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https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/files/original/733102c43e0b8f4acab96b99ad5de365.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.
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/b022416f7bbf463ad7ec4c451d792200.jpg
c8eea70d5d3626d66c7d065816dc4947
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Buildings
Description
An account of the resource
Houses and other structures on Cooper Street in Camden, N.J.
Place
Residence, business, or other entity.
Illustrations
Photograph by Jacob Lechner
Significance
<p>327 Cooper Street is a contributing structure of the Cooper Street Historic District, which is listed on the New Jersey and National Register of Historic Places. The middle of a row of three houses built in the early 1850s, it supports the district’s significance as a collection of residences representing the nineteenth-century history of Camden. Its past residents include a Civil War soldier who became an officer of the U.S. Colored Troops, a prominent physician, and a journalist who became a United States Congressman. Since 2018, this building combined with the adjacent 329 Cooper Street has housed the <a href="https://childhood.camden.rutgers.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Rutgers-Camden Department of Childhood Studies</a>.</p>
Architectural style
Georgian Revival, obscured by renovations.
Date of construction
c. 1852-55
History
<p>As Cooper family heirs sold their land for development in the 1850s, they used two adjoining lots at 327 and 325 Cooper Street to set an aesthetic for the future. The deeds for both properties, executed in 1852, specified that “three story brick buildings only shall be erected upon Cooper Street.” This ruled out wood-frame structures and assured houses of a size and scale that would only be affordable to similarly substantial owners. The lot later numbered 327 became the middle house of a row of three similar residences at the northwest corner of Fourth and Cooper Streets. The house, built between 1852 and 1855, was rented out by its first owners, who lived in Burlington County.</p>
<p><strong>Civil War Family</strong></p>
<p>The earliest tenants of 327 Cooper Street who can be documented are the Trimble family, who moved to this address by 1858. The Trimbles lived in Philadelphia before moving to Camden, but they had roots that extended to Chester County, Pennsylvania, and Baltimore, where family members went into the shipping and mercantile business. The head of the household on Cooper Street, Joseph Trimble, descended from those Baltimore merchants. He joined his father and grandfather’s business, and he and his wife Sarah, who married in 1840, started their family in Baltimore. By 1847, however, they moved to Philadelphia, and by 1852 they were in Camden.</p>
<p>The Trimbles filled their rented home at 327 Cooper Street with as many as 13 residents. The 1860 Census recorded Joseph, 45 years old, as an importer of soda ash (sodium carbonate), a chemical that would have been useful to South Jersey’s glassmaking industry. Sarah, 43 years old, by this time had borne ten children, seven of whom lived with the family, ranging in age from 2 to 18. Joseph’s brother James and his wife, Jane, both age 40, also lived at 327 Cooper Street, and the extended family employed two domestic servants: a Black woman, Asha Bocha, age 60, who was born in Maryland, and a white woman, Mary Murphy, an Irish immigrant 45 years old.</p>
<p>While the Trimbles lived at 327 Cooper Street, the Civil War rocked Camden and the family. Joseph Trimble, an early adherent of the Republican Party, plunged immediately into home front support for the Union. He joined the Camden Relief Society to collect and distribute funds to support the families of men who enlisted as soldiers; in 1862 he served as its president and hosted at least one meeting at his home. Trimble also served as a lieutenant in Camden’s regiment of the Home Guard, formed to defend New Jersey from aggression. Sarah Trimble, meanwhile, became a leader of the Ladies’ Soldiers Aid Society, which collected old clothing to be remade into bandages and other items for sick and wounded soldiers. She invited donations to be sent to her home. Joseph Trimble’s brother James did commissary work for the Union army.</p>
<p>The Trimble family also had a son of military age, their oldest, Armon, who was 19 years old when southern forces attacked the federal <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/fort-sumter-the-civil-war-begins-1018791/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Fort Sumter</a> in South Carolina. Armon soon enlisted for three months’ service as a private with the New Jersey <a href="https://civilwarintheeast.com/us-regiments-batteries/new-jersey/3rd-new-jersey-militia/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Third Infantry Militia</a>, which deployed to Washington and guarded trains carrying provisions to Union troops. He re-enlisted in 1862 as a second lieutenant with the <a href="https://history.army.mil/museums/fieldMuseums/fortHood_3dCav/history.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Third Cavalry of the U.S. Army</a>, a regiment then fighting Confederates as well as Native Americans in New Mexico. Armon joined the unit there, but it soon moved east to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and from there to St. Louis and Memphis, where he received notice in February 1863 that his services were no longer needed. Apparently not content to be idle during wartime, Armon next joined the Thirty-Third Regiment, Pennsylvania Infantry Militia, for emergency service during Robert E. Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania, serving from June 26 to August 4, 1863, a period that spanned the Battle of Gettysburg.</p>
<p>In his final act of Civil War service, Armon Trimble applied to become one of the white officers being placed in command of U.S. Colored Troops (USCT). After appearing before a board of examiners in Washington, at 22 years of age he gained appointment as a first lieutenant of the <a href="https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/search-battle-units-detail.htm?battleUnitCode=UUS0028RI00C" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Twenty-Eighth Infantry Regiment USCT</a>. His unit suffered heavy losses in the campaign at Petersburg, Virginia, and was among the Union forces to enter Richmond after the city fell. The regiment took charge of prisoners in Richmond, and thereafter redeployed to Texas, where Trimble and the rest of his troops mustered out in 1865.</p>
<p>While Armon Trimble was away in service, the rest of the Trimble family moved back to Philadelphia. It had made such a mark in Camden that a testimonial dinner held at the West Jersey Hotel in 1863 saluted Joseph Trimble as “a public man and a politician in the cause of justice, right, and humanity.”</p>
<p><strong>The Lure of Science</strong></p>
<p>After the departure of the Trimbles, 327 Cooper Street ceased to be a rental property. In 1864, the earlier owners from Burlington County sold the house to Sarah S. Moody, the daughter of a Philadelphia tailor who had been married for ten years to Edward F. Moody, a bank clerk and cashier. Sarah Moody’s family had local roots that extended to the American Revolution, when a direct ancestor fought at the Battle of Red Bank; her husband’s were similarly deep but in Boston, Massachusetts, where he was born. Edward Moody and his father, Paul, relocated to Philadelphia by the late 1840s. While Edward Moody held a series of clerk and cashier positions with Philadelphia banks, he and his father moved to Camden. They lived in the 200 block of Federal Street, close to the most direct ferry crossing to Philadelphia, when Edward and Sarah married in 1854.</p>
<p>By the time they bought the Cooper Street house, the Moodys had one son, 5-year-old Edward Jr., and another, Nicholas, was born after the move. Edward’s banking career progressed to his election as cashier of the New Republic Bank in Philadelphia in 1869 and of the Fourth National Bank of Philadelphia in 1871. The luxuries of the Moody household included a gold watch and a piano, and by 1870 the family employed a domestic servant, a Black woman who was born in Delaware, Louisa Wiggins, who was 20 years old. That year the Census recorded Edward as 39 years old, a bank agent; Sarah Moody, 35 years old, keeping house; and the boys Edward Jr., 11, and Nicholas, 3.</p>
<p>Edward Moody was also known locally as “Professor Moody” for his vocational devotion to science. He had been attending meetings at Philadelphia’s <a href="https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/franklin-institute/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Franklin Institute</a> since at least 1862, and he frequented the amateur scientific societies that formed in Camden in the late nineteenth century. This may account for his brief service as chief engineer of the Camden Water Works during 1872-73. But he was better known for his lectures and demonstrations of experiments in settings that included the Franklin Institute, the Wagner Free Institute of Science, and the Camden Microscopical Society. Promoting one of his talks on chemistry in 1874, the <em>New Republic</em> newspaper in Camden commented, “what has rendered his discourses so entertaining are his experiments, which are not only invariably successful, but so clearly and distinctly explained that even those who have a very limited knowledge of the science can understand and appreciate them.”</p>
<p>In 1873, after his stint with the Water Works, Edward Moody went to work for the newly founded Camden Safe Deposit Company. He remained with the company for the rest of his career, but in 1883 the Moodys sold their Cooper Street house and moved to Philadelphia. They continued to maintain ties in both cities, however, and returned to Camden in the 1890s.</p>
<p><strong>City of Medicine</strong></p>
<p>The growth of Camden in the decades after the Civil War drew increasing numbers of physicians to the city, among them the owner of 327 Cooper Street for the next 13 years, Dr. Alexander M. Mecray. His path to Camden followed a common pattern of an aspiring physician from a rural county who trained at a Philadelphia medical school and then found Camden to be a promising setting to begin practice. The opening of the new Cooper Hospital in 1887 encouraged the trend.</p>
<p>Alexander Mecray was born in 1839 in Cape May County, New Jersey, where his father was a river pilot and proprietor of the Delaware House hotel. The younger Mecray’s path to medical practice took him first to study in Camden with his brother-in-law, Dr. Alexander Marcy, and from there to the University of Pennsylvania medical school. During the Civil War, he worked as a medic at Satterlee Hospital in Philadelphia. After his service concluded, he married a woman with similar family ties to the region’s maritime activity, Lydia Etris, the daughter of a Philadelphia ship joiner.</p>
<p>Alexander and Lydia Mecray moved to Camden when he started his practice by purchasing a drug store at Fourth and Pine Streets in 1865. He became active in the Camden city and county medical societies and served on the board of managers for the Camden Dispensary, which provided medical services to the indigent. She bore three children and engaged in charitable activities, including raising funds for the dispensary and for the Women’s Park Association for Children. Mecrays were, therefore, well established in their professional, civic, and family life by the time they moved to Cooper Street in 1883.</p>
<p>Cooper Street was becoming an increasingly prestigious address during the 1880s, spurred by a more attractive streetscape accomplished by moving curbs on both sides of the street 12 feet toward the center. This created space for small front lawns and gardens for the length of the thoroughfare, which benefitted the older rowhouses built in the 1850s as well as the newer, architect-designed homes that began to appear in the 1880s. Among the Mecrays’ neighbors on Cooper Street were longtime associates in the medical community, J. Orlando and Elizabeth White, who lived in the house next door (329 Cooper) and Henry Genet and Helen Taylor, who had been their neighbors on Market Street and a few years later built a new home at 305 Cooper.</p>
<p>The Mecray household when they moved into 327 Cooper Street included Alexander, then 43 years old; Lydia, 35; a 17-year-old son, James, and two daughters, 13-year-old Julia, and 4-year-old Anna. When documented in the 1880 Census at their previous home on Market Street, the Mecrays employed a Black woman as a domestic servant: Emma Savage, who was 25 years old, illiterate, and born in Virginia. Her presence reflects the increasing population of African Americans moving to Camden and Philadelphia in the decades following the Civil War. There is no record of whether she worked for the family after they moved to Cooper Street, but the Mecrays continued to employ domestic servants throughout the years in their new home. They had others in their household as well: for a time, a widow and two daughters who may have been relatives; a German roomer who advertised private lessons in German, classics, and mechanical drawing; and Alexander Mecray’s father, James.</p>
<p>When Cooper Hospital opened in 1887, Alexander Mecray was among the first physicians appointed to its staff. The Mecray family continued to live at 325 Cooper Street through the 1890s, but they also acquired a farm in Maple Shade, Burlington County. In 1899 they put 327 Cooper Street up for sale and moved to the country.</p>
<p><strong>Publishing and Politics</strong></p>
<p>The next transfer of 327 Cooper Street made it the eventual home of a United States Congressman. Francis (Frank) F. Patterson Jr., 32 years old in 1900, was firmly entrenched in Camden circles of newspaper publishing and Republican politics. The son of a newspaperman, he had been around journalism since he was a boy in Woodbury doing odd jobs for printers and selling papers. After his father bought the Camden <em>Courier</em>, he became a typesetter at the age of 15 and city editor at 18. Moving in and out of jobs as a reporter and editor in Camden, Philadelphia, and Baltimore during his 20s, he found his way into politics as a protégé of Camden’s Republican power broker, David Baird. He edited the paper that Baird and other Republican organization leaders bought in 1894, the <em>Camden Evening Telegram</em>, and gained a share of ownership. In 1899 he joined with his brother Theodore and two other partners to merge the <em>Telegram </em>with another Camden paper, the <em>Post,</em> to create the <em>Post-Telegram</em>—which they sold to a syndicate headed by Baird.</p>
<p>By the time Patterson, his wife Isabel, and two-year-old son (also named Frank) moved into 327 Cooper Street, the newspaperman had taken his first explicit step into politics by serving one term in the New Jersey Assembly. Next, in 1900, his loyalty to the Republican Party was rewarded by an uncontested nomination to serve as Camden County Clerk, a position he held for the next two decades while he and Isabel raised their family on Cooper Street. Three additional children were born at home by 1910. That year, the U.S. Census recorded the household as Frank Jr., age 41; Isabel, age 37; and the children Frank 3d, age 12; Robert, 9; Isabel, 6; and Mary, 5. The Pattersons also employed domestic servants, in 1910 two Black women, both 29 years old: Addie Trader, who was born in Maryland, and Laura Anderson, born in Delaware. In addition to the servants, the Pattersons’ affluence gave them the ability to send their children to private Quaker schools (the boys to Penn Charter in Philadelphia).</p>
<p>While serving as County Clerk, Patterson remained publisher of the <em>Post-Telegram</em> and in 1911 served a one-year term as president of the Camden Republican Club across the street from his house, at 312 Cooper Street. His influence widened to banking circles as he became president of the Pyne Point Building and Loan Association and the West Jersey Trust Company. Isabel Patterson joined other Camden women in raising funds for charitable causes such as hospitals and the Red Cross. The era of the First World War touched the Patterson family as Frank Jr. served on the local draft board and his oldest son enlisted in the Army. Frank 3d served in the Quartermaster Corps in Newark during 1917-18, but he encountered his greatest risk during the global <a href="https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/influenza-spanish-flu-pandemic-1918-19/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">influenza pandemic</a> that reached Camden in 1918. The first of the Patterson family to contract the illness was his mother, Isabel, then Frank 3d also contracted the disease while home on leave. Both survived.</p>
<p>Patterson’s next reward as a Republican loyalist came in 1920, when he was elected to the <a href="https://bioguide.congress.gov/search/bio/P000114" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">United States Congress</a> from the First District following the death of the incumbent, his North Camden neighbor William J. Browning. Although dividing his time between Camden and Washington, Patterson remained deeply engaged in local matters, for example urging that the envisioned location for the new Delaware River Bridge be shifted northward so that it would not cut through the lumberyard of his longtime political patron, David Baird. His habits of attention to local politics soon played a role in his political demise. He easily gained re-election to Congress in 1922, but by 1924 he had a challenger who called attention to his minimal impact on the national stage. He lost his seat in Congress in 1926 to that challenger, Charles A. Wolverton, a former prosecutor and state assemblyman who ultimately served sixteen terms representing the First District.</p>
<p>By the time Patterson’s tenure of Congress ended, the Pattersons also departed the house at 327 Cooper Street. Like other many affluent Camden residents during the 1920s, in 1925 they moved to Merchantville, thus ending the era of 327 Cooper Street as a single-family home.</p>
<p><strong>Rooming House</strong></p>
<p>Cooper Street during the 1920s experienced transition brought on indirectly by construction of the Delaware River Bridge. Anticipating an economic boom for Camden, boosters and real estate interests sought to redevelop Cooper Street as a commercial corridor, akin to New York’s Fifth Avenue. Many nineteenth-century rowhouses underwent conversions into offices or apartments, while others slipped into a period as rental properties. This was the case of 327 Cooper Street, which for more than two decades provided financial support for a rooming house operator, Lillian Hertlein (often Anglicized as Hertline).</p>
<p>Hertlein, a single woman in her late 30s, had been living across the street in an apartment at 408 Cooper Street when she saw the opportunity to rent the former Patterson home. She paid $85 a month rent, placed ads in the newspapers, and by 1930 had filled the house with lodgers and one person who also paid for meals in addition to a room. The residents recorded in the 1930 Census reflected an array of working-class employment in Camden: factory workers, construction contractors, and a store manager. Two were employed at the enormous RCA-Victor complex at the foot of Cooper Street, one as an assembler of “talking machines” and the other as an electrician for radios. The mix was similar by 1940, although her roomers then included a family of three, including a seven-month-old infant. By 1940, Hertlein owned the home.</p>
<p>At some point in the 1940s, a man who came to live in Hertlein’s rooming house also became her husband. John F. Britt was a veteran of the First World War who had served with the 110<sup>th</sup> Machine Gun Battalion in France, earning a Purple Heart medal. When he filled out his draft registration card for World War II in 1943, he listed 327 Cooper Street as his address and Hertlein as a friend who would serve as his emergency contact.</p>
<p>Britt and Hertlein were married by 1947, when the Camden <em>Courier-Post</em> noted that “Mr. and Mrs. John F. Britt, of 327 Cooper Street…are at their summer home at Beach Haven Crest.” Like the earlier owner of their house, the new couple shared an interest in Republican politics, and both served as members of the local Republican Party committee. They became leaders in the local chapter of the Military Order of the Purple Heart and its auxiliary, and they formed a club to collect and repair toys to give to children in county shelters at Christmastime. John Britt worked as a machinist for the Scott Paper Company, a job he held for twenty-eight years.</p>
<p>The Britts lived on the first floor of 327 Cooper Street and rented out apartments on the second and third floors. They owned the building until at least 1954, and in their later years lived close by near Fourth and Market Streets. Reflecting the changing character of Cooper Street, an ad offering 327 for sale in 1953 described it as an “income property” with eight apartments. For sale again in 1958, it was described as vacant and “available for conversion to offices.”</p>
<p><strong>Puerto Rican Neighborhood</strong></p>
<p>When a new landlord advertised apartments at 327 Cooper Street in 1959, the ad promised renovated, three-room units and called attention to their location in a “Puerto Rican neighborhood.” The tenants with Spanish surnames who lived at this address in the late 1950s and early 1960s represented the Puerto Rican presence in North Camden that had been growing since the Second World War. During the war, the Campbell Soup Company had recruited workers from the island to keep its factory in operation. Housed at first near the plant on the Delaware River waterfront, the new Puerto Rican residents of Camden subsequently found apartments in nearby neighborhoods, started businesses and community institutions, and raised families. The ad for apartments at 327 Cooper Street documents one landlord’s recognition of the likely tenants for a building on Cooper Street in 1959.</p>
<p>The owners of 327 Cooper Street during this period were Saul and Frances Artis, a dentist and his wife who also bought the adjoining rowhouse at the northwest corner of Fourth and Cooper Streets (<a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/80" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">329</a>). Saul Artis was among many other professionals during the 1950s and 1960s who made their living in Camden but chose not to live there – a common pattern in the decades following World War II. Saul, a graduate of Camden High School and the University of Pennsylvania Dental School, had served in the Army Dental Corps in the Panama Canal Zone. Following the war, he established his dental practice in Camden, but after marrying Frances they and their three children lived in Haddon Township.</p>
<p>The Artis's Cooper Street buildings served as Saul’s office as well as rental apartments. While other buildings in North Camden suffered from the neglect of absentee landlords, the Artises participated in the Cooper Street Association, which carried out beautification and maintenance projects. In 1960, they remodeled the house adjacent to 327 Cooper Street, 329, into modernized offices and apartments.</p>
<p>While the Artises invested and remodeled, in the nearby blocks to the north Rutgers University carried out an urban renewal plan that replaced the adjacent rowhouse neighborhood to the north with a campus of new buildings. Appreciating the growth of the university in their backyard, by 1981 the Artises donated their buildings to Rutgers; 327 Cooper Street served as a home for the Rutgers-Camden Department of Social Work, the campus’s first Hispanic Affairs Office, and the Bursar’s office. Since 2018 the building, joined with <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/80" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">329 Cooper Street</a> and named the Artis Building after the donors, has housed the <a href="https://childhood.camden.rutgers.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Rutgers-Camden Department of Childhood Studies</a>.</p>
Associated Individuals
For a list of known occupants of 327 Cooper Street, visit the <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15gz3_mGk3FcNl0TPaOZAq6B1CHvOpqRcY7a99xkp_l4/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Cooper Street Residents Database</a> and scroll down to 327.
Sources
Camden and Philadelphia Newspapers (Newspapers.com and Genealogy Bank).<br /> Camden City Directories (Camden County Historical Society and Ancestry.com).<br /> Camden County Property Records.<br /> New Jersey State Census, 1885-1915, and U.S. Census, 1850-1950 (Ancestry.com).<br /> Prowell, George R. <em>The History of Camden County, New Jersey.</em> Philadelphia: L.J. Richards & Co., 1886.
Research by
Charlene Mires and Lucy Davis
Posted by
Charlene Mires
Send corrections to cmires@camden.rutgers.edu
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
327 Cooper Street
Description
An account of the resource
Contributing structure, Cooper Street Historic District.
1850s
1860s
1870s
1880s
1890s
1900s
1910s
1920s
1930s
1940s
1950s
1960s
1970s
1980s
1990s
2000s
2010s
African Americans
Apartments
Banking
Burlington County
Camden Dispensary
Cape May
Civil War
Cooper Hospital
Dentists
Doctors
Influenza
Journalism
Maple Shade
Merchants
Merchantville
Philadelphia
Politics
Puerto Ricans
Republican Party
Rooming House
Rutgers-Camden
Science
Servants
Veterans
Water Works
Woodbury
World War I
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https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/files/original/5d94eac0fafe294d65709896e0dc8aca.jpg
86eddcec41502d24f44810beba07bfb6
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
305 Cooper Street is individually listed on the National Register of Historic Places, described in its nomination as “one of the most distinguished extent attached townhouses of the American Queen Anne Revival style in the nation, and probably was one of the best of the early urban works of its architect, Wilson Eyre.” Also a contributing structure of the Cooper Street Historic District, the residence was home to a prominent Camden physician, Henry Genet Taylor, and his family for seventy-five years. Restored by Rutgers University, it serves as the <a href="https://writershouse.camden.rutgers.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Writers House</a> of the Department of English.
Architectural style
Queen Anne Revival
Date of construction
1885-86
History
<p>The exuberant townhouse at 305 Cooper Street created a stir in Camden when it appeared in 1885-86. Unlike any previous house in the city, and surpassing most built thereafter, the building reflected a highly individualized embrace of Queen Anne style that discarded the staidness and symmetry of its neighbors on Cooper Street.</p>
<p> “This structure will mark an entirely new departure in Camden architecture, being of an entirely new ornate character,” the <em>Camden County Courier </em>forecast as construction began in June 1885. At least some of the locals were not pleased. The new residence was “the subject of considerable criticism from architects and others,” the <em>Morning Post</em> noted as the house neared completion the following January. The spectrum of opinion hinted in the local press ranged from a tempered mention of the “unique residence on Cooper Street [that] attracts so much attention” (<em>Morning Post, </em>January 16, 1886) to a more barbed referenced to the “costly and peculiarly constructed residence" (<em>Daily Courier,</em> November 4, 1886).</p>
<p>The Philadelphia architect who designed the home, <a href="https://www.philadelphiabuildings.org/pab/app/ar_display.cfm/25852" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Wilson Eyre</a>, was then early in his career but on his way to becoming one of the most sought-after residential architects on the East Coast. Known for individuality, creativity, and attention to detail, his work included mansions for prominent people in the Main Line suburbs of Philadelphia, and he later designed the fountain for Logan Square on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. </p>
<p><strong>The Path to Cooper Street</strong></p>
<p>Henry Genet Taylor, 50 years old when he moved his family into the new house on Cooper Street, came from a family with deep ties in the medical community of Philadelphia and Camden. His father, Dr. Othniel Taylor, had gained prominence in Philadelphia for his role in combatting the cholera epidemic of 1832; moving to Camden in 1844, when Henry Genet and his two brothers were boys, the elder Dr. Taylor was among the organizers of the Camden County and city medical societies. Henry Genet Taylor’s mother, Evelina, descended from English Quaker settlers of West Jersey and reflected family heritage in the naming of her sons. Her lineage included an indirect line to Edmond-Charles Genet, also known as “Citizen” Genet, the first ambassador from France to the United States during the 1790s. Thus Henry was known throughout his life as “Genet,” his given middle name. An older, named Othniel for his father, had the middle name Gazzam from his mother’s side of the family. A younger son had an unusual first name, Marmaduke, and his mother’s maiden name, Burroughs, in the middle.</p>
<p>Henry Genet Taylor remained in his boyhood home in the 300 block of Market Street as he largely followed his father’s path to the University of Pennsylvania medical school and leadership positions with the medical societies and <a href="https://stpaulschurchcamden.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. Paul’s Protestant Episcopal Church</a> across the street from their house. His life took a more dramatic turn, however, with the outbreak of the Civil War. Newly graduated from medical school and appointed assistant surgeon for the <a href="http://8thnj.org/history" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Eighth Regiment of New Jersey Volunteers</a>, he deployed deep into Virginia to treat the wounded and recover the dead. In four vivid letters published in the <em>West Jersey Press </em>during 1862, he recounted his experiences, including the <a href="https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/williamsburg-the-battle-of/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Battle of Williamsburg</a> and an encounter with General Stonewall Jackson while on a pass behind Confederate lines to retrieve wounded Union soldiers. Taylor continued his service later in the war with the Third Army Corps, which placed him at the Battle of Gettysburg. He mustered out of the Army in 1864, but military service remained a fixture of his life through the National Guard and medical examinations for the Board of Pensions.</p>
<p>After the Civil War, while launching his private practice, Henry Genet Taylor joined with his father, brother Othniel, and other prominent Camden residents to establish the Camden Dispensary, which became another lifelong position of service. Founded in 1867 with funds left over from bounties raised to hire substitute soldiers for the Union Army, the dispensary provided medical care to indigent patients. The dispensary operated in a former fire house on Third Street south of Market with the younger Othniel Taylor, a pharmacist, in charge of day-to-day operations.</p>
<p>Only after the death of both of his parents (his father in 1870 and his mother in 1878) did Henry Genet Taylor take steps to establish his own household and family. In 1879 when he was 42 years old, he married Helen Cooper, who was 10 years younger. Their union set a course toward the home later built at 305 Cooper Street because the new Mrs. Taylor was a descendant of Camden’s founding family, which had extensive land holdings north of that thoroughfare. She had grown up amid an extended family of aunts and uncles in the “Cooper Mansion” between Second and Front Streets, the later site of Johnson Park. The Cooper heirs sold most of their property for development from the 1840s through the 1870s. But in 1885 the 305 Cooper Street double lot—the only undeveloped parcel remaining on the block—came back into the family through a mortgage foreclosure and sheriff’s sale. Helen Cooper Taylor’s aunt, Elizabeth, gained title to the land.</p>
<p>How and why the Taylors commissioned Wilson Eyre to design their new home is unknown. But Cooper Street in the early 1880s was becoming a setting for homes grander than the three-story brick rowhouses built a generation before. Enormous mansions anchored the area around Sixth and Cooper, and houses for the length of the thoroughfare gained new front yard space in the early 1880s when the City Council agreed to move the curbs of Cooper Street toward the center by twelve feet on each side. The more pastoral setting prompted a wave of architect-designed houses, with 305 Cooper Street among the trend setters.</p>
<p><strong>Physician’s Home and Office</strong></p>
<p>Among its many other unusual qualities, the house at 305 Cooper Street was purpose-built to serve as both a home and office. Such a dual use was common among physicians, were becoming plentiful on Cooper Street during the 1880s in anticipation of the opening of nearby <a href="https://www.cooperhealth.org/about-us/our-history" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Cooper Hospital</a>. But this house was designed from the start to serve both purposes, not adapted. The front entrance enabled visitors to proceed in either of two directions, into the office or the family quarters. A separate unusual front entrance descended from ground level to enable deliveries and servants to reach the back of the house through a passageway, out of sight of both patients and family.</p>
<p>The Taylors—a family that had grown to include two young sons—settled into the new house at the end of the summer of 1886, after their customary annual sojourn in Cape May. The next year, Taylor was among the physicians appointed to a staff position with the newly opened Cooper Hospital, which became another of his lifelong affiliations. The family’s prosperity was tempered by loss, however. Shortly before the move to Cooper Street, Genet’s older brother Othniel, the mainstay of the Camden Dispensary, died from heart disease at the age of 52. Then, less than a year after the move, an infant daughter born to Helen and Genet died at four months of causes that were not publicly disclosed. In the custom of the time, the funeral for the child, Helen Elizabeth Taylor, was held at home. More funerals followed in 1890 for Genet’s younger brother Marmaduke, a lawyer, who died from acute peritonitis at age 54, and seven months later for Marmaduke’s widow Agnes, who had cancer. These deaths added to the Taylor household their minor niece, Annie.</p>
<p>Despite such sad beginnings, the Taylors and their descendants remained at 305 Cooper Street for a remarkable seventy-five years, longer than most owners in the neighborhood. The Taylors raised two sons to adulthood, Henry G. Taylor Jr., who was known as Harry, and Richard Cooper Taylor. Domestic servants were also a constant presence, typically Irish or German immigrants who lived in rooms on the third floor.</p>
<p>During summers the Taylors, like many other wealthy families in Camden, left the city for extended weeks or months in resort areas. The Taylors customarily spent their summers at Cape May, but during the 1890s extended their travels to more distant resorts. In this era of railroad tourism by those who could afford it, the Taylors at first sought out the health benefits of areas with mineral springs. Both Genet and Helen endured chronic health challenges, for his part rheumatism and gout, and for her the aftereffects of surviving typhoid fever. Their summer journeys took them to White Sulphur Springs and Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, and Hot Springs, Virginia. While not abandoning Cape May, over the next decade, they widened their travels into a circuit that also included resorts in Lake Placid, New York, and St. Catherines in Ontario, Canada. The benefits were noticeable to Dr. Taylor’s neighbors in Camden, for example prompting the <em>Morning Post</em> to note in 1895, “Dr. H. Genet Taylor is home again after two months of recreation looking well, and to quote the genial doctor, feeling chipper and young again.”</p>
<p>Henry Genet Taylor headed the household at 305 Cooper Street until he died in 1916 from “ailments incident to old age,” including recent bouts with pneumonia and influenza. At 79, his lifespan had far exceeded his brothers, and the accolades that followed his death pointed to his lifelong devotion to health care, including his service during the Civil War. Cooper Hospital installed a memorial tablet in the main corridor. The Cooper Street house passed to his widow, Helen, who lived until 1936, and then to their sons.</p>
<p>A new generation of Taylors at 305 Cooper Street began in the 1920s, after Henry Genet Taylor Jr. married Maude Denney, the daughter of a local banker. Their two children carried on the names that had become common: another Henry Genet Taylor (III), born in 1925, and another Helen Cooper Taylor (named for her grandmother but known as “Tottie,” born in 1927). The younger Helen Cooper Taylor carried on the family tradition in medicine by enlisting in the <a href="https://researchguides.library.wisc.edu/c.php?g=860714&p=6167910" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">United States Cadet Nurse Corps</a> during the Second World War, when she was 17 years old.</p>
<p><strong>Continuity and Change</strong></p>
<p>Throughout the continuity of the Taylors’ ownership, North Camden was changing around them. Construction of the Delaware River Bridge (later renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge), completed in 1926, prompted civic boosters in Camden to envision Cooper Street as a commercial thoroughfare. Real estate interests fueled speculative buying, selling, and converting of former residences into offices and apartment buildings. The Taylors eventually joined this trend, in part. While they remained in the home, after Helen Cooper Taylor’s death in 1936 her son Henry Genet Jr. converted the upper floors into apartments of one to two rooms with tile baths, showers, and Pullman kitchens. By the time of the 1940 Census, the occupants included not only the Taylor nuclear family but also tenants who represented a spectrum of working life in Camden: Arthur Beckman, age 21, a draftsman at the New York Shipbuilding Co.; Mary Lord, 23, a social worker for the YWCA who had been born in Hawaii; Margaret Miller, 30, a public school teacher, and her roommate, Jeanette Bloombaum, 40, a bookkeeper for the Works Progress Administration; Mildred Patton, 23, a restaurant dietician, and her husband Paul, 22, a piler for a transportation company; and Beatrice Watson, 43, a saleswoman in a department store. For about 10 years between 1940 and 1950, the tenants included Agnes Draper, a longtime teacher who had been the first principal of Camden High School.</p>
<p>The neighborhood around Third and Cooper Streets became considerably more dense with apartment dwellers, including young children who were products of the baby boom that followed the Second World War. They attended the Cooper School on Third Street north of Linden, which placed them at risk from traffic to and from the factories on Camden’s waterfront. In 1952 one of the Taylors’ tenants, Jennie Seavers, mobilized the Cooper School PTA to call attention to the danger. Seavers and other women from the PTA joined hands to form human chains across the intersections of Third Street with Cooper and Linden Streets to block drivers for six minutes while their children passed and to demand that the city install traffic signals. Two months later, without acknowledging the role of the protest, the city complied.</p>
<p><strong>Historic Preservation</strong></p>
<p>By the time Henry Genet Taylor Jr. died in 1961, his son had moved to Florida and his daughter had married and lived in the suburbs. North of Cooper Street, rowhouses built during the 1860s and 1870s had deteriorated from intense use and neglect by absentee landlords, and redlining imposed in the 1930s discouraged investment. Rutgers University had announced a plan to demolish houses between Cooper Street and the Benjamin Franklin Bridge to create an expanded campus through urban renewal. Like other longtime residences in the area, 305 Cooper Street was offered for sale as an apartment house, not a home. “Close to Rutgers College,” said the advertisement. “Attractive stone building in excellent condition, six apartments plus entire first floor which can be made into three additional apartments. Never a vacancy. A good investment. Asking $35,000.”</p>
<p>By the late 1960s, 305 Cooper Street and other nineteenth-century buildings in Camden found a protector in Edward J. Teitelman, a psychiatrist by profession with a keen appreciation for historic architecture. He purchased 305 Cooper Street, where he lived with his wife, Mildred, and two sons; <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/78" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">303 Cooper Street</a> next door, where he opened a mental health clinic; and other properties on Cooper and Lawrence Streets. As a member of the <a href="https://newtonmeetingcamden.org/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Newton Friends Meeting</a> on Cooper Street between Seventh and Eighth, in 1966 he argued for its protection from a state highway project then threatening the building. “If Camden is ever going to revive,” he said, “these places ought to be here. There should be some evidence of what was.”</p>
<p>Teitelman, who later became chairman of the Camden Historical Review Committee, turned scholarly attention on his home at 305 Cooper Street. With cooperation from the Taylor family, he documented the details of the structure and advocated for its significance in American architectural history. In 1970, while serving as preservation officer for Camden County, he successfully nominated his house for listing on the <a href="https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/AssetDetail/c2c6844d-0dac-420b-a0d7-c516e8c924e2" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">National Register for Historic Places</a>. It was, he stated, “one of the most distinguished extent attached townhouses of the American Queen Anne Revival style in the nation, and probably was one of the best of the early urban works of its architect, Wilson Eyre.” In 1980 Teitelman published a comprehensive article about the house in <em>Winterthur Portfolio</em>, a prestigious journal of decorative arts and material culture, and in 1983 it was documented for the <a href="https://www.loc.gov/item/nj0011/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Historic American Buildings Survey</a>. These acknowledgements of the significance of 305 Cooper Street set a precedent for designation of the Cooper Street Historic District, approved for the National Register in 1989. Teitelman’s advocacy for Cooper Street buildings extended into the late 1980s, when he opposed demolishing houses in the historic district to create a site for a federal courthouse annex but lost the fight. In 1999, he argued against running the New Jersey Transit <a href="https://www.nycsubway.org/wiki/New_Jersey_Transit_RiverLine" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Riverline</a> through the historic district.</p>
<p>By the late 1980s and early 1990s, 305 Cooper Street was among properties owned by Teitelman that appeared in legal notices related to back taxes. Finally, in 2001 a trustee for Edward and Mildred Teitelman sold 305 Cooper Street as well as the house next door (<a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/78" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">303</a>) to Rutgers University. The house built for Henry Genet and Helen Taylor sat in deteriorating condition for a decade, until Rutgers approved $7 million to rehabilitate it and a house across the street (312) for use by the university. The result at 305 Cooper Street, a grandly restored <a href="https://writershouse.camden.rutgers.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Writers House</a> for the Department of English, in 2016 received a <a href="https://smparchitects.com/ribbon-cutting-at-rutgers-writers-house/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Grand Jury Award from the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia</a>.</p>
Associated architects/builders
<a href="https://www.philadelphiabuildings.org/pab/app/ar_display.cfm/25852" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Wilson Eyre</a>, architect.<br />Restoration by <a href="https://smparchitects.com/ribbon-cutting-at-rutgers-writers-house/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">SMP Architects</a>.
Sources
<p>Camden and Philadelphia Newspapers (Newspapers.com and Genealogy Bank).<br /> Camden City Directories (Camden County Historical Society and Ancestry.com).<br /> Camden County Property Records.<br /> 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 /> Teitelman, Edward. “Wilson Eyre in Camden: The Henry Genet Taylor House and Office.” <em>Winterthur Portfolio,</em> Vol 15, No 3 (Autumn 1980): 229-55.</p>
Research by
Charlene Mires, Lucy Davis, and Mikaela Maria
Posted by
Charlene Mires
Send corrections to cmires@camden.rutgers.edu
Associated Individuals
For a list of known occupants of 305 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 305.
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
305 Cooper Street
Description
An account of the resource
Structure on the National Register of Historic Places, contributing structure of the Cooper Street Historic District.
1880s
1890s
1900s
1910s
1920s
1930s
1940s
1950s
1960s
1970s
1980s
1990s
200s
2010s
300 Block
305 Cooper Street
Activism
Apartments
Camden Dispensary
Children
Civil War
Cooper Family
Death
Doctors
Gout
Heart Disease
Historic Preservation
Immigrants
Nurses
Peritonitis
Philadelphia
Queen Anne
Renovations
Restoration
Rheumatism
Rutgers-Camden
Servants
Teachers
Tourism
Typhoid Fever