves, his wife Elizabeth, and their two children.</p>
<p><strong>Hardware and Prosperity</strong></p>
<p> A sheriff’s sale of 423 Cooper Street in 1886 opened more than three decades of occupancy by members of a prominent Camden retail family, William and Clara Fredericks and their daughter, Edna, born the same year they moved into the house. William Fredericks, born in Camden in 1854, managed the hardware store that his father, Harry, had founded in the 1850s. The store carried the goods that helped to build the growing city – window sashes, doors, and building supplies. While the business prospered, the elder Fredericks also organized the Camden Merritts baseball team, which lasted just a year (1883) but started the career of pitcher William (Kid) Gleason, who later played for the Baltimore Orioles, the Detroit Tigers, and Philadelphia Nationals.</p>
<p> When the Fredericks family moved into 423 Cooper Street, the <em>Camden Daily Telegram </em>noted that their “handsome new residence” was being “fitted up in an elegant manner.” The Fredericks family displayed other signs of affluence while living at this address, including the employment of domestic servants even though they remained a small family of three. When Edna Fredericks reached adulthood, at age 20 in 1906 she sailed with relatives to Europe for a summer tour. The family also spent summers at the Jersey Shore, favoring Atlantic City.</p>
<p> In 1916, approaching retirement from business, Fredericks put the house up for sale, advertising it as a “three-story brick house in one of the finest residential sections of Camden.” It offered “twelve rooms and handsome tiled bathroom; hardwood floors; pier and mantle mirrors; crystal chandelier; gas and coal ranges, cemented cellars; large yard and side entrance; front and side porches.” After a lifetime in Camden, in 1918 Fredericks retired and the family moved to an apartment in West Philadelphia.</p>
<p><strong>Funeral Home</strong></p>
<p> The next long-term occupant of 423 Cooper Street reflected the transition of the thoroughfare to commercial uses during the 1920s. The transition, promoted by Camden real estate interests, included conversion of many former residences into offices or apartment buildings. The redevelopment activity accompanied construction of the Delaware River Bridge, later renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, which opened in 1926.</p>
<p> Beginning in 1923, 423 Cooper Street became the residence and funeral home of Charles W. Hiskey, who was assisted in the business by his wife, Matilda. Previously on Sixth Street, the Hiskeys described their new location as a “modern funeral home.” Charles Hiskey developed an extensive network of acquaintances that could be expected to aid the business as he joined various lodges, the Masons, the Kiwanis Club, and other organizations. Matilda Hiskey was a lifelong member of the First Methodist Church. The funeral home remained in operation until 1961, when Charles Hiskey died, five years after his wife.</p>
<p><strong>Offices and Demolition</strong></p>
<p>A real estate firm next acquired the building and leased to office tenants, including physicians. As an office building, 423 Cooper Street changed hands several times during the 1960s and 1970s, then became the property of Rutgers University in 1984. When surveyed for inclusion in the Cooper Street Historic District in 1985, the building was described as “a highly intact example of one of the most prevalent styles of architecture on Cooper Street” and “a significant contributor to the heritage of the streetscape.” The building was demolished in the early 1990s, creating a vacant lot that remained three decades later.</p>
Associated Individuals
For a list of known residents of 423 Cooper Street, visit the <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15gz3_mGk3FcNl0TPaOZAq6B1CHvOpqRcY7a99xkp_l4/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Cooper Street Residents Database</a> and scroll down to 423.
Sources
<p>Camden and Philadelphia Newspapers (Newspapers.com and Genealogy Bank).<br /> Camden City Directories (Camden County Historical Society and Ancestry.com).<br /> Camden County Property Records.<br /> Cooper Street Historic District, National Register Nomination, U.S. Department of Interior.<br /> New Jersey State Census, 1855-1915, and U.S. Census, 1850-1950 (Ancestry.com).<br /> Prowell, George R. <em>The History of Camden County, New Jersey.</em> Philadelphia: L.J. Richards & Co., 1886.</p>
Research by
Charlene Mires
Posted by
Charlene Mires
Send corrections to cmires@camden.rutgers.edu
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
423 Cooper Street
Description
An account of the resource
Vacant lot, site of demolished contributing structure, Cooper Street Historic District.
1840s
1850s
1860s
1870s
1880s
1890s
1900s
1910s
1920s
1930s
1940s
1950s
1960s
1970s
1980s
1990s
400 Block
423 Cooper Street
Banking
Baseball
Demolition
Doctors
Esterbrook Steel Pen Company
Funeral Homes
Greek Revival
Hardware Dealers
Philadelphia
Quakers
Renovations
Rutgers-Camden
Woodbury
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https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/files/original/59ba02cfefc7e9519bfa4fb3ff75e9dd.jpg
c39b0193f6dbec81019fe0c9216d4e67
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Buildings
Description
An account of the resource
Houses and other structures on Cooper Street in Camden, N.J.
Place
Residence, business, or other entity.
Illustrations
Photograph by Jacob Lechner
Significance
303 Cooper Street is a contributing structure of the Cooper Street Historic District, listed on the New Jersey and National Register of Historic Places. A 1980 survey of historic structures on Cooper Street described the building as “the best example of high-school, pre-Civil War architecture to be found in Camden.” It therefore supports the historic district’s designation on the basis of architectural merit as well as its representation of broad patterns of American history. Through its owners and occupants, this house tells the story of Camden’s development in manufacturing, finance, and medicine, and its later challenges as a post-industrial city. Purchased by Rutgers University in 2001, it serves as an office building for the <a href="https://camden.rutgers.edu/discover-camden/leadership/office-of-chancellor" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Rutgers-Camden Chancellor</a> and other senior administrators.
Architectural style
Renaissance Revival
Date of construction
1853
History
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/france-and-the-french/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">French immigrant</a> 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.</p>
<p>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 <em>Public Ledger</em> 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.</p>
<p><strong>Wealth and Status</strong></p>
<p>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 (<a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/74" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">401-03 Cooper Street</a>), a lumber merchant who later entered into a manufacturing partnership with Stimson.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a href="http://www.dvrbs.com/camden-religion/camdennj-church-2ndpresbyterian.htm" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Second Presbyterian Church</a>, 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 <em>Camden Democrat</em> reported. In 1866, the Internal Revenue Service taxed Stimson on possessions that included a carriage, two gold watches, and a piano.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p><strong>A Judge, Eventually</strong></p>
<p>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<em> Morning Post. </em>In Camden, he accumulated political capital as well, holding public office and serving as a director for enterprises that included the <a href="https://sjfilmoffice.com/location/camden-safe-deposit-trust-company/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Camden Safe Deposit and Trust Co.</a> and the <a href="https://delawareriverheritagetrail.org/2021/06/24/the-camden-amboy-railroad/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Camden and Amboy Railroad</a>. He was a founder of <a href="http://www.dvrbs.com/camden-religion/camdennj-church-TrinityBaptist.htm" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Trinity Baptist Church</a>.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>With the benefit of domestic labor for housework, Sarah Woolston engaged in charitable activities. She served on the board of managers for the <a href="https://www.sageth.com/businesses/camden-home-for-friendless-children/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Camden Home for Friendless Children</a>, 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.</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://www.libraries.rutgers.edu/camden" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Robeson Library of Rutgers-Camden</a>. Houses filled the block until they were demolished in the 1962-64 urban renewal project that created an enlarged campus for Rutgers.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p><strong>Banking and Medicine</strong></p>
<p>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 <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Central_Trust_Camden_NJ.JPG" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Central Trust Company</a>, 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.</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/search-battle-units-detail.htm?battleUnitCode=UNJ0031RI" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Thirty-First Infantry Regiment of New Jersey Volunteers</a>, saw action at the <a href="https://www.battlefields.org/learn/civil-war/battles/chancellorsville" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Battle of Chancellorsville</a>. 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <em>Morning Post </em>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 <a href="https://history.mayoclinic.org/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Mayo Clinic</a>.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>The Strenuous Life</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 “<a href="https://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/roosevelt-strenuous-life-1899-speech-text/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">strenuous life</a>” 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.”</p>
<p>Focusing his practice on internal medicine and treatment of tuberculosis, Pechin became a member of the Board of Managers of the <a href="https://digital.hagley.org/1970200_05385" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Camden Tuberculosis Hospital</a>. 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.</p>
<p>It came as a “severe shock,” the Camden <em>Morning Post</em> 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.</p>
<p><strong>Jewish Home</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://bethelsnj.org/about-beth-el/our-history/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Congregation Beth-El</a>, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>Service to Camden</strong></p>
<p>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 <a href="https://www.campbellsoupcompany.com/about-us/our-story/campbell-history/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Campbell Soup</a> 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 <a href="https://www.hbs.edu/leadership/20th-century-leaders/Pages/details.aspx?profile=arthur_c_dorrance" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Arthur C. Dorrance</a>, 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.</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/camden-new-jersey-riots-1969-and-1971/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">riot of 1971</a>. 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 <a href="https://www.thecongressofracialequality.org/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Congress for Racial Equality</a> (CORE).</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://camden.rutgers.edu/discover-camden/leadership/office-of-chancellor" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Chancellor</a> and other senior administrators of Rutgers University-Camden.</p>
Associated Individuals
For a list of known occupants of 303 Cooper Street, visit the <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15gz3_mGk3FcNl0TPaOZAq6B1CHvOpqRcY7a99xkp_l4/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Cooper Street Residents Database</a> and scroll down to 303.
Sources
<p>Francis Berger, <em>Genealogical and Memorial History of the State of New Jersey </em>(New York: Lewis Historical Publishing Company, 1910).<br /> Camden City Directories (Camden County Historical Society, Ancestry.com).<br /> Camden County Property Records.<br /> Camden and Philadelphia Newspapers (Newspapers.com and Genealogy Bank).<br /> U.S. Census, 1850-1950, and New Jersey State Census, 1885-1925 (Ancestry.com).<br /> Register of Officers and Men of New Jersey in the Civil War, 1861-65 (Ancestry.com).<br /> Nathanial B. Sylvester, <em>History of Saratoga County, New York </em>(Philadelphia: Everts & Ensign, 1878).<br /> Priscilla M. and Franklyn M. Thompson, "Central Trust Company," <a href="https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/ed8dd60e-55a4-4520-9013-b419ce02df74/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">National Register of Historic Places</a>.</p>
Research by
Charlene Mires, Scott Hearn, and Lucy Davis
Posted by
Charlene Mires
Send corrections to cmires@camden.rutgers.edu
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
303 Cooper Street
Description
An account of the resource
Contributing structure, Cooper Street Historic District.
1850s
1860s
1870s
1880s
1890s
1900s
1910s
1920s
1930s
1940s
1950s
1960s
1970s
1980s
1990s
2000s
300 Block
303 Cooper Street
African Americans
Automobiles
Bala Cynwyd
Banking
Bar Mitzvah
Black Migration
Bordentown
Camden Home for Friendless Children
Camden Light Infantry
Camden Republican Club
Campbell Soup Company
Civil War
Community Chest
Death
Doctors
Hadassah
Immigration
Jersey Shore
Jewish Welfare Society
Jews
Lumber
Manufacturers
Maryland
New York
Puerto Ricans
Riot of 1971
Russia
Rutgers-Camden
Servants
Social Services
Spinal Meningitis
Tuberculosis
United Fund
Veterans
Vineland
World War II
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https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/files/original/b022416f7bbf463ad7ec4c451d792200.jpg
c8eea70d5d3626d66c7d065816dc4947
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Buildings
Description
An account of the resource
Houses and other structures on Cooper Street in Camden, N.J.
Place
Residence, business, or other entity.
Illustrations
Photograph by Jacob Lechner
Significance
<p>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 <a href="https://childhood.camden.rutgers.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Rutgers-Camden Department of Childhood Studies</a>.</p>
Architectural style
Georgian Revival, obscured by renovations.
Date of construction
c. 1852-55
History
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>Civil War Family</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The Trimble family also had a son of military age, their oldest, Armon, who was 19 years old when southern forces attacked the federal <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/fort-sumter-the-civil-war-begins-1018791/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Fort Sumter</a> in South Carolina. Armon soon enlisted for three months’ service as a private with the New Jersey <a href="https://civilwarintheeast.com/us-regiments-batteries/new-jersey/3rd-new-jersey-militia/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Third Infantry Militia</a>, which deployed to Washington and guarded trains carrying provisions to Union troops. He re-enlisted in 1862 as a second lieutenant with the <a href="https://history.army.mil/museums/fieldMuseums/fortHood_3dCav/history.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Third Cavalry of the U.S. Army</a>, 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.</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/search-battle-units-detail.htm?battleUnitCode=UUS0028RI00C" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Twenty-Eighth Infantry Regiment USCT</a>. 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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p><strong>The Lure of Science</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Edward Moody was also known locally as “Professor Moody” for his vocational devotion to science. He had been attending meetings at Philadelphia’s <a href="https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/franklin-institute/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Franklin Institute</a> 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 <em>New Republic</em> 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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>City of Medicine</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>Publishing and Politics</strong></p>
<p>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 <em>Courier</em>, 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 <em>Camden Evening Telegram</em>, and gained a share of ownership. In 1899 he joined with his brother Theodore and two other partners to merge the <em>Telegram </em>with another Camden paper, the <em>Post,</em> to create the <em>Post-Telegram</em>—which they sold to a syndicate headed by Baird.</p>
<p>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).</p>
<p>While serving as County Clerk, Patterson remained publisher of the <em>Post-Telegram</em> 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 <a href="https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/influenza-spanish-flu-pandemic-1918-19/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">influenza pandemic</a> 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.</p>
<p>Patterson’s next reward as a Republican loyalist came in 1920, when he was elected to the <a href="https://bioguide.congress.gov/search/bio/P000114" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">United States Congress</a> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>Rooming House</strong></p>
<p>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).</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 110<sup>th</sup> 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.</p>
<p>Britt and Hertlein were married by 1947, when the Camden <em>Courier-Post</em> 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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p><strong>Puerto Rican Neighborhood</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 (<a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/80" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">329</a>). 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/80" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">329 Cooper Street</a> and named the Artis Building after the donors, has housed the <a href="https://childhood.camden.rutgers.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Rutgers-Camden Department of Childhood Studies</a>.</p>
Associated Individuals
For a list of known occupants of 327 Cooper Street, visit the <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15gz3_mGk3FcNl0TPaOZAq6B1CHvOpqRcY7a99xkp_l4/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Cooper Street Residents Database</a> and scroll down to 327.
Sources
Camden and Philadelphia Newspapers (Newspapers.com and Genealogy Bank).<br /> Camden City Directories (Camden County Historical Society and Ancestry.com).<br /> Camden County Property Records.<br /> New Jersey State Census, 1885-1915, and U.S. Census, 1850-1950 (Ancestry.com).<br /> Prowell, George R. <em>The History of Camden County, New Jersey.</em> Philadelphia: L.J. Richards & Co., 1886.
Research by
Charlene Mires and Lucy Davis
Posted by
Charlene Mires
Send corrections to cmires@camden.rutgers.edu
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
327 Cooper Street
Description
An account of the resource
Contributing structure, Cooper Street Historic District.
1850s
1860s
1870s
1880s
1890s
1900s
1910s
1920s
1930s
1940s
1950s
1960s
1970s
1980s
1990s
2000s
2010s
African Americans
Apartments
Banking
Burlington County
Camden Dispensary
Cape May
Civil War
Cooper Hospital
Dentists
Doctors
Influenza
Journalism
Maple Shade
Merchants
Merchantville
Philadelphia
Politics
Puerto Ricans
Republican Party
Rooming House
Rutgers-Camden
Science
Servants
Veterans
Water Works
Woodbury
World War I
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https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/files/original/fd717c211a595e81ce06306a5198326c.jpg
ad7bc1b6cf9f38965f3b7bd2721b557e
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Buildings
Description
An account of the resource
Houses and other structures on Cooper Street in Camden, N.J.
Place
Residence, business, or other entity.
Illustrations
Photograph by Jacob Lechner
Significance
The building at 319 Cooper Street is a landmark of Camden’s industrial history and Cooper Street’s emergence as an educational corridor. Built in 1960, the building was originally the headquarters of Local 103 of the International Union of Electrical Workers, which represented labor at the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). It stands on the former site and side yard of an Italianate rowhouse built in 1867 (a twin of the surviving adjacent structure, <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/84" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">321 Cooper Street</a>); residents of the home included a prominent business and civic leader of Camden and an activist in women’s reform organizations. The union headquarters of 1960 became a classroom building in the 1970s for the Camden Campus of Camden County College and in the 1980s for the Juvenile Resources Alternative School and Kane Business Academy. Purchased in 2000 by Rutgers University, the building served temporarily as the high school for the LEAP Academy University School and in 2013 became home to the Rutgers-Camden <a href="https://honors.camden.rutgers.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Honors College</a>.
Date of construction
1960, on site of Italianate rowhouse built in 1867.
History
<p>Before a classroom building stood at 319 Cooper Street, the lots beneath it were the site and side yard of a three-story, brick Italianate rowhouse built in 1867. It was one of a pair that included the surviving structure next door (<a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/84" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">321</a>). The houses were built for two prominent two prominent Camden business and civic leaders, Benjamin Archer (319) and Joseph De La Cour (321). They were advancements in architectural style from Cooper Street’s Greek Revival rowhouses of the 1850s, so striking that they stirred the <em>West Jersey Press </em>to describe them with a reference to the popular song of the Civil War era, “<a href="https://balladofamerica.org/home-sweet-home/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Home Sweet Home</a>.” Noting the superior workmanship and the latest in home comforts, the newspaper commented, “It is by the addition of such buildings as these that will make Cooper Street in reality what it has been jokingly styled, the ‘Fifth Avenue’ of Camden.” Completing the picture, Archer and De La Cour installed iron fences on white marble foundations between the street and the side yards of their adjoining homes.</p>
<p><strong>Urban Prosperity and Reform</strong></p>
<p>For more than four decades, 319 Cooper Street was home to the Archer family, headed by Benjamin F. and Mary W. Archer. They moved to the new residence from their previous home at 227 Cooper Street, and by 1870 their household consisted of Benjamin, then 36 years old; his second wife, Mary, 31; a 12-year-old son from Benjamin’s first marriage, George; and a 1-year-old daughter, Helen. They employed two domestic servants, both Irish immigrants: Rosie MacEntire, 40, and Bridget Rogers, 35.</p>
<p>Benjamin Archer was near-lifelong resident of Camden, born in 1833 to Philadelphia parents who moved to the emerging city across the river when he was an infant. Both cities remained important in Benjamin’s life; in his early adult years, while still living in Camden he worked as a wholesale grocer in Philadelphia near the riverfront. His life took a turn, however, after he married Kate Starr, the daughter of a Camden iron manufacturer, in 1857. His new father-in-law, Jesse W. Starr, took him into the family business: the <a href="https://www.philageohistory.org/rdic-images/view-image.cfm/HGSv19.1830-1831" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Camden Iron Works</a>, 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, generating employment for foundry workers and wealth for the Starr family.</p>
<p>Benjamin and Kate Archer had one son, George, while they lived in the Starr household in Haddonfield early in their marriage. But struggles lay ahead. In 1864, Kate Archer died at the age of 26 from causes that were not publicly disclosed, leaving Benjamin a widower with a young son while still in his early 30s. He remained a partner in the Camden Iron Works, but in 1865 he remarried. Mary W. Sloan, a schoolteacher prior to their marriage, bore one child before the family moved to 319 Cooper Street—a daughter who died in 1866 at the age of 3 months. The next was Helen, born in the new home in 1869, who survived.</p>
<p>Struggles in business also lay ahead. The financial panic of 1873 strained the iron foundry, leading Benjamin Archer to depart the business in 1875 before it reached the stage of voluntary bankruptcy. His familiarity with urban utilities from those years at Camden Iron Works apparently worked to his advantage, however. After a short period with another iron foundry in Burlington, Archer took a lasting position as manager of the Camden Gas Light Company, which held the city’s franchise for gas street lighting. He had also attained a degree of status and business reputation to qualify as a director on important corporate boards, including the National State Bank of Camden. During the 1870s he was among the incorporators of a company to build a turnpike between Haddonfield and Berlin; in the 1880s he was among the investors who built the first cottages at Barnegat City on the Jersey Shore. His prominence in Camden included elective office; a Republican, he served on the City Council and Board of Chosen Freeholders.</p>
<p>Benjamin and Mary Archer’s family grew to include an additional son, F. Morse Archer, born in 1873. They were active members of the <a href="http://www.dvrbs.com/camden-religion/camdennj-church-centenaryme.htm" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Centenary Methodist Episcopal Church</a> at Fifth and Cooper Streets, where Benjamin served on the board of trustees and led Sunday School and Mary, who had been educated at the M.E.-affiliated Pennington Seminary, took leading roles in the Ladies’ Aid Society and the Women’s Home Missionary Society. When the church contemplated expanding with a new building in 1893, the Archers hosted the meeting for reviewing the plans. When a new pastor arrived, the Archers were the couple in the receiving line who introduced their neighbors.</p>
<p>The Archers’ affluence gave them the means to contribute to social welfare. During the financial panic of the 1870s, Benjamin Archer joined committees to provide aid for the poor through a Relief Society and a Soup Society. But it was Mary Archer who took the most prominent role as a social reformer, especially in the 1890s after her children were grown. She joined the Camden branch of the <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/womens-history/womans-christian-temperance-union" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Women’s Christian Temperance Union</a> (WCTU), a national organization that had formed in the 1870s to promote prohibition and abstinence from alcohol. By the 1890s, the organization also engaged campaigns for prison reform, labor laws, and woman suffrage. Mary Archer served as treasurer of the Camden branch and as a representative at regional and national conferences. She supported the WCTU prison reform platform by advocating for a matron to be appointed to oversee the Camden City Jail.</p>
<p>Mary Archer was one of the driving forces in the WCTU’s creation of a Camden “Boys’ Parlor,” envisioned as a wholesome environment to divert news boys and other youth from juvenile delinquency. Opened in 1891 in rooms on Arch Street, the project sought ways “by which neglected boys may be lured from the resorts now enticing them, such as the pool room, and similar places frequented by the idle and vicious, and by the aid of such a helping hand, lifted to good citizenship,” the Camden <em>Morning Post</em> reported. The project evolved to offer carpentry lessons and entertainment, albeit alongside lectures on temperance. Archer, the treasurer of the project, instituted a savings program that encouraged the boys to deposit pennies into a collective bank account instead of spending them on cigarettes. Over time, the project added programs for girls and additional training for industrial trades. When boys were too old for the parlor, they were referred to the YMCA or assisted with job placement.</p>
<p>The house at 319 Cooper Street remained the Archers’ residence until 1910. At times they provided homes for elder relatives, and they always employed two domestic servants – for a remarkably long period from the mid-1880s until 1910, an Irish immigrant woman named Jane Lynn, and for a time her daughter with the same name. The children grew up, married, and left home. Both boys went to Princeton. George joined his father at the gas lighting company; Morse continued to Harvard Law and later returned to Camden, where he was appointed assistant prosecutor. Helen Archer followed her mother into church and reform activism, nurtured in this direction by childhood fund-raising fairs for the Camden Home for Friendless Children. When she married in 1892, her first home with husband Richard Develin was directly behind her parents at 318 Penn Street (although the Develins later moved to Merchantville).</p>
<p>In the first years of the twentieth century, Benjamin Archer advanced to president of the Camden National Bank after many years on the board of directors. He was by then in declining health with debilitating rheumatism, however, and sought respite with long stays at hot springs and mountain resorts. When he died at home in Camden in 1903, the <em>Camden Courier </em>eulogized his contributions to the city. “During his active business career [he] was identified with most of the public enterprises that have promoted the growth and prosperity of the city, and was ever among the foremost to participate in any movement having its welfare in view,” the newspaper editorialized. Helen Archer remained at 319 Cooper Street until her death in 1910, when she was recalled as “quite active in religious and charitable work,” especially the Boys’ Parlor, the WCTU, the YMCA, and the Centenary M.E. Church.</p>
<p><strong>Funeral Director and Banker</strong></p>
<p>After the Archer family, 319 Cooper Street briefly became a rental property that was converted into rooming house and restaurant called the New Stratford. By the middle of 1912, however, the house had a new owner and full-time resident, prominent funeral home director Fithian S. Simmons. Perhaps best known as the director of 1892 <a href="http://americanliteraryblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/whitmans-funeral-and-burial.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">funeral</a> for the poet Walt Whitman, Simmons had been in business in Camden for decades. By moving to Cooper Street, he established a residence separate from the funeral parlor on Market Street that had previously been his home.</p>
<p>Simmons was born in Port Elizabeth in Cumberland County, New Jersey, in 1855, and by 1870 moved to Millville to learn undertaking and cabinetmaking. At the age of 20, he went to work as a salesman for a Philadelphia undertaking supplies firm, but he left after two years, moved to Camden, and started his own funeral home. He married a young woman from Millville, Alverta Stanger.</p>
<p>By the time they moved to 319 Cooper Street in 1912, Fithian and Alverta Simmons were in their 50s – roughly the same age as their new home. They quickly commissioned alterations that added porches to the front and side, suburban-style upgrades that were becoming common for Cooper Street’s older residences. They had no children, but a nephew, Dr. Harry H. Grace, lived nearby at <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/78" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">303 Cooper Street</a>; they also had a vast network of acquaintances created through Fithian Simmons’ many memberships in clubs and fraternal organizations. The household typically employed one domestic servant, in 1915 a second-generation Irish maid and, unusually, in 1920 a woman who had recently immigrated from Jamaica. The Simmons’ affluence also supported trips to Europe, and they were early adopters of the automobile.</p>
<p>Fithian Simmons’ customary life transformed during the 1920s, at home and in business. He was left a widower when Alverta died from influenza in 1919, the second year of the <a href="https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/influenza-spanish-flu-pandemic-1918-19/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">global epidemic</a>. Shortly thereafter he created a new family of sorts when he co-founded the Camden Club in an available house next to his own (315 Cooper Street). He was immediately elected president of the businessmen’s club, which remained an institution on Cooper Street for nearly two decades. Simmons also remarried in 1922, making 319 Cooper Street also the home of his new wife, Roberta, who had also been previously widowed.</p>
<p>In the early 1920s, Fithian Simmons retired from undertaking and focused on other business interests, which included directorships of building and loan associations and the Central Trust Company, which he had co-founded with other Camden businessmen in the 1890s. From 1922 until 1927 he served as president of the bank. Fithian and Roberta Simmons remained at 319 Cooper Street until 1939, when he died at the age of 83 and she several months later at 71. They left bequests to siblings, to nieces and nephews, and to Cooper and West Jersey hospitals. The household belongings, including antiques and a 1938 Packard sedan, went up for auction to settle the estate.</p>
<p><strong>Union Headquarters</strong></p>
<p>The era of 319 Cooper Street as a single-family home ended with Fithian and Roberta Simmons. The street had largely transformed to commercial uses during the 1920s, indirectly as a result of the Delaware River Bridge (completed in 1926, later renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge). Camden boosters and real estate interests, expecting a business boom, promoted the transition of Cooper Street into a commercial thoroughfare. They bought, sold, and converted former residences into office buildings and apartments, including the twin to 319 Cooper Street (<a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/84" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">321</a>), which became a six-unit apartment house. The next house to the west, 315 Cooper Street, became the Camden Club headed by Fithian Simmons.</p>
<p>The next chapter for 319 Cooper Street reflected another aspect of Camden’s history, its emergence and decline as an industrial powerhouse. By 1943, during World War II, the rowhouse at 319 Cooper Street became headquarters for the union that represented workers at the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), Local 103 of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers. RCA’s massive production complex at the foot of Cooper Street was then running at full strength to fulfill defense contracts. But in the wake of a series of labor conflicts and strikes in Camden during the 1930s, RCA had begun to move most of its production work to other parts of the country with cheaper labor. Wartime production masked the full impact of these moves on Camden, which after World War II retained primarily high technology elements of the company.</p>
<p>The union headquarters at 319 Cooper Street was a place for shop steward meetings, elections of officers, and charitable activities of the union. But rival unions also struggled over representation of RCA workers, with consequences for the headquarters building. By 1950, the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America lost its role as bargaining agent to its rival, the International Union of Electrical Workers (IUE). In a settlement between the unions, the IUE received title to 319 Cooper Street in 1951.</p>
<p>In 1959, the IUE broke ground for a new two-story office building in place of the rowhouse at 319 Cooper Street and its undeveloped side yard. The demolition was in keeping with urban renewal practices of the era, including plans by Rutgers University to demolish adjacent blocks of nineteenth-century rowhouses to create an expanded Camden campus. In place of the Italianate house built in 1867, the union commissioned a thoroughly modern, glazed brick and glass commercial headquarters designed by William L. Duble of Erlton, N.J. The new building housed an auditorium, administrative workspaces, and a wood-paneled conference room and office for the union president.</p>
<p>The new IUE headquarters, opened in 1960, became the setting for the mass meetings about prospects of RCA layoffs and for voting on contracts that averted a strike in 1967 and ended a 10-week walkout in 1970. In 1963, the headquarters also was a point of departure for busloads of Camden industrial workers bound for the August 28 massive March on Washington, where Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.</p>
<p><strong>Renovations for Classrooms</strong></p>
<p>The IUE remained at 319 Cooper Street until 1973, then moved its local headquarters a block away to Market Street. A new era opened for 319 Cooper Street as a classroom building for a series of educational institutions, signaling Cooper Street’s emergence as an educational corridor. Renovations in 1974 transformed the union headquarters into the “urban campus” for Camden County College, which had its main campus in suburban Blackwood. With offerings that included classes in Spanish for Camden’s growing Puerto Rican population, Camden County College stayed until moving to a new building at Seventh and Cooper Street in 1978.</p>
<p>After Camden County College, 319 Cooper Street served as home to the Juvenile Resource Center (JRC) Alternative School and, next, the proprietary Kane Business Institute. Owned by Rutgers University since 2000, the building became a temporary location for the high school of the LEAP Academy University School, then a Rutgers-Camden classroom building, and beginning in 2013 home for the Rutgers-Camden <a href="https://honors.camden.rutgers.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Honors College</a>. Multiple renovations for educational uses left the building unrecognizable as a landmark of Camden’s labor history. The modern office building of 1960 disappeared behind a brick façade that harmonized with the traditional materials used in Cooper Street’s older rowhouses—yet at the same time, obscured much of the building’s past.</p>
Associated Individuals
For a list of known occupants of 319 Cooper Street, visit the <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15gz3_mGk3FcNl0TPaOZAq6B1CHvOpqRcY7a99xkp_l4/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Cooper Street Residents Database</a> and scroll down to 319.
Sources
<p>Camden and Philadelphia Newspapers (Newspapers.com and Genealogy Bank).<br /> Camden City Directories (Camden County Historical Society and Ancestry.com).<br /> Camden County Property Records.<br />Cowie, Jefferson. <em>Capital Moves: RCA’s 70-Year Quest for Cheap Labor. </em>Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999.<br />Dorwart, Jeffrey M. and Philip English Mackey. <em>Camden County, New Jersey, 1616-1976: A Narrative History. </em>Camden County, N.J.: Camden County Cultural & Heritage Commission, 1976.<br /> New Jersey State Census, 1885-1915, and U.S. Census, 1850-1950 (Ancestry.com).<br /> Prowell, George R. <em>The History of Camden County, New Jersey.</em> Philadelphia: L.J. Richards & Co., 1886.</p>
Research by
Charlene Mires and Lucy Davis
Posted by
Charlene Mires
Send corrections to cmires@camden.rutgers.edu
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
319 Cooper Street
Description
An account of the resource
Former union headquarters, site of demolished Italianate rowhouse.
1860s
1870s
1880s
1890s
1900s
1910s
1920s
1930s
1940s
1950s
1960s
1970s
1980s
1990s
2000s
2010s
Automobiles
Banking
Barnegat City
Camden County College
Camden Iron Works
Cumberland County
Death
Demolition
Education
Funeral Homes
Influenza
Italianate
Labor Unions
LEAP Academy
Manufacturers
Men's Clubs
Methodist Episcopal
Modern
Philadelphia
Porches
RCA
Reform
Renovations
Rheumatism
Rutgers-Camden
Women's Christian Temperance Union
Women's Clubs
-
https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/files/original/733102c43e0b8f4acab96b99ad5de365.jpg
9d23d325c2e895cf6bffd6d406ce0aaf
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Buildings
Description
An account of the resource
Houses and other structures on Cooper Street in Camden, N.J.
Place
Residence, business, or other entity.
Illustrations
Photograph by Jacob Lechner
Significance
<p>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.</p>
Architectural style
Modern
Date of construction
1966, on site of previous residence built c. 1855.
History
<p>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).</p>
<p>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 <a href="http://msr-archives.rutgers.edu/archives/Issue%2014/features/schoop.htm" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Mickle Street</a> and the <a href="http://www.dvrbs.com/camden-school/camdennj-school-mickle.htm" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">John W. Mickle School</a>. 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 <a href="https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/point-breeze-bonaparte/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">estate in Bordentown</a>, Burlington County.</p>
<p><strong>Collegiate School and Boarding House</strong></p>
<p>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 <em>West Jersey Press </em>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.</p>
<p>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 <em>Morning Post </em>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.</p>
<p><strong>Family Home</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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, <a href="https://nj.gov/oag/oag/ag_1857-1861_dayton_bio.htm" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">William L. Dayton</a>, 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.</p>
<p>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 <em>Philadelphia Times </em>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://www.nga.org/governor/foster-mcgowan-voorhees/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Foster McGowan Voorhees</a>.)</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>A Domain of Men</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The Camden Club came into existence through the efforts of a Camden undertaker, Fithian Simmons, who lived at <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/85" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">319 Cooper Street</a>, 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 <a href="https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/influenza-spanish-flu-pandemic-1918-19/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">influenza epidemic</a> 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 <em>Morning Post </em>described it, into a “luxurious clubhouse.” Membership required a $100 initiation fee and the same amount each year in annual dues.</p>
<p>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 <em>Morning Post </em>reported. By that time, Simmons remained involved as president emeritus.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Another fraternal organization in similar straits benefitted from the Camden Club’s demise. The <a href="https://www.mooseintl.org/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Loyal Order of the Moose</a>, 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.</p>
<p><strong>Union Headquarters</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>Youth Services</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
Associated Individuals
For a list of all known occupants of 315 Cooper Street, visit the <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15gz3_mGk3FcNl0TPaOZAq6B1CHvOpqRcY7a99xkp_l4/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Cooper Street Residents Database</a> and scroll down to 315.
Sources
<p>Camden and Philadelphia Newspapers (Newspapers.com and Genealogy Bank).<br /> Camden City Directories (Ancestry.com).<br /> Camden County Property Records.<br /> New Jersey State Census, 1885-1915, and U.S. Census, 1850-1950 (Ancestry.com).<br /> New Jersey Office of Cultural and Environmental Services, Historic Sites Inventory No. 0408205 (315 Cooper Street), 1985.<br /> Prowell, George R. <em>The History of Camden County, New Jersey.</em> Philadelphia: L.J. Richards & Co., 1886.</p>
Research by
Charlene Mires and Lucy Davis
Posted by
Charlene Mires
Send corrections to cmires@camden.rutgers.edu
Questions / needs for additional research
Papers of the Amalgamated Food and Allied Workers Union Local 56 are available for future research at Rutgers University Libraries Special Collections (New Brunswick).
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
315 Cooper Street
Description
An account of the resource
Modern office building on former site of a c. 1855 residence.
1850s
1860s
1870s
1880s
1890s
1900s
1910s
1920s
1930s
1940s
1950s
1960s
1970s
1980s
1990s
2000s
2010s
2020s
300 Block
315 Cooper Street
African Americans
Attorneys
Banking
Beverly
Black Migration
Boarding House
Bridge Impact
Burlington County
Camden Dispensary
Cape May
Death
Demolition
Doctors
Domestic Life
Dutch
Food Industry
France
Greek Revival
Influenza
Judges
Labor Unions
Maritime
Men's Clubs
Modern
Pennsauken
Pneumonia
Presbyterians
Renovations
Republicans
Schools
Social Services
Tourism
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https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/files/original/b4c797de75db0d2a78cff5f85a2a9713.jpg
ac73eb57f91e5511da2c99eacbbc9893
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Buildings
Description
An account of the resource
Houses and other structures on Cooper Street in Camden, N.J.
Place
Residence, business, or other entity.
Significance
The concrete block garage, built c. 1939-50, originally served the funeral home operating at that time at <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/75" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">423 Cooper Street</a>. The garage replaced two nineteenth-century, working-class rental rowhouses. The house at 428 Lawrence Street was the early childhood home and possibly the birthplace of Edward A. Reid, who later in life was the first Black judge to be appointed for the Camden County courts.
Date of construction
c. 1847-54
History
<p>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 <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/75" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">423 Cooper Street</a>, 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. </p>
<p><strong>428 Lawrence Street</strong></p>
<p>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.<br /><br />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 <em>West Jersey Press</em>, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/lawnside-new-jersey/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Lawnside</a>, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/75" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">423 Cooper Street</a>, entered into a partnership with a redevelopment firm. The project included renovations of <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/84" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">321</a> and <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/69" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">411 Cooper Street</a> 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.</p>
Associated Individuals
For a list of known residents of 428 Lawrence Street, link to the <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1oOkUYd5Qa7w5M0Ga0vWhq9evz980wMElF8jhPuw3GHM/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Lawrence Street Database</a>. For earlier residents of the block (prior to house numbering), see <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1cI-_IVB-ei-no50oQzzTn36wz6gTgtHiIXCxq8_s9Rw/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Lawrence Street by Block, 1854-1860</a>.
Sources
Camden and Philadelphia City Directories.<br /> Camden and Philadelphia Newspapers.<br /> Camden County Deeds.<br /> Sanborn Insurance Maps, 1885-1950.<br /> U.S. and New Jersey Census, 1870-1950.<br /><br /><strong>Note on sources</strong>: When documented for the National Register of Historic Places, the Lawrence Street rowhouses were thought to have been occupied by servants for the homeowners on Cooper Street. At 428 Lawrence Street, one individual worked as a butler and waiter and several others as domestics, but none are known to have been employed on Cooper Street. This research updates and corrects the record.
Research by
Charlene Mires and Kaya Durkee.
Posted by
Charlene Mires
send corrections to cmires@camden.rutgers.edu
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
428 Lawrence Street
Description
An account of the resource
Garage, built c. 1939-50 on former site of two nineteenth-century rowhouses.
1840s
1850s
1860s
1870s
1880s
1890s
1900s
1910s
1920s
1930s
1940s
1950s
1960s
1970s
1980s
1990s
2000s
423 Cooper Street
428 Lawrence Street
African Americans
Attorneys
Austria
Automobiles
Bakers
Banking
Black Migration
Blacksmiths
Bricklayers
Butlers
Caners
Carpenters
Childhood
Children
Demolition
Dressmakers
England
Extended Family
Factory Workers
Funeral Homes
Garage
Gardeners
Germany
Hatters
Howard University
Investment
Ireland
Japan
Judges
Laundries
Lawnside
Lawrence Street
Masons
North Carolina
Plasterers
Rooming House
Rutgers-Camden
Shipyard Workers
Tinsmiths
Virginia
Waiters
Weavers
Widows
-
https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/files/original/1093d3fa70bf6ac5b1684d70ea33d82b.jpg
ac73eb57f91e5511da2c99eacbbc9893
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Buildings
Description
An account of the resource
Houses and other structures on Cooper Street in Camden, N.J.
Place
Residence, business, or other entity.
Significance
The concrete block garage, built c. 1939-50, originally served the funeral home operating at that time at 423 Cooper Street. The garage replaced two nineteenth-century, working-class rental rowhouses.
Date of construction
c. 1939-50
History
<p>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 <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/75">423 Cooper Street</a>, 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.<br /><br /><strong>430 Lawrence Street</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/96">428 Lawrence Street</a> 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 <em>West Jersey Press</em>, 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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 4<sup>th</sup> and 5<sup>th</sup> Cooper and Penn St.”<br /><br />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 <em>Morning Courier,</em> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
Associated Individuals
For a list of known residents of 430 Lawrence Street, link to the <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1oOkUYd5Qa7w5M0Ga0vWhq9evz980wMElF8jhPuw3GHM/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Lawrence Street Database</a>. For earlier residents of the block (prior to house numbering), see <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1cI-_IVB-ei-no50oQzzTn36wz6gTgtHiIXCxq8_s9Rw/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Lawrence Street by Block, 1854-1860</a>.
Sources
Camden and Philadelphia City Directories.<br /> Camden and Philadelphia Newspapers.<br /> Camden County Deeds.<br /> Sanborn Insurance Maps, 1885-1950.<br /> U.S. and New Jersey Census, 1870-1950.<br /><br /><strong>Note on sources</strong>: When documented for the National Register of Historic Places, the Lawrence Street rowhouses were thought to have been occupied by servants for the homeowners on Cooper Street. At 430 Lawrence Street, the tenants included one individual, Thomas Whiteside, who is known to have worked as a chauffeur for the F.W. Ayer/Wilfred Fry family on nearby Penn Street. This raises the possibility that other individuals with the occupation "driver" may have worked for that household as well. This research updates and corrects the record, finding no known servants associated with Cooper Street households.
Research by
Charlene Mires and Kaya Durkee
Posted by
Charlene Mires
Send corrections to cmires@camden.rutgers.edu
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
430 Lawrence Street
Description
An account of the resource
Garage, built c. 1939-50 on former site of two nineteenth-century rowhouses.
1850s
1860s
1870s
1880s
1890s
1900s
1910s
1920s
1930s
1940s
1950s
1960s
1970s
1980s
1990s
2000s
430 Lawrence Street
African Americans
Banking
Bartenders
Black Migration
Boatmen
Childhood
Children
Clerks
Coach Painters
Colorado
Demolition
Drivers
Farmers
Funeral Homes
Garages
Germany
Haddonfield
Hatters
Investment
Ironers
Laborers
Laundries
Lawrence Street
Librarians
Lumber
Mediums
Messengers
Mount Holly
Nevada
New York
Parks
Pennsylvania
Polishers
Porters
Public Officials
Rutgers University
Servants
Shoemakers
Weddings
Widows
-
https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/files/original/102be0fae6e53064d8daa05e145c9be4.jpg
454bb3c58bd68f131cacb5c9b5477bc1
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Buildings
Description
An account of the resource
Houses and other structures on Cooper Street in Camden, N.J.
Place
Residence, business, or other entity.
Illustrations
<em>Camden Post</em>, November 27, 1897.
Significance
Built during the 1820s and home to two generations of the Cooper family, the mansion at 121 Cooper Street later served as a public library and an important site of activism for woman suffrage and other civic projects led by Camden women.
Architectural style
Federal, adapted to Second Empire by addition of Mansard roof.
Date of construction
ca. 1825
History
<p>A large brick house, home to descendants of Camden’s founding Cooper family for two generations, stood on Cooper Street between Front and Second Streets for nearly a century, from the 1820s until 1919. The land, later designated as Johnson Park, had been acquired by members of the Cooper family from another English Quaker landholder in 1689. Richard Matlack Cooper, who inherited the property from his grandfather, chose it as the location for a residence that reflected his prominence, wealth, and need to accommodate a large family: his wife, Mary Cooper, eight of their children, periodically other relatives, and the domestic servants whose labor sustained the household. Built by 1825 (possibly earlier), the symmetrical red-brick structure was five bays wide and at least that deep. A brick wall surrounded the residence, a brick stable stood in the rear, and fruit trees shaded the grounds.</p>
<p>The home’s first head of household, Richard M. Cooper, played a significant role in the economic vitality of Camden through his roles with the <a href="https://camdenhistory.com/businesses/banks/first-camden-national-bank-trust" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">State Bank of Camden</a>, initially as its first cashier (1812-14) and then as its president (1814-42). The bank, one of the institutions that propelled Camden’s growth as a city less dependent on Philadelphia, stood just a block away from the Cooper Mansion (as it came to be known). Cooper also held positions in government, including judge and justice of the Gloucester County courts and state assemblyman. In 1829, he was <a href="https://bioguide.congress.gov/search/bio/C000760" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">elected to the first of two terms in the U.S. Congress</a> on an anti-Jacksonian ticket headed by John Quincy Adams for president. His politics aligned with his banking interests as he opposed President <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/presidents/andrew-jackson/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Andrew Jackson</a>’s dismantling of the centralized <a href="https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/second-bank-of-the-us" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Second Bank of the United States</a>, headquartered in Philadelphia. Cooper’s votes on military matters were consistent with his faith heritage as a Quaker as well as anti-Jacksonian politics. During his first term, he voted against the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Indian-Removal-Act" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Indian Removal Act</a>, which nevertheless passed and forced Native Americans to relocate to territory west of the Mississippi River. During the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/nullification-crisis" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">nullification crisis</a> of 1832-33, when South Carolina attempted to declare a federally enacted tariff null and voice within the state, Cooper voted against giving Jackson the power to use military authority to enforce collecting duties on imports.</p>
<p>When Richard M. Cooper <a href="https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/7173544/richard-matlack-cooper" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">died in 1843</a> at age 76, the mansion on Cooper Street and the rest of his property passed in equal parts to his children, with the provision that half of the income from his holdings be reserved for his wife, Mary (who outlived him by more than two decades). She continued to inhabit the mansion, together with her adult unmarried children and domestic servants. Prominent among the siblings were the youngest, who were twins: Dr. Richard M. Cooper and lawyer William D. Cooper, who were around 30 years of age at the time of their father’s death. Dr. Cooper played a leading role in public health in Camden, including co-founding a dispensary to provide medical services to indigent patients. The twins’ older sisters Elizabeth, Mary, and Sarah became known for their support of charitable causes. By 1860, the household of siblings and Irish domestic servants also included a 13-year-old niece, Helen Cooper, whose mother had died. (In later years, Helen married another prominent resident of Cooper Street, Dr. Henry Genet Taylor.)</p>
<p>The younger generation of Coopers waited until after their mother’s death in 1869 to renovate the mansion to reflect contemporary architectural tastes. The formerly two-story house became three stories with the additional of a <a href="https://www.britannica.com/technology/mansard-roof" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Mansard roof</a>, a European design element that had become popular in France and the United States. Similar renovations were taking place at other older homes around Camden. The <em>West Jersey Press</em> took note of the widespread improvements during these years following the Civil War, observing, “They evince the highest taste in many cases, and some of the buildings metamorphosed possess considerable architectural beauty. The Mansard roof is a great addition, and has been generally adopted, where changes have been made.”</p>
<p>The twins Richard and William Cooper nurtured an idea for another Camden improvement, in the form of a hospital. Although both of them died in the mid-1870s before the project could be carried out, their sisters Elizabeth and Sarah and another brother, Alexander, stepped forward to contribute and raise the necessary funds. The Camden Hospital–soon named <a href="https://www.cooperhealth.org/about-us/our-history" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Cooper Hospital</a>–opened in 1887. A building for the hospital stood ready by 1877, but it took another ten years to fund an endowment to support its operations.<br /><br /><strong>Uncertain Future</strong></p>
<p>By 1880, the household at the Cooper Mansion had diminished to only the sisters Elizabeth, age 74, and Sarah, age 76, with four or five servants (most of them Irish immigrants). The sisters’ deaths in the 1880s closed a chapter for the mansion as a family home and opened uncertainty about the future for the property. At the time of the mansion’s construction, Camden was only beginning to emerge as a city and the Cooper family held most of the land north of Cooper Street as undeveloped property. But the terms of Richard M. Cooper’s will in 1843 had released his heirs to develop the land as they saw fit. At that fortuitous time, when Camden gained in status as the seat of <a href="https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/locations/camden-county-new-jersey/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">newly formed Camden County</a>, building lots sold at a fast clip. The square where the mansion stood, between the industrialized Delaware River waterfront to the west and recently built residential blocks to the east, consequently became a rare open space in the fast-growing, densely developing city. Only two other houses stood in the block, both facing Front Street.</p>
<p>During the 1890s, the future of the Cooper Mansion touched off a debate in Camden. The local Women’s Parks Association, formed in 1893, succeeded in persuading the Camden City Council to purchase the mansion and its square from the Cooper Estate for $75,000 (financed by a bond issue) in 1895. The resulting Cooper Park, with its new landscape of curving walks, benches, and streetlamps, raised a question of whether the old mansion should be retained within the more picturesque setting. The Parks Association, which had responsibility for maintaining the square, divided over the issue; for a time, a committee of City Council supported demolition. A flurry of public debate in the fall of 1897 centered primarily on whether the outmoded aesthetics of the building marred an otherwise improved public space. Opponents of demolition argued for giving the mansion a new purpose as a manual training high school or a library. In a victory for a project long favored by the <a href="http://www.dvrbs.com/camden-texts/camdennj-womansclub-1894-1919.htm" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Camden Woman’s Club</a> (whose membership overlapped with the Parks Association) and other influential citizens, the proponents of the library prevailed.<br /><br /><strong>Library</strong></p>
<p>The mansion, reduced in size by demolition of a rear extension, opened as the Cooper Library in 1898 with a collection of 2,000 books amassed through public donations. The building remained a residence as well, but only for park caretakers and a librarian. The caretaker from at least 1900 through 1909, Thomas Jones, nurtured the plants and trees of the park and kept it spotless. Known affectionately to parkgoers as “Pop,” Jones shared quarters in the mansion with his wife and teenage son. Jones had immigrated from Ireland as a child; his wife Ellen’s parents also were Irish. Also resident in the mansion-turned-library was the librarian, Marietta Kay Champion. A descendant of the prominent Kay family of Haddonfield, Champion was a longtime Camden resident whose father had been one of the founders of <a href="https://stpaulschurchcamden.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. Paul’s Church</a> on Market Street. Champion’s formal schooling had ended in the eighth grade, but she pursued further education through the Camden University Extension, which offered college-level lectures for adults (in that program, she earned honorable mention for a paper on “The Story of Faust” in 1891). Champion also had a keen interest in history. On the basis of documenting her genealogy, she became a member of the <a href="https://nscda.org/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Colonial Dames Society</a>; later in life, she served as secretary of the <a href="https://cchsnj.org/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Camden County Historical Society</a> (which met for a time in the library).</p>
<p>The Cooper Library soon became designated as a branch within a small system of libraries in Camden. In 1903, Camden accepted a gift of $100,000 from Pennsylvania steel magnate <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Andrew-Carnegie" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Andrew Carnegie</a>, who financed library buildings around the country in keeping with his “<a href="https://www.carnegie.org/about/our-history/gospelofwealth/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Gospel of Wealth</a>” philosophy. The new Carnegie-funded building, which opened in 1905 on Broadway at Line Street, became the central <a href="https://www.nj.gov/dca/njht/funded/sitedetails/carnegie_library_camden.shtml" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Camden Free Library</a>; in addition to the Cooper Branch Library in the former mansion, another branch opened in East Camden.<br /><br /><strong>Women's Activism</strong></p>
<p>Just as women had played a pivotal role in establishing Cooper Park and saving the mansion, they increasingly used the Cooper Branch Library as a place for gathering and activism. These activities escalated after 1907, when a renovation installed an auditorium on the building’s second floor. The Camden Woman’s Club, a mainstay of civic and social activity for middle- and upper-class women since 1894, moved its headquarters to the library after the renovation. By 1912, the library began hosting speakers who promoted <a href="https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/woman-suffrage/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">woman suffrage</a>, and it hosted meetings of the Camden Equal Suffragist League beginning with the organization’s founding in 1913. Local <a href="https://www.dar.org/">Daughters of the American Revolution</a> met at the library and established a Visiting Nurses Society, which also met there. At the Cooper Branch Library in 1916, with the Great War underway in Europe, local women organized a chapter of the New Jersey Women’s Division for National Preparedness. During the war, the library became headquarters for the Red Cross. Other groups that united women and men for civic betterment—the Civic Club and the Playgrounds Commission, for example—gathered in the library as well. Collectively, these activities made the Cooper Branch Library a center for Progressive Era causes for more than a decade and defined it as predominantly a place for women’s activism.</p>
<p>An act of philanthropy in 1915 signaled an approaching end to the mansion’s service as a library and community center. Eldridge R. Johnson, the founder and president of the <a href="https://ethw.org/Victor_Talking_Machine_Company" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Victor Talking Machine Company</a>, announced his intention to donate $130,000 for construction of a new, modern library in Cooper Park to replace the older building. Johnson’s factories and offices, the product of rapid expansion since the company’s founding in 1901, stood adjacent to the park. He intended the gift to provide a library more in keeping with the scale and impressive, neoclassical architecture of cultural institutions in major American cities. Although not stated as such in the public record, such a library would compare favorably or potentially outshine to the central Camden Free Library that had been funded by Andrew Carnegie. The new <a href="https://johnson-park.camden.rutgers.edu/library.htm" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Cooper Branch Library</a>, constructed behind the old Cooper Mansion, opened in 1919. Then, with only a ripple of public opposition, contractors demolished the mansion. Johnson donated additional funds to renovate and beautify the square, which the city renamed <a href="https://johnson-park.camden.rutgers.edu/history.htm" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Johnson Park</a> in his honor in 1920.</p>
Associated Individuals
For a list of all known occupants of 121 Cooper Street, visit the <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15gz3_mGk3FcNl0TPaOZAq6B1CHvOpqRcY7a99xkp_l4/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Cooper Street Residents Database</a> and scroll down to 121.
Sources
Camden City Directories (Camden County Historical Society and Ancestry.com).<br /> Camden County Property Records.<br />New Jersey State Census, 1885-1915, and U.S. Census, 1850-1910 (Ancestry.com).<br />Camden, New Jersey, Newspapers.<br /> Prowell, George R. <em>The History of Camden County, New Jersey.</em> Philadelphia: L.J. Richards & Co., 1886.<br />"<a href="https://li.proquest.com/elhpdf/histcontext/21st_Congress.pdf">Twenty-First Congress</a>" and "<a href="https://li.proquest.com/elhpdf/histcontext/22nd_Congress.pdf">Twenty-Second Congress</a>" (Proquest).
Research by
Charlene Mires and Lucy Davis
Posted by
Charlene Mires
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Cooper Mansion (121 Cooper Street)
Description
An account of the resource
Demolished home to two generations of the Cooper family, later a public library.
100 Block
121 Cooper Street
1820s
1830s
1840s
1850s
1860s
1870s
1880s
1890s
1900s
1910s
Attorneys
Bankers
Banking
Cooper Family
Cooper Hospital
Cooper Park
Demolition
Doctors
Eldridge Johnson
Extended Family
Johnson Park
Librarians
Libraries
Mansard
Philanthropy
Public Health
Public Officials
Red Cross
Reform
Renovations
Woman Suffrage
Women's Clubs
World War I