The double-lot home built at 311 Cooper Street in 1870 was among the most substantial on the block, similar in scale to the surviving structure on the northeast corner of Third and Cooper. In contrast to its neighbors, the three-story house described as “handsome” by the West Jersey Press set a new standard for materials with its façade of Chester County green stone, “which is just now attracting the attention of capitalists and builders.” The style of the home was Second French Empire, distinguished by a mansard roof that resembled other new houses then under construction in North Camden.
The first family to live at 311 Cooper Street moved from a rowhouse in the next block (229 Cooper Street) and remained in their new residence for more than three decades. William E. and Caroline Lafferty came to Camden from Wilmington, Delaware, where they were married in 1849. William Lafferty, 46 years old in 1870, worked as superintendent of the New Jersey Chemical Company, a Camden manufacturer of fertilizers and other chemicals. The Lafferty household included Caroline, 40, and William and Caroline’s three daughters, ranging in age from 5 to 20. (A fourth daughter had died in the 1850s at the age of 4.) The Lafferty family typically employed two domestic servants: in 1870 they were Black women who were born in Delaware; by 1880, they were Irish immigrant women.
The Lafferty daughters followed divergent paths. The oldest, Cecelia, had a developmental disability that Census takers in 1880 defined as “dementia.” While a teenager in the 1860s, she spent at least two years at the Moravian Seminary for Young Ladies in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; by 1880, she was institutionalized at the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane. Also known as Kirkbride’s Hospital, the facility with finely landscaped grounds in West Philadelphia was regarded as the best standard of care for its time. The next daughter in age, Emily, finished high school but did not pursue a profession or trade. The youngest, Minna (Minnie), attended the Preparatory School of Swarthmore College but did not continue to college there; she later reported completing four years of college. In 1892 she married a lumber merchant, William Stroud, and followed the path of many former Camden residents by living in Merchantville and Moorestown. The Stroud household included a son and Minna’s sister Emily, who did not marry.
The Lafferty family apparently lived a quiet life on Cooper Street, unlike many of their neighbors who played leading roles in political, civic, and social organizations. William E. Lafferty was steadily a vestryman at St. Paul’s Protestant Episcopal Church for thirty years and served as its treasurer. His service later merited a memorial window in the church.
Members of the Lafferty family lived at 311 Cooper Street until the deaths of William (in 1904) and Caroline (in 1908). During their years in the home, the environment around it changed markedly with the construction of an adjacent house at 305 Cooper Street. That house, built in 1885 for Dr. Henry Genet Taylor, filled the double lot to the west and attached to the existing houses on both sides (303 and 311). The three houses formed an unusual row of substantial houses built at different times in contrasting styles.
Coal Connections
When advertised for sale in 1908, 311 Cooper Street was described as a “handsome stone front residence” with solid walnut interior finishing. Its next owners, from 1910 to 1919, came to Camden from the west-central Pennsylvania coal-mining town called Glen Campbell (so named for the Glenwood Coal Company and its superintendent Cornelius Campbell). The new residents of 311 Cooper Street, Samuel L. and Margaretta Clark and their children, had deep business and family ties with their hometown that they maintained throughout their years in Camden.
Samuel L. Clark, a coal merchant, was 30 years old when the family arrived on Cooper Street; Margaretta was 31, and their three sons ranged in age from 5 to 9. The family employed two domestic servants, documented in the 1910 Census as Isabella Bryson, age 18, and Florence Burley, 16, both born in Pennsylvania. A year after the family came to Camden, the Clarks had an additional child, a daughter, born in 1911. The Clarks sent their children to the private Camden Friends School, and in the case of their oldest son, David, to Penn Charter School in Philadelphia to prepare for his later entry to Princeton.
The advent of the automobile helped the Clarks maintain their connections in the Pennsylvania coal region. Shortly after buying 311 Cooper Street, they added a brick garage at the back of their property, facing Lawrence Street. They motored each summer to Glen Campbell, where Samuel Clark retained roles in businesses run by his brother, Joseph Clark, a future Pennsylvania state senator. The Clark family controlled the First National Bank of Glen Campbell and a number of companies engaged in extraction of coal, gas, oil, and other natural resources.
The Clarks lived at 311 Cooper Street until 1919, when they advertised the home for sale, stating “Reason for selling—Business in Philadelphia; have purchased a home over there.” They moved to Merion, in the fashionable Main Line suburbs west of the city; Samuel Clark later served as president of one of the Clark family companies, the Royal Oil and Gas Corp., which had offices in the Philadelphia National Bank Building.
Apartment Conversions
The Clarks advertised their home for sale as a single-family residence, calling it a “most desirable home,” with 14 rooms, three baths, electric lights, and vapor heat. But in 1920 Cooper Street was on the cusp of a transition toward a commercial corridor with a greater density of residents living in apartments. The Helene Apartments, Camden’s first rental apartment building for upper class tenants, had opened in 1912 at the nearby southeast corner of Cooper and Third Streets. Although several more years would pass before the most concerted push to convert North Camden houses into apartments, in 1920 that transition came to 311 Cooper Street. Work began in December 1919, and by 1920 the new “Kinney Apartments” offered “seven complete housekeeping” units in the “best residential section, five blocks to ferry.” The tenants included white-collar professionals and businesspeople, including an insurance agent, a variety of salesmen, a physician, a clergyman, and a corset maker.
A more intensive redevelopment of Cooper Street occurred later in the 1920s, reflecting aspirations for a business boom in Camden following completion of the Delaware River Bridge (later renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge) in 1926. To create a larger, more modern apartment building at 311 Cooper Street, a real estate company demolished the stone façade of 1870 and replaced it with a Georgian-revival style brick front; a rear addition extended the building to the full depth of the lot. The result was a 32-apartment building with units of one, two, or three rooms, all with baths. The Segwyn Realty Company called the new building the Bloom Apartments, named for the company treasurer Hyman Bloom. Through at least 1950, the building continued to attract business and professional tenants, including a significant number of public school teachers and employees of RCA. By the 1960s, Spanish surnames among the tenants reflected the increasing presence of Puerto Ricans in North Camden during the decades following World War II.
The apartment building had a resident superintendent until at least 1959, but in later years fell into disrepair and financial difficulties. Corresponding with Camden’s post-industrial decline, the building began to appear in legal notices related to back taxes by the mid-1980s. Still, surveyors for the Camden Bureau of Planning considered the building to be a historically significant structure in 1985 as they prepared to nominate Cooper Street as a historic district. “Though this building experienced an extraordinary alteration to its front façade, it remains an integral and significant element to the streetscape,” the structure survey form noted.
The Cooper Street Historic District achieved National Register status in 1989, but conditions at 311 Cooper Street deteriorated. In 1995, the Courier-Post described the building as a “dilapidated apartment complex” when reporting on the stabbing of a homeless man in a hallway. A resident elsewhere in the 300 block of Cooper Street told the newspaper that “the apartment complex is no stranger to drunks and alcoholics who are rowdy.”
Another transformation for Cooper Street was afoot by 2000, when administrators of Rutgers-Camden saw opportunities to increase the visibility of the university by buying properties adjacent to its existing campus. The Camden campus had been created through urban renewal demolitions in the early 1960s, but Cooper Street’s buildings had been spared because of their perceived commercial value. By 2000, 311 Cooper Street, which was then on the city’s foreclosure list, became viewed as a prospect to be renovated into a graduate student dormitory. The university encountered objections from officials and residents concerned about the loss of a taxable property to a tax-exempt state institution. But ultimately Rutgers purchased the building for $100,000 and stated intentions to spend an estimated $1.5 million to restore and convert it to student housing.
By 2002, Rutgers proposed instead to demolish the apartment building, which was authorized following public hearings. Two decades later, 311 Cooper Street consisted of a fenced lawn with a modular office structure at the back of the property.
Camden and Philadelphia Newspapers (Newspapers.com and Genealogy Bank).
Camden City Directories (Camden County Historical Society and Ancestry.com).
Camden County Property Records.
New Jersey State Census, 1885-1915, and U.S. Census, 1850-1950 (Ancestry.com).
National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, Sen. Joseph O. Clark House, Glen Campbell Borough, Pa., 2011.
New Jersey Office of Cultural and Environmental Services, Historic Sites Inventory No. 0408204 (Bloom Apartments, 311 Cooper Street), 1985.
The office building at 315 Cooper Street reflects Camden’s transitions and needs during an era of industrial decline. Built in 1966, the building first served as headquarters of the Amalgamated Food and Allied Workers Union Local 56, creating a tie between Cooper Street and Camden’s longstanding role in the food processing industry. In the 1980s, the building became home to the Camden County Juvenile Resource Center (later known as the Camden Center for Youth Development). The modern building took the place of a c. 1855 Greek Revival-style home owned by prominent Camden residents, including John W. Mickle, the namesake for Mickle Street and the former Mickle School. During a period as a rental property in 1870-71, the residence served as home to the Collegiate School of Camden, a private school. From the 1920s through the 1940s, before it was demolished for construction of the office building, the house at 315 Cooper Street was a hub of men’s club activity as headquarters for the Camden Club and later the Moose Lodge.
During the 1850s, the north side of Cooper Street began to fill with houses as Cooper family heirs sold their land for development. Among this first generation of structures in the 300 block, 315 Cooper Street ranked as one of the largest and most substantial. A double-lot, brick, Greek Revival residence, 315 Cooper Street first served as home for a retired physician from Cape May, Joseph Fifield, and his wife, Lydia. After Lydia Fifield’s death in 1858, the home was owned briefly by Albert W. Markley, a recent president of the Farmers’ and Mechanics’ Bank in Philadelphia (who lived at other times at 218 and 420 Cooper Street).
The 315 Cooper Street house gained a notable new connection in 1861, when it was purchased by John W. Mickle, whose family roots extended to seventeenth-century settlement in the region that became South Jersey. Mickle, a retired sea captain with extensive investments in turnpikes, railroads, and ferry operations, lived a scant few months in 315 Cooper Street before his death later in 1861. But he brought with him an extended household that included widows of his brother and nephew, who remained in the home through the end of the 1860s. John W. Mickle’s memory lived on in Camden through the naming of Mickle Street and the John W. Mickle School. Mickle was honored not only for his prominence in business but for his public service in the New Jersey State Assembly and in the convention that drafted the New Jersey Constitution of 1844. His survivors also recalled his seafaring days carrying trade between the Port of Philadelphia, Europe, and South America. His distinctions included transporting Princess Charlotte of France to join her father, Joseph Bonaparte, while he lived on an estate in Bordentown, Burlington County.
Collegiate School and Boarding House
The heirs of John W. Mickle rented 315 Cooper Street to tenants beginning in 1870, although family members returned to live there intermittently when it was not otherwise occupied. For about two years beginning in 1870, the home became a girls’ boarding school. The Ladies’ Department of the Collegiate School of the City of Camden at 315 Cooper was an extension of a private day school that Reverend Martin L. Hoffer, a Presbyterian minister, had been running since 1868 in a former Odd Fellows’ Hall at Fourth and Market Streets. Hoffer, who lived in Beverly, Burlington County, had previously operated a boys’ boarding school in Beverly and a military boarding school for boys in Allentown, Pennsylvania. His Collegiate School in Camden offered instruction in classical and commercial subjects for boys and girls (in separate classrooms). Viewed by the West Jersey Press as “important step in the permanent growth and prosperity of our city,” Hofford’s school on Market Street and its boarding school extension at 315 Cooper nevertheless proved to be short-lived. By 1874 he moved to other ministerial posts. The girls’ boarding school, acquired by new teachers and with a different name, continued two years longer nearby at 312 Cooper Street. The Collegiate School on Market Street, after a brief closure, reopened on Market Street under a new principal.
After the departure of the Collegiate School, the owners of 315 Cooper Street continue to offer it for rent or for sale: “A three-story brick house ten minutes’ walk from the ferry,” read an advertisement in the Camden Morning Post in 1879. “Contains all conveniences; heated throughout; stationary wash stands in bed rooms; two water closets; two kitchens; stationary wash tubs; underdrained; dry cellar.” For about five years, 1878 to 1883, 315 Cooper Street became a boarding house operated by Mary A. Lanning, who lived there with her husband and adult son, as many as seven boarders, and two servants. Recorded in the 1880 Census, the boarders included a lawyer, a bank teller and his wife, a sea captain and his wife, and a hardware dealer. The servants were Susan Boyer, a Black woman who was widowed, and likely her son John, age 12. Neither of the Boyers could read or write.
Family Home
The house at 315 Cooper Street became a family home once again in 1883, when a dispute among heirs of John W. Mickle led to a court-ordered sale of the property. For the next 26 years, 315 Cooper Street was owned and occupied by attorney Peter V. Voorhees, his wife Louisa Voorhees, their son James Dayton Voorhees, and usually three to four domestic servants. They previously lived several blocks away at 430 Linden Street, part of the 1870s development known as Linden Terrace.
The names of the new residents of 315 Cooper reflected the depth and breadth of their family histories. Peter V. Voorhees had a family lineage that traced to seventeenth-century Dutch settlement of Long Island, New York. Peter V., born in New Brunswick in 1852, graduated from Rutgers College in 1873 and then moved to Camden to study law with his uncle, Peter L. Voorhees. The younger Voorhees followed his uncle’s specialization in real estate law and became, among other roles, a representative of the Cooper family trust. In 1881, he married Louisa Clarke Dayton, whose family history extended to seventeenth-century English settlers of Boston. Later generations lived in Somerset County, New Jersey, and Louisa’s father, a lawyer, moved to Camden after graduating from Princeton College. Louisa’s uncle, William L. Dayton, served in the United States Senate and in 1856 was the young Republican Party’s candidate for vice president of the United States. Honoring Louisa’s family legacy, the Voorhees’s son was called by his middle name, Dayton.
Peter V. and Louisa Voorhees had been married about two years when they moved to 315 Cooper Street with one-year-old Dayton. A second child, a daughter named Elsie born in 1883, died just before her first birthday while the family vacationed at Lake Minnewaska, New York. A death notice in the Philadelphia Times stating that she died “suddenly” suggests an accident or other unexpected cause, but the details were not publicly disclosed. Thereafter, they remained a family of three as Peter prospered as a lawyer, Louisa engaged in charitable activities, and Dayton grew up at 315 Cooper Street and went on to college at Princeton.
The domestic workers in the Voorhees household included Celina (or Selina) Kammerer, who stood apart from other domestic help on Cooper Street through an unusually long term of service and her nationality. While most white domestics on Cooper Street were Irish immigrants or native-born, Kammerer was born in France. No evidence exists to explain how she came to be employed in the Voorhees household or why she stayed so long, but she was present throughout their time at 315 Cooper Street. Public records reveal only that Kammerer was born between 1850 or 1860, that her mother was French and her father either French or Prussian, and that she immigrated to the United States in 1866. Most other domestic servants who worked for the Voorhees family were Irish immigrant women, but by 1900 the family also employed a Black butler, Jesse Bailey. Born in Virginia in 1850, Bailey likely came to Camden as part of the emerging wave of Black migration out of the South to northern cities.
In addition to the large home on Cooper Street and domestic servants, the affluence of the Voorhees family enabled extended summer vacations to the Jersey Shore, Maine, the Adirondacks, and Florida. Like others of their social and economic standing, they had leisure time and resources for tourism to resorts by rail. During the 1890s, they also traveled by ocean liner to Europe and from the West Coast by sea to Japan.
At home, Peter V. Voorhees’s legal work included handling the Cooper family’s sale of their Cooper Street land between Front and Second Street for use as a public park—later known as Johnson Park. At the pinnacle of his legal career, between 1900 and 1905, he served as an appointed lay judge of the New Jersey Court of Errors and Appeals. Like other men of his station, Voorhees maintained a network of positions on local boards of directors, including the Camden Republican Club (at 312 Cooper Street, across from his house), the Camden City Dispensary (which provided medical care to the indigent), the West Jersey Title and Guarantee Company, and the First National Bank. He served as a vestryman of St. Paul’s Protestant Episcopal Church on Market Street. (He was not, however, connected with the 1899 creation and naming of Voorhees Township, which took its name from then-governor Foster McGowan Voorhees.)
The Voorhees family remained at 315 Cooper Street until the 1906 death of Peter V. Voorhees from multiple ailments that followed a serious bout with pneumonia the previous year, and the 1909 death of Louisa Voorhees from unspecified diseases. This ended the era of single-family ownership at this address. Dayton Voorhees, who served in World War I and then became a professor of politics at Princeton University, did not return to the family home. By 1915 it was rented out and divided between two households, one headed by James Buckelew, the superintendent of the West Jersey and Seashore Railroad Company, and the other headed by Lewis Larsen, a salesman. By 1920, the tenants were real estate dealer William P. Hollinger with his wife, Frances; three young children; and two domestic servants, a married Black couple James and Susan Taylor.
A Domain of Men
During the 1920s, Cooper Street experienced transition from a residential to commercial thoroughfare, largely through the efforts of real estate interests who anticipated a business boom coming with the 1926 completion of the Delaware River Bridge (later renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge). While many former residences on Cooper Street became apartments or office buildings, 315 Cooper Street gained a new purpose as a club house for Camden’s professional men.
The Camden Club came into existence through the efforts of a Camden undertaker, Fithian Simmons, who lived at 319 Cooper Street, next door to the vacated Voorhees home. The club filled two voids: on a personal level, Simmons poured his energy into the club following the death of his wife, Alverta, during the influenza epidemic in 1919. For Camden’s elite, the club offered a gathering place for men following the demise of the Camden Republican Club, which had been an anchor of men’s sociability on Cooper Street for decades. Supporters of the new Camden Club contributed $1,000 each to raise the funds to transform the Voorhees “mansion,” as the Morning Post described it, into a “luxurious clubhouse.” Membership required a $100 initiation fee and the same amount each year in annual dues.
With Simmons serving as president, the Camden Club sought to be the equivalent of the leading clubhouses for men in Philadelphia. The remodeled building offered a restaurant open day and night; parlors and reception rooms; rooms for billiards, card-playing, and other games; and four bedrooms on the third floor. By all outward appearances, the club thrived during the 1920s and celebrated its tenth anniversary with a dinner at 315 Cooper Street early in 1931 with “members and guests comprising leading business, professional and political notables,” the Morning Post reported. By that time, Simmons remained involved as president emeritus.
The Camden Club’s finances were not secure enough to survive the Great Depression, however. After purchasing the building for $14,000 in 1920, the club had taken out a mortgage for $100,000 to finance its ambitious remodel. By 1938, the club had fallen into default on the mortgage and owed thousands in back taxes to the City of Camden. With numerous prominent individuals and companies implicated as bond holders for the club, the building went up for sale to settle its debts.
Another fraternal organization in similar straits benefitted from the Camden Club’s demise. The Loyal Order of the Moose, Lodge 111, founded in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1888, had been active in Camden since 1909. The local lodge had opened a grand new headquarters on Market Street in 1929, but it fell into default on the mortgages and receivership by 1934. Having lost ownership of its hall to banks, the Moose Lodge opted in 1939 to buy the former Camden Club at 315 Cooper Street. For the next twenty-five years, the clubhouse became the hub of social and service activity for the men’s Moose lodge and the auxiliary Women of the Moose. Sports banquets, movie nights, dances, and other events were occasionally punctuated by police attention to liquor sales on Sundays and the presence of slot machines. Like other fraternal organizations of its time, the lodge restricted its membership to white people only, a limitation not overturned by Moose International until 1973.
Union Headquarters
By the 1960s, Cooper Street stood at the edge of an urban renewal zone. Between 1962 and 1964 Rutgers University created a new Camden campus through demolition of houses in the blocks between Cooper Street and the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, between Third and Fifth Streets. Although Cooper Street was spared wholesale destruction because of its perceived commercial value, the longstanding houses at 315 and 319 Cooper Street fell to demolition. Both became the sites for new union headquarters buildings, with 315 the site of a new, modern office building built in 1966 for the Amalgamated Food and Allied Workers Union, Local 56. Next door at 319 Cooper Street stood another strikingly modern structure built in 1960 for the International Union of Electrical Workers, Local 103. Together, the buildings created ties between Cooper Street and two of Camden’s longstanding industries, food processing and sound recording.
The Amalgamated Food and Allied Workers Union Local 56 – Meat Packing Division purchased 315 Cooper Street as the previous longtime occupant, the Moose Lodge, moved to temporary new quarters farther east on Cooper Street at the Walt Whitman Hotel. Formed in 1940, by the 1960s Local 56 represented workers in fisheries, canneries, farms, grocery stores, and food processing plants throughout New Jersey and at the General Foods plant in Dover, Delaware. Its work included organizing migrant labor in South Jersey, which in 1967 prompted a visit to Cooper Street by a delegation of Vietnamese tenant farmers escorted by the U.S. Department of Labor.
Later known as the United Food and Commercial Workers, Local 56 remained at 315 Cooper Street until 1982, when it opted to leave Camden for a building in Pennsauken that offered more space and easier, more ample parking.
Youth Services
By the time of the union’s departure, the economic and social circumstances of Camden had produced needs for greater social services for residents experiencing poverty, homelessness, or other effects of the sharp decline of industry in the late twentieth century. Responding to the needs of youth in these conditions, a nonprofit organization, New Ventures Management, purchased 315 Cooper Street and made it the headquarters for the Juvenile Resource Center (JRC). The center, led by former Camden school board member Stella Horton since its founding in 1978, provided juvenile offenders with alternatives to incarceration, including an alternative school, counseling, and employment programs.
The JRC continued its work on Cooper Street for decades, changing its name in 2003 to the Camden Youth Development Center (CYDC) after receiving a $1.2 million grant from the William Penn Foundation to join forces with the Camden City Youth Services Commission. Surrounded by that time by buildings purchased by Rutgers University, in 2012 the CYDC also gained an executive director, Felix James, with connections to Rutgers as a graduate of the university’s law school in Camden. Continuing operations in the 2020s, the CYDC stated its mission as “embracing and using the assets of young people to meet their needs and successfully address the complex work they must do to transform their communities and neighborhoods.” Its services encompassed leadership development, tutoring, employment preparation, college preparation, and “providing emotional, social, spiritual, physical, and cultural proficiencies.” Evolving from the original JRC focus on alternatives to incarceration, the CYDC in the 2020s stressed civic engagement as a pathway to success.
Camden and Philadelphia Newspapers (Newspapers.com and Genealogy Bank).
Camden City Directories (Ancestry.com).
Camden County Property Records.
New Jersey State Census, 1885-1915, and U.S. Census, 1850-1950 (Ancestry.com).
New Jersey Office of Cultural and Environmental Services, Historic Sites Inventory No. 0408205 (315 Cooper Street), 1985.
Prowell, George R. The History of Camden County, New Jersey. Philadelphia: L.J. Richards & Co., 1886.
The house at 323 Cooper Street reflects transformations on Cooper Street by the 1880s, when architect-designed houses began to appear on the increasingly prestigious thoroughfare. Higher-style homes accompanied a change in the streetscape, which gained small front yards after the Camden City Council agreed to a resident’s proposal to move the curbs of Cooper Street toward the center for 12 feet on each site.
In contrast to adjacent older brick rowhouses, the stone-front 323 Cooper Street was designed by the Philadelphia firm Hazlehurst & Huckel, who were known for residential, church, and commercial architecture. One of the partners, Edward P. Hazlehurst, had worked with one of Philadelphia’s best-known architects, Frank Furness, before starting his own firm with Samuel Huckel Jr. in 1881. The partners subsequently designed another Cooper Street house (527) in similar style, and they won a competition to design the Manufacturer’s Club prominently located at Broad and Walnut Streets in Philadelphia. Later, Huckel individually won a commission to remodel Grand Central Station in New York.
The lot at 323 Cooper Street was available for construction in 1886 because it had long been owned by the occupants of the house next door (321 Cooper Street), chemical manufacturer Joseph De La Cour and his family. The new house at 323 was commissioned in 1886 for De La Cour’s daughter Emily and her husband, Edward F. Nivin. By that time a family with five young children, the Nivins lived in the house briefly, but by 1890 with Joseph De La Cour in failing health, they put both houses (321 and 323 Cooper Street) up for sale.
Networks of Power for the Modern City
The first long-term owners of 323 Cooper Street, John J. and Anna Burleigh, also filled the house with young children. They had five children by the time they moved in, and three more were born during their eight years on Cooper Street – two sons and six daughters. (One other son died at some point prior to 1900.) John Burleigh, born in 1855 in Gloucester County, was the son of Irish immigrants; Anna, formerly Anna Smith, was born in Elmer, Salem County, the same year. After they married in 1874, when they were both 19 years old, they settled in Camden.
When the Burleighs moved to Camden, John Burleigh was a telegraph operator, a skill he had picked up beginning at the age of 14. He gained a position as station and telegraph operator for the West Jersey Railroad Company in Elmer, Anna’s hometown. By the time they began their family life in Camden, Burleigh had advanced to chief telegraph operator for the railroad.
It was an auspicious time to have knack for wires, electricity, and transportation. In the 1870s and early 1880s, Burleigh played a leading role in creating the infrastructure that made Camden a modern, industrial city. For the South Jersey Telephone Company, in 1879 he oversaw the laying of a cable beneath the Delaware River to connect Camden with Philadelphia by telephone. In 1881, he became a manager and electrician for the new Electric Illuminating Company of Camden – later the Camden Heating and Lighting Company – which led the city’s transition from gas to electric lighting. All the while, he maintained his position with the railroad, advancing to train master in 1884. His business activities expanded to electric streetcar lines, installed in the 1890s in Camden and between beach communities of the Jersey Shore.
The Burleighs’ purchase of one of the most stylish new homes on Cooper Street in 1890 displayed affluence also achieved in another arena: real estate finance. During the 1880s Burleigh had been elected secretary of several Camden building and loan associations. Increasingly prominent as a financier, he became secretary of the Camden Board of Trade the same year the family moved to Cooper Street. Ultimately, in 1892 Burleigh gave up his position with the West Jersey Railroad because of the press of other business. He remained an officer with the Camden Heating and Lighting Company and the various building and loan associations that were enabling home ownership for the middle class. Going a step farther, in 1889, he was among 25 incorporators of the new South Jersey Finance Company, “to buy and sell almost anything; it will make a specialty of real estate operations, negotiations of mortgages and the like and it will have power to guarantee titles,” the Camden County Courier reported. “One of the objects of the company will be the purchase, for people without means, of homes, and permitting them to pay for the same on monthly installments until they have paid sufficient to secure a loan from one of our building associations.” Another company organized a decade later sold insurance to cover the risks of defaults on mortgages.
While living at 323 Cooper Street, Burleigh’s social circles included the Camden Republican Club, then located across the street at 312 Cooper. He prevailed in euchre tournaments and joined the club on a trip to Civil War sites in Virginia. The Burleighs, a rare Roman Catholic family among the Protestants on Cooper Street, also devoted time and energy to their parish, the Church of the Immaculate Conception. John Burleigh led the project to build a Catholic lyceum (lecture hall) adjacent to the church and organized a literary society for youth. Like others of their social class, the Burleighs spent extended periods during the summer at the Jersey Shore, usually Atlantic City.
The Burleighs stayed in Camden until 1898. By that time, with John Burleigh firmly established as a financier, the family moved to the fashionable railroad suburb of Merchantville. John Burleigh’s fortunes continued to climb when the General Electric Company absorbed the Camden Heating and Lighting Company, which he still managed, in 1899. At the Burleighs’ new home in Merchantville, the U.S. Census documented the family in 1900: John and Anna had been married 26 years, and their eight children ranged in age from 4 to 24. That year they employed four domestic servants: a butler, a cook, a housemaid, and a coachman.
Civil War Veteran
John Burleigh sold his house to a contemporary and associate: George Barrett, who was a lumber dealer but also a director of the Camden Lighting and Heating Company and a fellow member of the Board of Trade and the Camden Republican Club. While Burleigh engaged in putting electricity to work in utilities and transportation, Barrett provided necessary infrastructure, like telephone poles and streetcar rail ties. He also held elective offices, culminating in a term as Camden County Sheriff between 1893 and 1896. This also placed him in Burleigh’s realm of real estate through his duties of seizing and selling properties in default of mortgages or tax payments.
Barrett, who owned 323 Cooper Street for the next two decades, was born in England in 1846 and immigrated to the United States with his parents at the age of 10. Raised in Pennsylvania, by 1878 he was in Camden and playing a role in the city’s then-dominant industry as co-owner of a sixteen-acre sawmill operation on the Delaware River waterfront between Penn and Pearl Streets. Barrett and his wife, Sarah, also from Pennsylvania, he lived during the 1880s and 1890s at 126 Cooper Street and raised three children there. The Barretts also acquired a cottage at the Jersey Shore, in Ocean City, where George was known for his boating and hunting skills, and Sarah hosted an annual fish dinner for other Camden women at the shore. Sarah Barrett participated in the women’s auxiliary groups of her husband’s organizations and joined the Camden Woman’s Club.
By the time the Barretts moved to 323 Cooper Street in 1899, George Barrett was devoting his greatest energy to the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), the patriotic and fraternal organization of veterans of the Civil War. Barrett, who fought for the Union with the 126th Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment, had been among the troops in the trenches during the siege of Richmond and then occupied the city after it fell. He bore a lasting reminder of the war in the form of a limp caused by a gunshot to the knee.
In Camden, Barrett was a leader in the Thomas K. Lee Post No. 5 of the GAR, and the same year he moved to 232 Cooper Street he was elected Department Commander for the New Jersey Division. Barrett coordinated planning for the national GAR encampment in Philadelphia that year, and throughout his years on Cooper Street engaged in meticulous planning and issued orders for GAR encampments and for the commemorations and parades on Memorial Day, Appomattox Day marking the end of the War, and other occasions. He supplied a 102-foot-long white pine pole for the American flag that flew at the Post No. 5 headquarters at Fifth Street and Taylor Avenue. Beyond Camden, he served on inspection committees for the Soldiers’ Home in Vineland, and he traveled to national GAR encampments in other cities. In 1913, he boarded a special train with other Camden veterans to attend the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the Battle of Gettysburg.
When the Barretts moved to 323 Cooper Street, their household consisted of George, then 52 years old; Sarah, 48, and two of their three grown children, daughter Flora, 21, and son Frank, 19, who worked as a bookkeeper. The children left home when they married, but the Barretts remained until 1923. That year, with construction of the Delaware River Bridge soon to disrupt North Camden, they moved to Moorestown.
Public Lives, Private Lives
Demolitions for the approach to the new bridge across the Delaware River displaced the next residents of 323 Cooper Street from their earlier long-time residence in the 500 block of Linden Street. Francis and Katherine Weaver lived at 323 Cooper Street for the next decade, although title to the home was held by their adult daughter and son-in-law, who lived in Salem County. When they moved to Cooper Street in 1924, Francis Weaver was an established attorney, 63 years old, and his wife was 10 years younger. Their household included Weaver’s mother, Harriet, and his sister Anna, a retired teacher who had become blind. Servants attended to the needs of the older women, who both died while the Weavers lived on Cooper Street – Harriet in 1927 and Anna in 1934.
Francis and Katherine Weaver were both public figures. In addition to his legal practice, Francis Weaver served on the New Jersey State Board of Taxation, where he presided over appeals of tax assessments. Katherine Weaver was an active club woman, devoting greatest energy to the Daughters of the American Revolution, where she was regarded as an authority on genealogical research. Her club activities extended to groups in Haddonfield and Moorestown, while in Camden she helped with the annual charity events for Cooper Hospital and hosted events for the Women’s Auxiliary of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church.
At St. Paul’s, located a block from the Weaver’s Cooper Street home, Katherine Weaver became involved in social work as a fund-raiser and leader for the Church Mission of Help, part of a nationwide Episcopal organization that sought to combat juvenile delinquency and render aid to young women and girls in cities. Among its activities in Camden, the mission sought to address the needs of young unwed mothers by advising them of their rights to financial support from their babies’ fathers, helping them find employment, and providing clothing for the babies. Weaver was involved with the mission from its inception in Camden in 1928 and served as financial secretary by 1932.
To most outward appearances, the Weavers lived a conventional life at 323 Cooper Street, but during the 1930s they also made the news in startling ways. In 1930, their son-in-law J. William McCausland was killed in a gangland-style shooting in Salem as he carried out his duties as a paymaster for the Salem Glass Works. He was carrying $3,000 in a cash box when a car drove up and a man stepped onto the running board, aimed a revolver, and fired. McCausland fell onto the cash box, dying from the gunshot, and the robbers fled. The Weavers’ daughter, Helen, was left a widow with three children. The family made news again in 1934-35 stemming from longtime tensions within the Weavers’ marriage, centered in large part on Katherine Weaver’s frequent activities outside the home. After fighting escalated into a physical altercation, Katherine Weaver left her husband in 1934 and filed for spousal support and a divorce. The subsequent legal hearings laid bare the difficulties of the marriage, which were reported by Camden newspapers in sensational detail. Weaver lost the case, but she lived apart from her husband thereafter. Francis Weaver died at 323 Cooper Street in 1938; Katherine Weaver lived until 1962 with her daughter in Salem County.
Episcopal Rectory
For nearly 25 years, 323 Cooper Street next served as the rectory for nearby St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. Rev. William D. McLean, whose father was an Episcopal priest in Chicago, moved into the home by the end of 1938 with his family, including his wife, Alice (a native of Moorestown), and three children under the age of 5. They stayed until 1940, when Rev. McLean, then 33 years old, was commissioned a first lieutenant chaplain with the U.S. Army. The 1940 Census showed two other occupants of the household, a housekeeper Louisa Mitchell, 52 years old, and her husband, Joseph, 61, a watchman at the RCA radio factory.
For the remaining years of 323 Cooper Street’s service to St. Paul’s, from 1940 until 1962, the rectory was home to Rev. Percival C. Bailey, McLean’s successor. Bailey, a native of Michigan, came to Camden with 22 years of experience in the ministry, including pastorates in mining districts and industrial Detroit. He had traveled widely abroad and brought his new parishioners first-hand observations of the upheavals in Germany that accompanied Chancellor Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. After the United States entered World War II, Bailey served on a committee formed by local pastors to offer counseling to conscientious objectors.
Bailey, who was unmarried, employed housekeepers during his years at 323 Cooper Street and rented excess rooms to tenants. When recorded by the 1950 U.S. Census the household included Bailey, then 58 years old; a housekeeper, Viola Darcy, 50, and three lodgers: Paul E. Kennedy, 44, a railroad conductor; John Costello, 24, a restaurant dishwasher, and Matos Costello, a deck hand. The Costellos, who roomed together, were both born in Puerto Rico, a reflection of the changing demographics of Camden in the decades following World War II.
Community Health and Nutrition
Percival Bailey remained at 323 Cooper Street until he retired from active ministry in 1962. From that point onward, the former residence served as an office for a series of community service organizations. The Visiting Nurses Association of Camden occupied 323 Cooper Street between 1963 and 1966 after urban renewal demolitions displaced the group from a nearby Fourth Street headquarters. From the late 1960s through the late 1980s, as Rutgers University expanded its presence on Cooper Street, various nutrition services of the New Jersey Cooperative Extension Service had a home in 323 Cooper Street. By 2002, the building housed New Jersey Health Initiatives, a grant-making program of the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation, and by 2022 the former residence also included the Provost’s office for Rutgers University-Camden.Camden and Philadelphia Newspapers (Newspapers.com and Genealogy Bank).
Camden City Directories (Camden County Historical Society and Ancestry.com).
Camden County Property Records.
New Jersey State Census, 1885-1915, and U.S. Census, 1850-1950 (Ancestry.com).
Prowell, George R. The History of Camden County, New Jersey. Philadelphia: L.J. Richards & Co., 1886.
407 Cooper Street is a contributing structure of the Cooper Street Historic District, listed on the New Jersey and National Registers of Historic Places, and notable as the home of a nineteenth-century descendant of the Cooper family. The district's nomination for the National Register identifies significance in part for the presence of Camden’s “most intact examples of nineteenth-century houses” and their embodiment of “the street’s change from residential and professional to commercial.” The house at 407 Cooper Street embodies this change through its history as a single-family home that transitioned to medical offices and apartments during the 1920s as affluent families moved to suburban towns during the construction period for the Delaware River Bridge (later renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge). In 2000, Rutgers University acquired the building, which became home to the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminal Justice.
Among the many building lots that heirs of the Cooper family sold on the north side of Cooper Street during the 1840s and 1850s, they retained one: the lot at 407, which remained undeveloped until construction of a three-story brick rowhouse in 1871. By that date, the lot had continued to pass through the family to William B. Cooper, who leased the house to another tenant for several years before retiring from farming in Stockton Township and moving into Camden in 1876 when he was 62 years old.
The Cooper Family and Legacies of Slavery
Descended from the first European landholders of the area that became Camden, William B. Cooper was born in 1814 in a house built by his grandparents in Delaware Township (later known as Stockton and still later developed into the Cramer Hill section of Camden). In the tradition of his Quaker family, he attended the Newton Friends School and later the Westtown Boarding School in Chester County, Pennsylvania. He returned to New Jersey and joined his father and brother Benjamin in farming the Cooper land.
According to an 1886 history of Camden County, the two brothers and their father were “in the days of slavery … devoted friend[s] of the refugee slaves, and would do anything to comfort and protect them.” Research by the Camden County Historical Society has identified the Camden area as “Station A” on the Underground Railroad in New Jersey, and the Coopers’ Stockton Township property afforded an especially conducive location on the Delaware River opposite Petty Island. In earlier years, however, the extended Cooper family had benefitted from enslaved labor and the slave trade. The Historical Society’s research documented sales of enslaved people at Camden ferry landings, including the Cooper Point ferry that William B. Cooper’s father leased to a Philadelphia operator. Two such transactions took place while the lease was in effect (1762-64) and one after it ended. During the late eighteenth century, another member of the family, Marmaduke Cooper, is known to have held fourteen slaves on another plantation (where his home, Pomona Hall, became a museum).
Those Cooper connections with slavery took place before William B. Cooper was born, but his life nevertheless entwined with the hierarchies of race that prevailed in the nineteenth century. In Stockton Township and at 407 Cooper Street, his household had both white and Black residents. At the head of the household were William and his wife, Phoebe, a descendant of another Quaker settler family, the Emlens; living with them was William’s older sister, Elizabeth. For the work of the household, they employed Black domestic servants, most consistently a woman in her 50s, Mary Ann Christmas, who moved with them from the farm to the city.
Apart from the Coopers, Christmas headed her own household in Stockton Township, documented in the 1880 Census as including four children, among them a 9-year-old daughter already in domestic service with the Cooper family and a 12-year-old son working as a waiter in a hotel. An 11-year-old son was attending school; an 8-year-old daughter was not. The household also included a nephew, Joseph Dean, who at 23 years old could not read or write; he worked as a coachman for the Coopers and joined his aunt at the new house at 407 Cooper Street. Although separated from her own household, while in the Coopers’ employ Christmas amassed wages enough to purchase property in 1883. The lot and single-story frame house, in the vicinity of Twenty-Ninth Street and Mitchell Streets in Cramer Hill, remained the family home for at least two decades.
In their elder years in Camden, the three Coopers of 407 Cooper Street became known for their support of charitable causes. All three played roles in managing and supporting the West Jersey Orphanage for Colored Children, which had been founded in 1874. Although an altruistic endeavor, the institution existed within its benefactors’ beliefs about the welfare and potential of Black children. The orphanage provided education and health care, but it also sought to “bind out” children over the age of 12 to enable them to learn trades or other employment.
The Cooper household diminished in the 1880s with the deaths of Elizabeth in 1883, Phoebe in 1887, and finally William in 1888 at the age of 75. His bequests reflected the range of and character of his civic interests: Cooper Hospital received the largest bequest, $50,000, followed by $15,000 given to the Friends’ Asylum for the Relief of Persons Deprived of the Use of Their Reason, located in the Frankford section of Philadelphia. The West Jersey Orphanage received $2,000, as did the City Dispensary and the Home for Friendless Children. To the servants of his household, he left $6,000.
Fruit Merchant
The next occupants of 407 Cooper Street, from 1888 until 1897, linked the home with merchant activity in Philadelphia and the pursuit of exotic fruits for the growing cities on both sides of the Delaware River. Eugene B. Redfield, who was in the produce business with his father at the Dock Street Market in Philadelphia, was about 30 years old when he purchased 407 Cooper Street as a home for himself and his wife, Lydia. They employed Black servants, including Martha Woolford and Thomas Jefferson.
Redfield & Son brought fruit and vegetables into Philadelphia from warmer climates in the South and West, then repacked and sold them to the nearby region. The founder of the firm, Eugene’s father Bradley, had started life in Connecticut but took up farming in Delaware in the late 1860s and then launched his produce business in Philadelphia in 1871. Like many of Dock Street’s commission merchants, he commuted to work from a home in Camden.
Eugene Redfield, the oldest of five siblings, moved to 407 Cooper Street around the time that he embarked on a new extension of the family business: Florida oranges. During the 1890s, the commercial orange industry was in its infancy, and Redfield found opportunity in Polk County near Tampa. He invested in land and developed a grove that over twenty years’ time developed to more than 2,000 trees, primarily oranges but also grapefruit, lemons, limes, and other novelties for northern tastes. Together with Lydia, he established a winter home in a colonial-style mansion and returned to Camden only during the summers.
The Redfields sold 407 Cooper Street and left Camden by the end of the nineteenth century. While continuing to winter in Florida, Eugene and Lydia divided their summer months between Atlantic City and a residence in West Philadelphia. In 1911, when Eugene Redfield died at his Polk County estate, Lydia took over the citrus grove and made Florida her permanent home.
Boarding House, Club House
After the Redfields departed, 407 Cooper Street changed hands several times in the first years of the twentieth century. As a rental property, from 1899 to 1902 it was a boarding house whose occupants included Samuel Hufty, the city comptroller of Camden and a veteran of the Civil War, and a physician, Paul Mecray, who soon married and moved into the house next door (405 Cooper Street). For a brief few months in 1903, the building became the club house for a fledging Union League organized by former Mayor Cooper B. Hatch. Conceived as a rival to the Camden Republican Club across the street at 312 Cooper Street, the Union League launched with fanfare in July 1903 with a lawn party for four hundred people and music by Josephus Jennings’ Third Regiment Band. The enthusiasm was not matched with sufficient funds to support the club, however, and it folded by November.
Bridges to Bridgeton
The next long-term owners of 407 Cooper Street owned the home from 1905 into the 1940s, through Cooper Street’s transition to a primarily commercial thoroughfare. The Ewell family, with deep roots in Cumberland County, located in Camden for the benefit of the medical career of Dr. Alfred Elwell, who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania medical school in 1899. The doctor’s father, Jacob, bought the home in 1905 and immediately signed the deed over to his son.
With the purchase of the home, Jacob Elwell, began to divide his time between Camden and Bridgeton, the commercial center of rural Cumberland County, about 40 miles south of Camden. He was 62 years old and a Civil War veteran whose unit fought at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. His trade was harness-making, which he had learned as a teenage apprentice and built into a prominent harness, leather, and saddle store in Bridgeton. When automobiles began to supplant horses early in the twentieth century, he saw the future and in 1911 added an auto garage to his store.
The Elwell household on Cooper Street at first consisted of two generations, Jacob Elwell and his wife Harriet, together with their doctor son and their adult daughter, Alice. In 1910 they employed a Black married couple, William and Cora Wright, as domestic servants. The Wrights, who had been married three years, had both migrated north from Virginia. They were, thus, harbingers of the larger wave of Black migration that came to northern industrial cities during the First World War.
The Elwell family experienced generational transitions while living at 407 Cooper Street. Jacob and Harriet celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary with a party back in Bridgeton in 1914. The next year, Dr. Alfred Elwell married a woman from Bridgeton, Helen Whitaker, and by 1920 their family on Cooper Street expanded to include two children. Alice Elwell also married and left the home in 1916. That year, the death of Harriet Elwell led her husband, Jacob, to move back to Bridgeton to live with another of their sons. He also died there, in 1922.
By the 1920s, Cooper Street was undergoing its own transitions related to the construction of the Delaware River Bridge (later named the Benjamin Franklin Bridge), which opened in 1926. Expecting a commercial boom for Camden, real estate interests promoted conversions of Cooper Street properties from family homes into office buildings and apartments. The Elwells were a bit ahead of the trend, as they started advertising an apartment for rent in 1918. In 1922 they joined other prominent neighbors in relocating to Merchantville, although they retained ownership of 407 Cooper Street and Alfred Elwell maintained his practice there. They rented offices to other physicians and apartments to long-term tenants such as Helen and Martha Lummis, sisters and school teachers. The Elwells themselves returned to live in one of their apartments from 1935 through 1941, when the doctor died from a heart attack that he experienced while driving in Ocean City. By that time his son, Alfred Jr., had completed medical school and was starting an internship at Cooper Hospital.
Offices and Apartments
The house at 407 Cooper Street remained a place of medical offices, dental offices, and apartments from the 1940s through the 1970s, owned for much of that time by Helen Elwell’s second husband, dentist John S. Owens. For a time during the early 1960s, it served as the Camden Free Dental Clinic. In its physical appearance and occupancy, the building continued to reflect the changing nature of Cooper Street. By 1980, its first floor had a front façade of polished stone that spanned the original house and an addition on the east side that housed an additional doctor’s office. “A rather ugly modernized first floor does little to enhance this structure,” noted historic structure surveyors from the Camden Division of Planning. Apartment tenants by the 1980s included individuals with Spanish surnames, likely a reflection of the increasing Puerto Rican population of North Camden.
Because of their perceived value as business locations, houses on Cooper Street were spared from the 1962-64 urban renewal project that created a campus for Rutgers University in the blocks between Cooper Street and the Benjamin Franklin Bridge. Rutgers, which had acquired the house next door at 405 Cooper Street by the 1970s, also purchased 407 Cooper Street in 2000. A renovation project in 2004 united the two buildings into one facility with office spaces, seminar rooms, and a student computer lab. The combined properties, turning their backs to Cooper Street by providing access through a shared back porch, became home to the Rutgers-Camden Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminal Justice.Newspapers of Camden, Bridgeton, Philadelphia, and Tampa, Florida (Newspapers.com and Genealogy Bank).
Camden City Directories (Camden County Historical Society and Ancestry.com).
Camden County Property Records.
New Jersey State Census, 1885-1915, U.S. Census, 1850-1950 (Ancestry.com).
Heatherington, M.F. History of Polk County, Florida. St. Augustine, Fla.: The Record Company, 1928.
Historical Data Systems, comp. U.S., American Civil War Regiments, 1861-1866 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 1999.
Prowell, George R. The History of Camden County, New Jersey. Philadelphia: L.J. Richards & Co., 1886.
The adjoining rowhouses at 421 and 419 Cooper Street were among the first to be built on the north side of Cooper Street as Cooper family descendants began to divide and sell their inherited property during the 1840s and 1850s. A broker and volunteer firefighter living in Philadelphia, Joseph R. Paulson, and his wife Mildred K. Paulson bought these lots in 1847. At least one house existed on the property by the end of 1848, when Joseph Paulson, at the age of 36, drew up an agreement that revealed expectations of an early death: he placed the properties in trust with his mother-in-law, Hester Keen, with instructions that she collect rents to support his wife and children, a son also named Joseph (then 13 years old) and daughter Emily (then age 5).
A death notice for Joseph R. Paulson appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer on November 29, 1849. The family invited relatives, friends, and members of the Humane Engine Company in Philadelphia to his funeral “from his late residence, Cooper Street, near Fifth, Camden, N.J.” They proceeded from there back to Philadelphia on the Arch Street ferry for his burial at Monument Cemetery. His cause of death was not made public. The property on Cooper Street, as he intended, remained a source of rental income and periodically a home for his descendants for the next 75 years.
A Soldier's Family during the Civil War
From 1863 (perhaps earlier) until at least 1869, 421 Cooper Street was the rented home of the Harbert family: Samuel C. Harbert, a dealer in agricultural implements in Philadelphia; his wife, Georgianna; and daughters Mary Virginia and Ella. During the first two years of the Civil War, Harbert served as regimental quartermaster in the New Jersey Fourth Infantry Regiment. The New Jersey Fourth participated in the defense of Washington until March 1862 and then advanced into Virginia and saw action in battles that included Yorktown, Bull Run, and Fredericksburg. Another Camden soldier, 17-year-old Thomas James Howell, demonstrated affection for Harbert's daughter Mary in letters he wrote home before being killed at the Battle of Gaines Mill on June 27, 1862.
Harbert mustered out of the New Jersey Fourth in January 1863 and thereafter served as an officer in the U.S. Volunteers Paymaster's Department Infantry Regiment until November 1865, reaching the rank of major. He also served on the Camden City Council from 1869 to 1871, when the family relocated to Philadelphia, his place of business. Samuel (1818-1888), Georgianna (1821-92), and the daughters are buried in Woodlands Cemetery in Philadelphia.
Family Legacy
As the original owner, Joseph Paulson, intended, the Cooper Street property supported his wife during her lifetime and upon her death conveyed to their two children. The siblings, adults by the time of their mother’s death in 1875, then divided ownership of the houses on their inherited land. Joseph Paulson, bearing the same name as his father, became the owner of 421 Cooper Street and a smaller house at the back of the property facing Lawrence Street. The homes continued to be rented to tenants.
Hazards of Youth in the 1880s
From around 1883 until 1892, the home at 421 Cooper Street was rented by the Kean family (sometimes spelled Keen, but apparently not related to the property owners). William C. Kean, a clerk for the Pennsylvania Railroad, and his wife Sarah, headed a family with two daughters and five sons living at home during this period. Sarah Kean's brother, Robert W. Downing, served as Comptroller for the Pennsylvania Railroad, which by 1888 also employed one of the Kean sons, then 17-year-old Charles A., as a clerk.
Camden newspapers recorded some of the experiences of the Kean sons, illustrating some of the hazards of youth the late nineteenth century. In 1884, 18-year-old Edmund suffered a severe contusion of his foot during a rough ride on a ferry boat in fog. In 1885, he made the news again for impertinence to the pastor of Trinity Baptist Church, which expelled him. In 1888, 15-year-old Harry and 13-year-old Joseph (known as Josie) were involved in a tree-cutting accident at their grandparents' farm near Woodbury, with Josie suffering axe cuts to his ankle. ("The shoe saved the foot from being entirely cut off, " the Camden Morning Post reported.) One of the boys, Robert (known as Bertie) did not live to adulthood. He died in the 421 Cooper Street home in July 1890 at the age of 13 from causes not publicly reported. The Camden Morning Post described him as "a bright and promising lad and his affection nature made him a favorite with his companions." As customary, his funeral service also took place at home.
In 1893, the Camden city directory announced the Kean sons as "removed to Philadelphia," and their parents were also across the river by the time of the 1900 Census (at 527 Broad Street, an area favored by transportation magnates). One of the Kean sons, William Jr., became a real estate developer of homes in the Germantown section of Northwest Philadelphia.
Security for a Widow
The Paulson family returned to 421 Cooper Street by 1897, opening a new period when the house again served as a source of income for a widow with young children. Mary A. Maxwell was 27 years old when she married a widower 30 years her senior, Joseph R. Paulson—the son of first owner of 421 Cooper Street. Joseph lived in Philadelphia, listed in public records variously as an optician, cutlery maker, and jewelry merchant.
With Joseph, Mary had two children and together they moved back to Camden and the 421 Cooper Street home. By the 1900 Census, the household consisted of Joseph, age 64; Mary, age 34; their sons Joseph Jr., age 6, and Charles, age 5, and a housekeeper, 55-year-old Clara Brewer. By 1905, Brewer's place had been taken by 21-year-old Rachel Ball, an African American who like many others in the early twentieth century had migrated north from Virginia. The family also added a daughter, Ruth, born 1902. The Paulsons lived at 421 Cooper Street for at least a decade and then, by 1910, made another move to the more fashionable suburb of Haddonfield. Still, they retained ownership of 421 Cooper Street.
In 1911, when Joseph died, the family's former home became a source of financial security for Mary and her children. Mary rented out 421 Cooper Street to other families while living next door at 419 Cooper Street, the other half of the Paulson family property that had passed to Joseph’s sister, Emily. The house at 421 for almost a decade became the rented home for another extended family headed by a widow, Clara Starn, until that family moved in 1920 to Merchantville. It remained a source of income for Mary Paulson and her family until 1925; its change of ownership that year warranted a story in the Camden Courier-Post to note that the property had been in the hands of only two families--the Paulsons and the Coopers--since Camden's earliest history.
1920s Disruption, Opportunity, and Renovation
During the 1920s, a series of disruptions and transitions led Camden boosters to view Cooper Street as a potential business corridor. Construction of the Delaware River Bridge (later renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge), completed in 1926, caused demolition of nineteenth-century homes in nearby blocks. Near the Delaware waterfront, the Victor Talking Machine Company demolished a block of Cooper Street homes to expand its factories. Commercial-scale buildings such as the Wilson Building, Camden's first skyscraper (620 Cooper, completed 1925), and the Plaza Hotel (500 Cooper, completed 1927), began to appear. Controversially for longtime residents, Cooper Street was widened in anticipation of increasing automobile traffic.
In the midst of these transitions, 421 Cooper Street changed from a family home to an office building. It was one of a series of renovation projects managed by Julia M. Carey, a 26-year-old daughter of Irish immigrants who had worked as a stenographer and notary before finding new opportunity in real estate sales during the 1920s. On behalf of the Bell-Oliver Corporation, she sold three Cooper Street houses--321, 421, and 521--to investors and stayed on to manage and remodel them. The renovations by the "energetic realty lady" were reported in the Camden Courier-Post of September 11, 1926: at 421 Cooper Street, Carey turned the home into an office building, and leased an office there for herself. (Meanwhile, she turned 321 Cooper Street into an eight-unit apartment house and 521 into offices for lawyers.)
It appears likely that Carey was responsible for the Mission Revival-style ornament that obscured the original facade of 421 Cooper Street. This Spanish-influenced style, which originated on the West Coast, had been rare in Camden but made two other appearances on Cooper Street during the 1920s: in a new commercial building at 525 Cooper and in the Chalcar Apartments building in the 200 block. The renovation of 421 Cooper Street, with enlarged windows and structural changes necessary to install the new Mission Revival ornament, is visible in an aerial photograph of the vicinity of the Delaware River Bridge approach taken c. 1926. The completed renovation can also be seen in the 1947 advertisement published at the top of this page.
Julia M. Carey lived at least briefly, c. 1929-1931, in one of the apartments she created at 321 Cooper Street. She remained involved with the neighborhood until at least 1940, when the Camden city directory listed her as having a real estate office at 521 Cooper.
Helen's Beauty Shop
After the renovation of 421 Cooper, the building had a variety of office tenants, including an insurance agency and promoters of the new Arlington Mausoleum in Pennsauken. But the business tenant who became most well-known to Camden during the 1930s and 1940s arrived in 1933, when Helen Waters opened a beauty shop on the second floor. She vigorously promoted her business with display advertising and flattering promotional articles in the Camden newspapers, encouraging the women of Camden to come to her for the latest in hairstyling and cosmetics.
By the time Helen opened her shop at 421 Cooper, she had been widowed and her work as a beautician supported two daughters. The 1930 Census found her at age 30 living at the Harding Villa Apartments on Federal Street while her daughters Patricia and Dorothy, then aged 9 and 10, lived with her parents Daniel and Lida Chester elsewhere in Camden. Helen, who had an eighth-grade education, worked as a beautician for Binder's Beauty Shop in Philadelphia before opening her own establishment at 421 Cooper Street, where she and her daughters also came to live. In 1938, Waters added cosmetics and facials to her business. Her daughters both graduated from high school, including at least one year at Mount St. Mary's Academy run by the Sisters of Mercy in Plainfield, New Jersey. In 1940, living with their mother at 421 Cooper, Dorothy worked as a typist and Patricia as a telephone operator. Patricia actively promoted a women's basketball league in Camden for former high school players.
Other businesses and organizations, including the Camden County Real Estate Board and the Camden County Democratic Party, had offices in 421 Cooper while Helen operated the shop and lived upstairs. In 1945, after both of her daughters had married, Helen bought the building but retained ownership only until 1947. When she put 421 Cooper Street up for sale, it offered an office suite on the first floor, additional office space on the second floor, "plus three nicely planned apartments with modern tile baths." Helen continued to operate her beauty salon in the building until at least 1950, but after its sale she moved behind it to 426 Lawrence Street.
Residential, Professional, Commercial
During the second half of the twentieth century, 421 Cooper Street served all elements of the transitions noted in the justification for naming Cooper Street a historic district on the New Jersey and National Registers of Historic Places in 1989. Its next owner, Ernest F. Birbeck, was an optician who moved his practice from the Plaza Hotel, then nearby at Fifth and Cooper Street, into 421 Cooper in 1950. He commuted from Pennsauken until he retired in 1967. His business tenants included a hearing aid center and a eyewear shop whose co-owner, B. Morozin, became the next owner of 421 Cooper. Under Morozin's ownership in the early 1970s, Rutgers-Camden students lived upstairs in space advertised as "dorm style" with a kitchen, dining room and air conditioning, for up to 10 people.
The Rutgers connection to 421 Cooper Street continued when another office tenant, lawyer Joseph Liebman, purchased the building in 1977. Liebman, a graduate of Rutgers Law School in Camden, lived in Philadelphia but according to information published in the Courier-Post had an office in 421 Cooper Street for fifty-five years. After one more change of ownership to another Philadelphia attorney/investor, Raymond Quaglia, Rutgers acquired the building in 1999.
On February 27, 2020, the Camden Historic Preservation Commission voted unanimously to dismiss with prejudice an application by Rutgers to demolish 421 Cooper Street. It further recommended reconstruction of the building, including restoring the facade.
On March 6, 2020, a request from Rutgers for emergency demolition of 421 Cooper Street was declined by the Historic Preservation Office of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection on the basis that the building's condition resulted from long-term deterioration.
On June 11, 2020, the Camden City Planning Board voted unanimously to deny Rutgers' request to demolish 421 Cooper Street.
Camden and Philadelphia Newspapers (Newspapers.com).
Camden City Directories (Camden County Historical Society and Ancestry.com).
Camden County Property Records.
Cooper Street Historic District, National Register Nomination, U.S. Department of Interior.
Digital Photographs Collection, Library Company of Philadelphia.
New Jersey State Census, 1885, 1895, 1915, and U.S. Census, 1870-1950 (Ancestry.com).
Property Report, 421 Cooper Street, New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection.
Structures Survey, 421 Cooper Street, New Jersey Office of Cultural and Environmental Services.
Note on sources: The historic structure report for this property dates it as “before 1885.” This research updates and corrects the record.
At the back of two Cooper Street-facing properties (419 and 421), two smaller houses with a small alley between them were added facing Lawrence Street sometime after 1847. The collective development of four residences stood on land purchased that year by Joseph R. Paulson, a Philadelphia merchant active in that city’s volunteer fire companies. Although just 35 years old when he bought the lots, Paulson apparently anticipated a need to assure future financial security for his family by 1848, when he placed the land and its ‘premises” in trust with his mother-in-law so that rents could be collected to support his wife and two young children. Paulson died in 1849 from a gastrointestinal hemorrhage while living in one of the Cooper Street-facing houses, and true to his wishes the four structures on his land generated income and at times provided shelter to his heirs for the next eight decades.
426 Lawrence Street
The 400 block of Lawrence Street had residents beginning in 1854, according to city directories. The earliest tenants who can be identified at 426 Lawrence Street included a man who later rose to prominence in Camden, Charles E. Derby, who rented the house between 1859 and 1861. Derby, a journeyman machinist born in Massachusetts, was a white man in his early 30s when he lived at 426 Lawrence with his wife, Susan (also white and in her early 30s), and their infant daughter Orilla. Shortly after they left Lawrence Street, in 1863, Derby co-founded the firm Derby & Weatherby (also known as the Camden Machine Works). Over the next four decades, the company grew at Delaware and Cooper Streets, where it produced machines for many of Camden’s waterfront industries. The firm specialized in building marine engines, including the engines that powered ferryboats operated by the Pennsylvania Railroad. By the time Derby died in 1901, he was described as “well known to machinists throughout the country.”
By 1865, the house at 426 Lawrence Street became home to a family that stayed for three decades, longer than any other residents of the block during the nineteenth century. The location would have been ideal for a house carpenter, the occupation of the head of household, William C. Bates. At that time and into the 1870s, builders were buying lots of land north of Cooper Street and rapidly putting up houses in pairs, groups of three, and entire rows. The distinctive Linden Terrace block (Linden Street between Fourth and Fifth Street) developed in 1871, for example. From Lawrence Street, Bates would have had a direct view, and potentially an opportunity for work, as builder Joseph Cooper constructed his unusually large, grand mansion at 406 Penn Street in 1869. Another of the city’s prominent builders, William Severns, had a carpentry shop across the street from Bates while that project was underway.
The Census of 1870 documented the Bates family as William, 54 years old, a white man; his wife Sarah, a white woman 55 years old; and their son Samuel, who was 30 years old and employed as a box maker. All were born in New Jersey. Unusual among their neighbors on working-class Lawrence Street, the Bates family employed or had a boarder who was a domestic servant, 19-year-old Maggie Johnson, for at least that one year. The family stayed on Lawrence Street until William Bates’s death in 1895, when he was 80 years old. His funeral took place from the house they had occupied for the last three decades.
Another relatively long-term tenant family occupied 426 Lawrence Street between 1896 and 1904. Like others on Lawrence Street during these years, William J. Roche and his wife, Rose, were immigrants—both had immigrated separately from Ireland during the 1870s and later married in the United States. They lived in Pennsylvania prior to moving to Camden sometime after 1888, following the birth of two children. William Roche appeared in Camden city directories as a clerk, but during the 1900 Census he identified his occupation as musician. That year while living on Lawrence Street, he was 49 years old; his wife, Rose, was 40 years old, and their two children, 13-year-old Regina and 12-year-old Gerald, were attending school. The family left Lawrence Street by 1905 and by 1910 had moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where William Roche worked as a piano polisher.
Tenants moved in and out frequently for the next two decades. Their occupations included steam fitter, printer, and molder, driver, machinist, bank watchman, and woodworker. At least one tenant family offered boarding for one or two working men. For a time during 1905, an unlicensed oleo margarine manufactory was set up at 426 Lawrence Street by an operator who sought to evade taxes by producing an unlabeled product for local stores. Inspectors hauled away 1,000 pounds of margarine as well as the machinery that produced it. The incident was an exceptional manufacturing use of the property, which otherwise remained rented to residential tenants.
By the 1920s, construction of the Delaware River Bridge (later renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge) prompted changes on Cooper Street as local real estate interests pushed to transform the residential street into a commercial thoroughfare. During this period, the longtime owners of 426 Lawrence Street, the Paulson family, put the house up for sale along with its companion Cooper Street-facing house (421 Cooper Street). At the time, a daughter-in-law of the original Paulson property owner, Mary Paulson, lived in 421 Cooper Street and derived income from renting out the other inherited houses. The sale of 421 Cooper and 426 Lawrence Street from Mary Paulson to the Bell-Oliver Corporation of Camden made news for the property’s lineage in Camden history. The Camden Daily Courier noted that only two families—the Paulsons and, before them, the Coopers—had owned the parcel since the time of the city’s founding.
While Cooper Street transitioned to business uses, Lawrence Street remained a row of residential rental properties. For most of the 1920s, spanning the period of the sale of the property and renovation of the Cooper Street-facing house, 426 Lawrence Street was the home of a shipyard worker, Frank Kenny, and his wife Jeannette (who had previously lived down the street at 418 Lawrence). By 1930, a machine hand at the RCA Victor radio factory, Maybel Gray, rented the house. A white female, 33 years old, Gray headed a household of two children, ages 12 and 14, who were attending school.
The continued pairing of 426 Lawrence and 421 Cooper Street as one parcel was evident through the presence and transactions of Helen C. Waters, a widow, who rented space in the remodeled 421 Cooper Street beginning in 1934. At that address, she operated her business, Helen’s Beauty Shoppe, and made a home for herself and two daughters. By 1943, after her daughters were grown, she moved to the smaller Lawrence Street house and subsequently bought the entire property, including 421 Cooper Street, in 1945. The property changed ownership again in 1947, transferring to an optometrist who ran his business in the Cooper Street-facing house but continued to rent 426 Lawrence Street to residential tenants. In 1950, Census takers recorded the occupant as Marguarite A. Graves, a 46-year-old white female working as a professional singer.
Frequently put up for rent or sale during the 1950s and 1960s, 426 Lawrence Street apparently also benefitted from a facelift to meet modern expectations. In 1953, a rental ad for the property described the house for potential tenants: “Teacher, business couple or widow looking for a modern central city home, here is a lovely tile bath, modern kitchen with dinette, one large bedroom, gas heated, living room and storage room.” The house, which had been standing for a century by the 1950s, also began to attract interest as a remnant of Camden history. One of Camden’s active preservationists, Edward Teitelman, purchased 426 Lawrence Street and its neighbor, 424 Lawrence, in 1969. Teitelman, a psychologist by profession, saved other properties on Cooper Street and nearby during this period, including the distinctive 305 Cooper Street designed by Philadelphia architect Wilson Eyre (later the Rutgers-Camden Writers House). He owned the pair of Lawrence Street houses until 1989; by 2004 they were in the hands of a real estate broker who sold them to Rutgers University in 2005.
Camden and Philadelphia newspapers (Newspapers.com)
Camden City Directories (Camden County Historical Society, Ancestry.com)
Camden County Property Records
Cooper Street Historic District, National Register Nomination, U.S. Department of Interior.
Inland Architect and News Record, Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, the Art Institute of Chicago
Manuals of the Legislature of New Jersey, 1896-97
Philadelphia Architects and Buildings Project, Athenaeum of Philadelphia
Structures Survey, 527 Cooper Street, New Jersey Office of Cultural and Environmental Services
U.S. and New Jersey Censuses (Ancestry.com)