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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/b371944a6a69dc0e6345a7e81c94c62e.jpg
9ca6b9724bb3a108ca1e7b5c6f1db82c
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Buildings
Description
An account of the resource
Houses and other structures on Cooper Street in Camden, N.J.
Place
Residence, business, or other entity.
Illustrations
Photograph by Jacob Lechner
Significance
325 Cooper Street is a contributing structure of the Cooper Street Historic District, which is listed on the New Jersey and National Register of Historic Places. The west end of a row of three houses built in the early 1850s, it supports the district’s significance as a collection of residences representing the nineteenth-century history of Camden. Its past residents include Camden’s second female physician, Lettie Ward. Since 2016, offices in this building have included the <a href="https://march.rutgers.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities</a> (MARCH) at Rutgers-Camden.
Architectural style
Greek Revival
Date of construction
c. 1852-1854
History
<p>As Cooper family heirs sold their land for development in the 1850s, they used two adjoining lots at 325 and <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/81" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">327</a> Cooper Street to set an aesthetic for the future. The deeds for both properties, executed in 1852, specified that “three story brick buildings only shall be erected upon Cooper Street.” This ruled out wood-frame structures and assured houses of a size and scale that would only be affordable to similarly substantial owners. The lot later numbered 325 became the west end of a row of three similar residences at the northwest corner of Fourth and Cooper Streets. The house, built between 1852 and 1854, was rented out by its first owners, who lived in Burlington County.</p>
<p><strong>From Countryside to City</strong></p>
<p>The first known tenants of 325 Cooper Street were members of the large and prominent Browning family, whose ancestors immigrated to the region from Holland in the early eighteenth century. Maurice Browning, who rented 325 Cooper Street beginning in 1854, grew up among a dozen siblings on his father Abraham’s farm in Stockton Township, about three and a half miles from Camden. The elder Browning, in addition to farming, also played a role in the city’s growth by establishing the Market Street Ferry, which passed to his heirs (including his son Maurice) when he died in 1836.</p>
<p>Maurice Browning, born in 1811, left the farm and pursued a career in pharmacy, working first in a drug store in Mount Holly, then studying pharmacy in Philadelphia, and then opening a drug store on Market Street in Camden. By the time he rented the house on Cooper Street, he had expanded his business activities to manufacturing and banking. With other family members, in 1840 he established the Aroma Mills, which extracted and sold dyes from woods. In 1855, around the time he moved to Cooper Street, Browning became a director of the newly formed Farmers’ and Mechanics Bank (later the First National Bank of Camden).</p>
<p>The Browning family at 325 Cooper Street in 1860 was headed by Maurice, then in his 40s, and his wife Anna, in her 30s, the daughter of a Philadelphia merchant who also owned a farm near Haddonfield. Married since 1840, their years on Cooper Street began in sadness in 1854 with the death of their oldest daughter, Ellen, who was 14 years old. The cause of her death was not publicly reported, but in the custom of the time her funeral was held at home prior to burial in Colestown Cemetery. The Brownings had earlier lost another child, a son named Maurice after his father, who died in 1850 when less than 2 years of age. These losses left the Brownings a family of five. When documented by the 1860 Census, the children were a son, Abraham, 15 years old, and two daughters, Josephine, 6, and Alice, 3. Another son, Lehman, was born the next year, in 1861. The Brownings employed two domestic servants, both Irish immigrants: Rebecca Caffrey, 36 years old, and Catherine McMullen, 17.</p>
<p>During the family’s years on Cooper Street, Maurice Browning joined in the enthusiasm for the new Republican Party, founded in 1854. At a mass meeting in Camden in 1856, Browning was among the local party supporters who turned out to voice support for the Republican platform and its national candidates, John C. Fremont for president and William L. Dayton for vice president. In 1862, Browning was among the original members of the Union League of Philadelphia, founded to support the Union cause during the Civil War.</p>
<p><strong>Camden, Philadelphia, and the World</strong></p>
<p>The Browning family left 325 Cooper Street by 1863, the year before the property’s original owners sold the home to Charles A. Sparks, a partner in a Philadelphia wholesale grocery and imports business. With his wife, Amelia, and their four children, Sparks lived at 325 Cooper Street during a decade, from 1864 to 1874, that proved pivotal in his career. Like other merchants with Camden and Philadelphia ties, his interests widened to investments that aided Camden’s growth and the region’s reach outward in the nation and the world.</p>
<p>Charles Sparks had family roots in <a href="https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/locations/salem-county-new-jersey/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Salem County</a>, New Jersey, but his father (a mariner), mother, and a brother had moved to Camden by 1850. Sparks began his adult working life across the river in Philadelphia as a clerk in the wholesale grocery, importing, and exporting business of Edward C. Knight, a Camden County native, and soon became a partner in the E.C. Knight Co. While remaining with the firm, Sparks chose to live in Camden after his 1852 marriage to Amelia Ross, who was born in England, the daughter of a merchant who became an extensive landholder in Stockton and Pennsauken Townships. They moved to Cooper Street from their earlier home near Third and Market Streets. By the time of the 1870 Census their household at 325 Cooper Street included four children, a son and three daughters ranging in age from 5 to 13; Charles by this time was 43 years old, and Amelia was 40. They employed at least one domestic servant, Sarah McHale, likely an Irish immigrant.</p>
<p>Charles Sparks' association with the E.C. Knight Co. placed him in an extensive network of trade between Philadelphia, the Pacific, and the Caribbean. Around the time that Sparks went to work for Knight, the firm expanded its trade from importing coffee from the West Indies to seagoing trade with California. As he became a partner in the company, Knight initiated imports of molasses and sugar from Cuba. At first acting as an agent for other refineries in Philadelphia, by 1870 the E.C. Knight Co. established its own refinery complex in the Southwark section of the city, with Charles Sparks in charge. Edward Knight also invested in railroads and steamship lines; in 1874, Sparks joined him as an incorporator of the <a href="http://cnhillsborough.blogspot.com/2021/03/delaware-and-bound-brook-railroad.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Delaware River & Bound Brook Railroad Company</a>, a 27-mile line reaching northward from Trenton that posed a challenge to the Camden & Amboy Railroad’s dominance of rail connections with New York.</p>
<p>Sparks' success in business returned benefits in Camden. At home at 325 Cooper Street, he initiated interior and exterior renovations. The <em>West Jersey Press </em>observed in 1869 that Sparks “has made a decided and tasteful alteration, both internally and externally, in his dwelling. He has replaced the ordinary window glass with French plate, in walnut sash, giving the front a pleasing effect.” The house in 2022 retains an impressive nineteenth-century hallstand, marble fireplace, and ornately framed parlor mirror that may attest to these improvements. Sparks also invested time and funds in Camden institutions, for example serving on the board of the Farmers’ and Mechanics’ Bank (later the First National Bank of Camden) with the previous occupant of 325 Cooper Street, Maurice Browning. He served on the building committee for the First Presbyterian Church, supported the Republican Party, and became known for a fine pair of horses that he drove in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park and while on vacation in Atlantic City.</p>
<p>The role of Amelia Sparks in these activities, or others independent of her husband, did not leave traces in the public record. She did, however, nurture a lasting connection with Camden. The Sparks family moved to Philadelphia in 1874 but kept 325 Cooper Street as a rental property. Many years later, after the death of Charles Sparks in 1904, Amelia Sparks returned to the house on Cooper Street. Then in her 70s, she spent another decade in her earlier home with one of her daughters, a niece, and servants to take care of the housework.</p>
<p><strong>Rental Property</strong></p>
<p>The Sparks family’s removal to Philadelphia in 1874 opened a period of three decades of varied tenancy at 325 Cooper Street. For most of the 1880s, the tenants were members of the Browning family who had lived at the same address two decades before—in this later era, George G. Browning, the brother of Maurice Browning and his partner in the dye industry. His household included Mary White, his mother-in-law but also mother of Dr. J. Orlando White, who lived two doors away at <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/80" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">329 Cooper Street</a>.</p>
<p>After this return of the Brownings, the house was offered for rent or sale periodically through the economic downturn of the 1890s until it became a boarding house in 1897. For a short period until 1901, the boarding house was run by Catherine Fisler, who lived in the home with her husband, Leonard, a Philadelphia produce dealer and Civil War veteran who fought for the Union with the Pennsylvania Third Cavalry. Their household included a grown son, his wife, and a grandchild, in addition to as many as eight boarders. When recorded in the Census of 1900, the boarders reflected the coalescing population of the growing industrial city—all were born in New Jersey or Pennsylvania, but their parents had birthplaces that included Delaware, Virginia, England, and Germany. The boarders held jobs ranging from unskilled laborer to railroad conductor to white-collar professions.</p>
<p>The last renter before Amelia Sparks returned to Cooper Street was Alfred G. McCausland, a railroad superintendent who rented the house for two years before purchasing another at 521 Cooper Street. Formerly a longtime resident of Wilmington, Delaware, McCausland and his family arrived in Camden by 1903 when the Reading Railroad transferred him from the Wilmington and Northern Railroad to the Atlantic City line. In his late 40s at the time of the move, McCausland’s household on Cooper Street included his second wife, Elizabeth (Lizzie), and two grown children from his first marriage. His son Frank also worked in railroading as a brakeman.</p>
<p><strong>Business and Professional Women</strong></p>
<p>The house at 325 Cooper Street remained in the ownership of the Sparks family until 1924, passing from Amelia Sparks to her daughter Emma and then to a niece, also named in Amelia Sparks. They remained in the home after the death of the elder Amelia in 1915 but also rented to other tenants—in 1920, a widowed designer of ladies’ gowns, Blanche Morse, and her family of four children, three of whom were adults working and adding to the household income. A daughter worked as a clerk in a department store, a son was a bank clerk, and another son a secretary for a leather company.</p>
<p>By the 1920s, Cooper Street was experiencing a transition to commercial uses caused indirectly by the construction of the Delaware River Bridge (later renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge), which opened in 1926. Expecting an economic boom in Camden, boosters and real estate interests sought to remake Cooper Street into a commercial corridor. With many former residences converting into apartments and offices, it was therefore newsworthy when 325 Cooper Street sold in 1924 to an undisclosed buyer, “to remain as a residence,” the Camden <em>Morning Post</em> reported.</p>
<p>In fact, the residence became both a home and an office for its notable new owner, Dr. Lettie Ward. She was a longtime physician by the time she purchased 325 Cooper Street, but when she became a doctor in the 1890s she was only the second woman to practice medicine in the city. A Camden native, born in 1859, Ward initially followed a more common career path for unmarried, college-educated women and became a schoolteacher and principal. She was inspired, though, by Camden’s first female physician, <a href="https://njwomenshistory.org/discover/biographies/sophia-presley/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Sophia Presley</a>, who also had begun her career in teaching. In 1894, Ward resigned her position as principal of the Jesse Starr School and enrolled in the <a href="https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/womans-medical-college-of-pennsylvania/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania</a>. Graduating in 1898, she returned to Camden to practice.</p>
<p>Ward purchased 325 Cooper Street in 1924 after being displaced from her previous longtime home and office three blocks away, on Cooper Street near Sixth, because it stood in the path for extending a street to connect with the new Delaware River Bridge. In her new home, she had her office on the first floor, and in addition to providing health care she hosted executive board meetings of the Camden County Business and Professional Woman’s Club. For her fourteen years at this address, Ward lived upstairs from her office in a household with other unmarried women of her generation. When recorded by the 1930 Census, Ward was 70 years old and shared the living quarters with three other women, one of them her cousin Alice Hibbs, 60 years old. The other two, described in the Census as lodgers, were lifelong companions and recently retired principals of Camden schools: Laura J. Harrop, 64, and Lillie T. Osler, 63. After Ward retired and moved in 1938, Harrop and Osler also left to live with other family members and remained together for the rest of their long lives, each of them reaching 101 years of age. They were buried side-by-side in the Haddonfield Baptist Cemetery.</p>
<p><strong>Rooms and Apartments</strong></p>
<p>After Lettie Ward’s period of ownership, 325 Cooper Street followed a trajectory more typical of older rowhouses in North Camden, increasingly deteriorating yet becoming more densely populated with roomers and apartment dwellers. By 1940, a family of six rented the house and in turn let rooms to six additional lodgers. An ad offering an apartment in 1943 promised “refined surroundings,” but by 1949 a landlord was ordered by the city to install a shower and a toilet to bring the building up to code. In the 1950s, the house was marketed as a potential office location at a “reduced price” and later marketed for sale as a rooming and apartment house.</p>
<p>Tenants at 325 Cooper Street beginning in the 1940s reflected the changing demographics of Camden, especially the growing presence of <a href="https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/puerto-rican-migration/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Puerto Rican residents</a>. The Campbell Soup Company had recruited Puerto Rican workers to Camden during the Second World War, at first housing them near the soup factory on the waterfront. As workers stayed, created lives and families, and started businesses and institutions, they became increasingly dominant in the population of North Camden. Tenants with Spanish surnames were common at 325 Cooper Street; three born in Puerto Rico were documented in the 1950 Census: Vincent Porrata, 37, a kitchen helper in a hotel; and Arthur Cruz, 29, and Ralph Maldonado, 24, both laborers for a metal specialty company.</p>
<p>Sometime prior to 1980, 325 Cooper Street became the property of Edward Teitelman, a psychiatrist by profession but also a historic preservation activist. Teitelman purchased and maintained several of Cooper Street’s most notable houses remaining from the nineteenth century, including two others in the same block, <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/78" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">303</a> and <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/79" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">305</a>. He lived in 305 Cooper Street, the distinctive Queen Anne Revival residence designed by Philadelphia architect Wilson Eyre. By the late 1980s, however, 325 Cooper Street was appearing in legal notices for overdue back taxes.</p>
<p>Rutgers University acquired 325 Cooper Street from trustees for Edward and Mildred Teitelman in 2001, and renovations created offices for the New Jersey Small Business Development Center of Rutgers-Camden. The building later served as home to the Rutgers-Camden Institute for Effective Education, offices for civic engagement activities, and beginning in 2016 as co-working space for the <a href="https://march.rutgers.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities</a> (MARCH). Among other activities, MARCH initiated the “Learning from Cooper Street” project to recover and raise awareness of the Cooper Street Historic District and adjoining blocks occupied by Rutgers-Camden.</p>
Associated Individuals
<p>For a list of all known occupants of 325 Cooper Street, link to the <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15gz3_mGk3FcNl0TPaOZAq6B1CHvOpqRcY7a99xkp_l4/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Cooper Street Residents Database</a> and scroll down to 325.</p>
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.<br /><br /><strong>Note on sources:</strong> A structure survey prepared by the Camden Division of Planning in 1980 identified 325 Cooper Street as the "George Bockius House." Further research in property deeds has established that George Bockius lived instead in the similar house at 329 Cooper Street.
Research by
Charlene Mires and Lucy Davis
Posted by
Charlene Mires
Send corrections to cmires@camden.rutgers.edu
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
325 Cooper Street
Description
An account of the resource
Contributing structure, Cooper Street Historic District.
1850s
1860s
1870s
1880s
1890s
1900s
1910s
1920s
1930s
1940s
1950s
1960s
1970s
1980s
1990s
2000s
2010s
300 Block
325 Cooper Street
Apartments
Boarding House
Burlington County
Civil War
Doctors
Dyes
Greek Revival
Grocers
Merchants
Philadelphia
Puerto Ricans
Railroad Executives
Republican Party
Rooming House
Rutgers-Camden
Salem County
Sugar
Teachers
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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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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
People
Description
An account of the resource
Residents of Cooper Street
Person
An individual.
Biographical Text
During the 1920s, a leader in public health who helped Camden respond to epidemics and keep its children healthy, lived for five years at 417 Cooper Street. These were the culminating years of Dr. Henry Hill Davis's long service as medical inspector for Camden's public schools. <br /><br />A native of Crosswicks, Burlington County, Davis came to Camden in the 1870s after graduating from Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia. While many physicians during the late nineteenth century gravitated toward Cooper Street and the vicinity of the recently opened Cooper Hospital, Davis opened both a pharmacy and medical practice in Kaighn Point. In 1899, he was appointed medical inspector for Camden's public schools--the first post of its kind in New Jersey and only the second in the nation, after New York City. Davis instituted annual physical examinations for Camden pupils and required vaccinations before any child could be admitted to school.<br /><br /> While continuing in this work for the schools, Davis was among the leaders in founding a new Camden Municipal Hospital for Contagious Diseases, which opened in 1916, and he served for twenty years as president of the Camden Board of Health. Over his long career, he led Camden's responses to smallpox outbreaks and the influenza epidemic of 1918-19.<br /><br />Davis and his wife, Harriett, rented the row house at 417 Cooper Street beginning in 1920; Davis was by this time 70 years old and his wife nine years younger. Their previous address had been 522 Linden Street, which was soon to be enveloped by construction activity for the Delaware River Bridge (later renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge). While at 417 Cooper, Davis continued in his post as medical inspector until retiring in 1925. The city honored him not only with a pension but also by giving his name to a new public school--still operating in 2020 as the <a href="http://camdencitydavis.ss12.sharpschool.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Dr. Henry H. Davis Family School</a> in East Camden. A street near the former site of the Municipal Hospital <a href="http://www.dvrbs.com/camden-streets/CamdenNJ-Streets-DavisStreet.htm" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">also bears his name</a>.<br /><br />In retirement, the Davises moved to Toms River, New Jersey, where they owned a home. There, Henry Davis's life came to a tragic end at the age of 78 in April 1929 when he was hit and killed by an automobile. The <em>Camden Courier-Post</em> took the opportunity when reporting his death to deliver a public health message: already during the first four months of the year, 55 people in South Jersey had been killed in crashes involving automobiles.
Time period on Cooper Street
1920-25
Location(s) - Cooper Street
417 Cooper Street
Occupation
Physician, Medical Inspector for Camden Schools
Birth Date
c. 1851
Birthplace
Crosswicks, N.J.
Death Date
April 10, 1929
Associated Individuals
Harriet Davis, wife
Sources
Camden City Directories and U.S. Census (Ancestry.com).<br />Camden<em> Courier-Post</em> (Newspapers.com).
Research by
Charlene Mires
Posted by
Charlene Mires
Send corrections to cmires@camden.rutgers.edu
Location(s) - Other
522 Linden Street (previous address)
563 Benson Street (previous address)
Third Street and Kaighn Avenue (pharmacy and practice, beginning 1870s)
Crosswicks, New Jersey
Toms River, New Jersey
Philadelphia
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Davis, Dr. Henry H.
Description
An account of the resource
A leader in public health, Dr. Henry Hill Davis lived at 417 Cooper Street for five years prior to his retirement in 1925.
1920s
400 Block
417 Cooper Street
Activism
Adult
Aging
Automobiles
Burlington County
Doctors
Health and Medicine
Male
Philadelphia
Schools
Toms River
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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.
Biographical Text
Joshua B. (for Benjamin) Franklin, who purchased 415 Cooper Street as well as the adjacent 417 Cooper Street in 1903, was a livery stable operator whose lifetime spanned to the age of the automobile.<br /><br />Franklin, born in 1861, moved from his family's farm in Burlington County to Camden during the city's fast-growing 1880s, when he was 21. He went to work for his uncle Joseph Franklin at the livery stable on Second Street between Cooper and Market and continued the business after his uncle's death. The Franklins became well known in Camden as they rented horses and carriages to the city's social and political elite. The business had a good location close to the Delaware River ferry crossings to Philadelphia and apparently yielded a good living, as Joshua Franklin purchased two other homes, at 224 Linden Street and 116 Cooper Street, before acquiring 415 and 417 Cooper. He joined fraternal organizations, including Lodge 15 of the Free and Accepted Masons.<br /><br />Franklin and his family lived in 415 Cooper while renting out the house next door. He improved the properties by adding wood front porches, in keeping with similar additions elsewhere on the block. He may have added the bay windows to the second and third floors, which are evident in an aerial photograph of Camden taken c. 1926 but not in a photograph of the block earlier in the twentieth century.<br /><br />When Franklin moved into 415 Cooper Street, his family consisted of his wife of 15 years, Mollie, and their 4-year-old daughter Edith. He was a notable enough in the community to cause his daughter's fifth birthday party to be reported in the <em>Camden Courier Post.</em> His personal fortunes soon took a tragic turn, however. Little Edith contracted typhoid fever and died in February 1907 at the age of 8, news that "came as a painful shock to various sections of the city where the family is well known," the <em>Courier-Post </em>lamented. By the end of the same year, Mollie Franklin also died, from the effects of a longstanding heart ailment. She was 38 years old.<br /><br />In the wake of these personal tragedies Joshua Franklin remained at 415 Cooper Street, and his community connections may explain the prominent tenants he attracted to his investment property next door: the dentist Elmer Bower, for example, and the medical inspector for Camden schools, Henry Davis. In 1909, Joshua Franklin was married for a second time, to Chellie Smith, a widow who had been working as a saleswoman for several years since her husband's death. Joshua and Chellie continued to live at 415 Cooper Street for the next 25 years, at times renting rooms to others.<br /><br />At the livery stable, Joshua Franklin suffered two serious injuries: in 1913, a severely broken arm that was treated by Dr. E.A.Y. Schellenger at Fifth and Cooper Streets, and in 1914 a near-electrocution that occurred during a Nor'easter when a live wire fell onto a telephone before Franklin picked up the receiver. The burns required treatment at Cooper Hospital.<br /><br />The appearance of automobiles in Camden during the first two decades of the twentieth century brought change and eventually the end of Franklin's livery stable. As his customers preferred their new automobiles to carriages pulled by horses, Franklin's business dealt more often with commercial clients, such as the city newspapers who still used horses to pull their delivery trucks. Franklin himself entered the automobile business with partners between 1921 and 1923, but by then in his 60s he retired and closed the stables as well. He continued to live at 415 Cooper Street with his wife, Chellie, until he died at home in 1938. In reporting his death, the <em>Camden Morning Post</em> recounted how his 78 years of life had spanned the age of liverymen to the age of the automobile.
Time period on Cooper Street
1900-38
Location(s) - Cooper Street
116 Cooper Street (1900-3)
415 Cooper Street (residence, 1903-38)
417 Cooper Street (rental property, 1903-38)
Location(s) - Other
Second Street between Cooper and Market (livery stable)
224 Linden Street (home prior to 1900)
39 N. Fourth Street and 47 N. Third Street (automobile businesses)
Burlington County (boyhood home)
Occupation
Livery stable operator
Automobile dealer
Birth Date
October 1861
Birthplace
Burlington County, New Jersey
Death Date
February 21, 1938, at home, 415 Cooper Street; burial in Harleigh Cemetery.
Associated Individuals
Mollie Campbell Franklin (first wife)<br /> Edith Campbell (daughter)<br /> Chellie Jones Smith Franklin (second wife)<br /> Etta Smith Eppler (daughter of second wife)<br /> George Franklin (brother)<br /> S.R. Franklin (brother)<br /> Joseph Franklin (uncle)<br /> Mrs. Joseph Johnson (sister)<br />Conly D. Brooks (partner in automobile business, 1921)<br /> Residents of 417 Cooper Street, 1903-38, see <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15gz3_mGk3FcNl0TPaOZAq6B1CHvOpqRcY7a99xkp_l4/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Cooper Street Database</a>.
Sources
Camden City Directories, New Jersey and U.S. Census Records, 1900-1940 (Ancestry.com)
Camden County Property Records
Camden Newspapers, 1900-1952 (Newspapers.com)
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
Franklin, Joshua B.
Description
An account of the resource
Originally a livery stable operator, Joshua Franklin's life on Cooper Street spanned to the age of the automobile.
116 Cooper Street
1900s
1910s
1920s
1930s
400 Block
415 Cooper Street
417 Cooper Street
Adult
Automobiles
Burlington County
Death
Horses
Injuries
Investment
Livery Stable
Male
Widowers
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https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/files/original/8f3f217f460f620d275a824cf8a311a1.jpg
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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
Buildings
Description
An account of the resource
Houses and other structures on Cooper Street in Camden, N.J.
Place
Residence, business, or other entity.
Architectural style
Originally a Greek Revival rowhouse, modified with Italianate influences and bay windows during the early twentieth century (prior to 1926).
Date of construction
1853
History
In March 1853 the Philadelphia <em>Public Ledger</em> observed, "Mr. Atwood has nearly finished two exquisitely, ornamentally and conveniently arranged dwelling houses on Cooper Street. They are fine additions to the improvements of that part of the city." With this brief note, the newspaper documented the construction of 415 and <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/48" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">417</a> Cooper Street. "Mr. Atwood" was Jesse Atwood, a Philadelphia-based artist whose wife, Hannah, had purchased property on the north side of Cooper Street from the Cooper family in 1845 and 1846. The frontage of the property accommodated three houses, initially a wood-frame house at <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/70" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">413</a> Cooper Street followed by the two brick houses erected in 1853. The Atwoods also developed four smaller dwellings on the back of the property, facing Lawrence Street. <br /><br />For most of the century following their construction, the houses at 415 and 417 Cooper Street were jointly owned with one or both treated as investment properties rented out to others. <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/54" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Hannah Atwood</a> derived a steady rental income as her husband pursued his career as an itinerant artist, and she bequeathed the houses to her granddaughter for the same purpose in 1883. The family sold the houses to others, but they remained rental properties.<br /><br /> It is possible that the Atwoods lived in either 413, 415, or 417 Cooper Street between 1853 and 1860, as they appear in city directories at "Cooper above Fourth." But for nearly eighty years, 415 Cooper Street had just two long-term resident families: the Brownings (c. 1860-1901) and the Franklins (1904-1938).<br /><br /><strong>Widowhood and</strong> <strong>Boarders</strong><br /><br />Jerusha Browning, who headed the household at 415 Cooper Street by 1860, was a member by marriage of the prominent Browning family of South Jersey. Her husband, Lawrence, had 17 siblings born from his father's two marriages, which gave Jerusha a vast network of relations while she lived on Cooper Street for more than two decades after the death of her husband. By marriage or lineage, her relatives included the Doughtons and Hollinsheads next door (413 Cooper), the Hinchmans (417), and other Browning households across the street (414) and in the 500 and 600 blocks.<br /><br />Jerusha apparently rented the three-story brick row house from its original owners, who relocated to Philadelphia but retained title until the 1880s. We cannot know why she made this choice, given that she and her son, Abraham, had inherited considerable property after her husband's death in 1858. If the $12,000 in inherited real estate lay in the South Jersey countryside, where the Brownings were extensive land holders, she may have opted for the proximity to neighbors or the potential to support the household by taking in boarders. In 1860, the residents at 415 Cooper Street included Jerusha, then age 60, Abraham, 26, another son, George, 22, daughter Margaret H., 30, and a servant, Margaret Welsh, 20.<br /><br />During the 1860s and 1870s, various other Browning relatives lived with Jerusha's family for short periods of time. They also continued to employ servants, including Lydia Pernell, who was African American, in 1874. Over time, however, Jerusha and her daughter Margaret began to accept boarders in their home. This began in a genteel manner by 1876, when Jerusha was 76 and her daughter 46, and their boarders included the English-born architect <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/47" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Arthur Truscott</a> and his two brothers in the insurance business, James and Millwood. They would have been low-risk boarders, given that they were nephews of an insurance man already established in Camden. <br /><br />Of the three Truscott brothers, the architect remained with the Brownings the longest, for at least twelve years between 1876 and 1888. During this period, he established his architecture practice in Philadelphia and designed the <a href="https://www.preservationnj.org/listings/new-jersey-safe-deposit-and-trust-company/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">New Jersey Safe Deposit & Trust Company building</a> at Third and Market Streets in Camden (1887). Later he served as a supervising architect during construction of the Camden High School built on Park Boulevard 1916-18. His firm Baily and Truscott also contributed new buildings to Cooper Street with the Chateauesque trio of houses at 538-42 Cooper Street (c. 1892)--later retained as facades for the LEAP Academy Charter School--and the Colonial Revival house at 514 Cooper (1903). <br /><br />After Jerusha Browning died in 1884, Margaret continued to operate the boarding house and to advertise it actively in Camden newspapers. She offered rooms for boarders on the second and third floor, in some cases connecting rooms that could be rented together. She remained in the home and in the boarding house business into her 70s. The Browning family association with 415 Cooper Street ended at the turn of the twentieth century, with Margaret H. Browning's death in 1901.<br /><br /><strong>From Horses to Automobiles</strong><br /><br />The next long-term occupant of 415 Cooper Street, Joshua B. (for Benjamin) Franklin, purchased this house as well as the adjacent 417 Cooper Street in 1903. Franklin and his family lived in 415 Cooper while renting out the house next door. He improved the properties by adding wood front porches in 1913, in keeping with similar additions elsewhere on the block. He may have added the bay windows to the second and third floors, which are evident in an aerial photograph of Camden taken c. 1926 but not in a photograph of the block earlier in the twentieth century.<br /><br />Franklin, born in 1861, moved from his family's farm in Burlington County to Camden during the city's fast-growing 1880s, when he was 21. He went to work for his uncle Joseph Franklin at the livery stable on Second Street between Cooper and Market and continued the business after his uncle's death. The Franklins became well known in Camden as they rented horses and carriages to the city's social and political elite. The business had a good location close to the Delaware River ferry crossings to Philadelphia and apparently yielded a good living, as Joshua Franklin purchased two other homes, at 224 Linden Street and 116 Cooper Street, before acquiring 415 and 417 Cooper. He joined fraternal organizations, including Lodge 15 of the Free and Accepted Masons.<br /><br />When Franklin moved into 415 Cooper Street, his family consisted of his wife of 15 years, Mollie, and their 4-year-old daughter Edith. He was a notable enough in the community to cause his daughter's fifth birthday party to be reported in the <em>Camden Courier Post.</em> His personal fortunes soon took a tragic turn, however. Little Edith contracted typhoid fever and died in February 1907 at the age of 8, news that "came as a painful shock to various sections of the city where the family is well known," the <em>Courier-Post </em>lamented. By the end of the same year, Mollie Franklin also died, from the effects of a longstanding heart ailment. She was 38 years old.<br /><br />In the wake of these personal tragedies Joshua Franklin remained at 415 Cooper Street, and his community connections may explain the prominent tenants he attracted to his investment property next door: the dentist Elmer Bower, for example, and the medical inspector for Camden schools, Henry Davis. In 1909, Joshua Franklin was married for a second time, to Chellie Smith, a widow who had been working as a saleswoman for several years since her husband's death. Joshua and Chellie continued to live at 415 Cooper Street for the next 25 years, at times renting rooms to others.<br /><br />At the livery stable, Joshua Franklin suffered two serious injuries: in 1913, a severely broken arm that was treated by Dr. E.A.Y. Schellenger at <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/72" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Fifth and Cooper Streets</a>, and in 1914 a near-electrocution that occurred during a Nor'easter when a live wire fell onto a telephone before Franklin picked up the receiver. The burns required treatment at Cooper Hospital.<br /><br />The appearance of <a href="https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/automobiles/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">automobiles</a> in Camden during the first two decades of the twentieth century brought change and eventually the end of Franklin's livery stable. As his customers preferred their new automobiles to carriages pulled by horses, Franklin's business dealt more often with commercial clients, such as the city newspapers who still used horses to pull their delivery trucks. Franklin himself entered the automobile business with partners between 1921 and 1923, but by then in his 60s he retired and closed the stables as well. He continued to live at 415 Cooper Street with his wife, Chellie, until he died at home in 1938. In reporting his death, the <em>Camden Morning Post</em> recounted how his 78 years of life had spanned the age of liverymen to the age of the automobile.<br /><br /><strong>Professionals and Entrepreneurs</strong><strong></strong><br /><br />The sale of 415 Cooper Street from the Franklin family to Dr. Benjamin Gross in 1943 marked a transition of uses to rented offices and apartments. Gross, a proctologist who lived in Merchantville, based his practice at 425 Cooper Street for about ten years before relocating the office to Collingswood. Other office tenants through the second half of the twentieth century included an accountant, a lawyer, and a dental practice.<br /><br />In the early twenty-first century, 415 Cooper Street gained new life as a restaurant location, at first operated by Rutgers-Camden graduate Elizabeth Ashley, then living in Cinnaminson. In addition to opening Lizzie's Cooper Street Cafe in 2003, she bought and renovated 417 Cooper Street next door to offer rental apartments to Rutgers-Camden students. Two other restaurants subsequently operated at 415 Cooper Street: McCargo's Restaurant (2006), a project of Camden native Aaron McCargo Jr., later a winner of <em>Next Food Network Star,</em> and another cafe (2007) operated by Ramona Breggeta.<br /><br />In 2007 Rutgers University purchased 415 Cooper Street from its most recent owner, Karen J. Giroux of Highland Park, N.J., for $500,000.
Illustrations
1. 415 Cooper Street, 2019. (Photograph by Jacob Lechner)
2. 415 Cooper Street, early twentieth century, prior to 1913. (Camden County Historical Society)
3. 415 and 415 Cooper Street with additions of front porches and bay windows on 415, detail from c. 1926 aerial photograph. (Library Company of Philadelphia)
Significance
415 Cooper Street is a contributing structure of the Cooper Street Historic District, listed on the New Jersey and National Registers of Historic Places. The district's nomination for the National Register identifies significance in part through architecture and transitions of use: "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." Together with the adjoining buildings 413-21 Cooper Street, 415 is one of the nineteenth-century homes that qualified Cooper Street for the National Register. Its notable history includes a connection to the prominent Browning family of South Jersey and to the architect Arthur Truscott, who lived in 415 Cooper Street as a boarder for at least twelve years. Lives of residents at 415 Cooper Street also illustrate matters of illness and death and changes in technologies of transportation. The home also embodies the pattern of transition from residential and professional to commercial uses identified as justification for listing the Cooper Street Historic District on the National Register. Rutgers purchased 415 Cooper Street in 2007.
Associated Individuals
For details about occupants of 415 Cooper Street, link to the <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15gz3_mGk3FcNl0TPaOZAq6B1CHvOpqRcY7a99xkp_l4/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Cooper Street Database</a> and scroll down to 415.
Research by
Charlene Mires
Posted by
Charlene Mires
Second corrections to cmires@camden.rutgers.edu
Sources
Camden City Directories, New Jersey and U.S. Census Records, 1860-1940 (Ancestry.com). Camden County Property Records.<br /> Camden and Philadelphia Newspapers, 1850-2007 (Newspapers.com and Genealogy Bank).<br /> Property Report, New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, Historic Preservation Office (2006).<br /> Structure Survey, New Jersey Office of Cultural and Environmental Services.<br /><br /><strong>Note on sources:</strong> Historic structures surveys identify this house as constructed c. 1846, consistent with the deed for purchase for the land. This research updates and corrects the date of construction for the home.
Questions / needs for additional research
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
415 Cooper Street
Description
An account of the resource
Contributing structure, Cooper Street Historic District.
1860s
1870s
1880s
1890s
1900s
1910s
1920s
1930s
1940s
1950s
1960s
1970s
1980s
1990s
2000s
400 Block
415 Cooper Street
Accountants
Architects
Attorneys
Automobiles
Boarding House
Boarding House Operator
Burlington County
Childhood
Collingswood
Death
Dentists
Doctors
Extended Family
Horses
Illness
Injuries
Investment
Livery Stable
Merchantville
Porches
Renovations
Restaurants
Rutgers-Camden
Typhoid Fever
Widowers
Widows