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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
John Hanmore and his wife, Eleanor, together with two adult daughters and two grandchildren, were among the first residents of new Cooper Street row houses built between Front Street and Delaware Avenue in 1883. They moved to 65 Cooper Street in Camden from a middle-class, managerial neighborhood of Philadelphia, demonstrating the appeal of Camden as a commuter suburb for the larger city across the Delaware River.
The Hanmores' new home was arguably the most desirable of the newly built, three-story homes, standing on the corner of Front and Cooper immediately west of the open square of the Cooper family mansion (later Johnson Park). The Hanmores filled their new home with walnut, oak, and mahogany furniture, installed window boxes for flowers, and added bay windows to the side of their row house that faced the square. One of the adult daughters, Elizabeth Hanmore, offered art lessons for schoolgirls. For John Hanmore, commuting from Camden to his work as a Philadelphia manufacturer of boiler and pipe coverings was likely easier and shorter than before—across the ferry to his business location on Delaware Avenue instead of a streetcar ride of more than 20 blocks from his earlier home at 2323 Green Street in Philadelphia.
The family’s presence on Cooper Street proved to be a short one, however, because of John Hanmore’s sudden and unexpected death from a heart attack in 1885. The Camden County Courier described his last moments with dramatic flair: "The deceased had been out riding with his daughter on the evening of his death, and returned about eight o'clock, sat down to the supper table with the rest of his family in apparently good spirits. He was just in the act of handing a cup to his little [grand]daughter when suddenly he fell from his chair to the floor. The members of the family came to his assistance, and raised him up, but life was extinct. Death was caused by paralysis of the heart, induced by consumption."
The family remained at 65 Cooper Street for three years longer, but thereafter the property served as a boarding house until its demolition to allow for the 1913 construction of a new office building headquarters for the Victor Talking Machine Company.
Time period on Cooper Street
c. 1883-1885
Location(s) - Cooper Street
65 Cooper Street
Location(s) - Other
2323 Green Street, Philadelphia (previous address)
7 S. Delaware Avenue (business address)
Occupation
Manufacturer of felt coverings for pipes and boilers
Birth Date
c. 1825
Birthplace
Newburgh, New York
Death Date
April 4, 1885
Associated Individuals
Eleanor Hanmore (wife)
Elizabeth Hanmore (daughter)
Mary Gerard (daughter)
May / Marie Gerard (granddaughter)
Roy Gerard (grandson)
Sources
Camden and Philadelphia City Directories (Ancestry.com)
New Jersey and U.S. Censuses (Ancestry.com)
Death of John Hanmore reported in Camden County Courier, August 7, 1885; legal notice for construction of bay windows published in Camden Courier-Post, March 31, 1885; art lessons advertised in Courier-Post on various dates in 1884 and 1885; public sale of household contents advertised in Courier-Post, June 6, 1888.
Research by
Charlene Mires
Posted by
Charlene Mires
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Hanmore, John
Description
An account of the resource
John Hanmore, a Philadelphia manufacturer, moved his family to a new home on Cooper Street during the 1880s. His death changed the family's fortunes.
00 Block
1880s
65 Cooper Street
Adult
Death
Interiors
Male
Manufacturers
Philadelphia
Renovations
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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.
Significance
421 Cooper Street is a contributing structure of the Cooper Street Historic District, which is listed on the New Jersey and National Registers of Historic Places. One of the earliest houses to be built on the north side of Cooper Street, the house is distinctive in representing financial strategies of widows during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The house also reflects the historic district's statement of significance that Cooper Street demonstrates "change from residential and professional to commercial." The 421 Cooper Street building began as a family home then turned to professional and commercial uses in the twentieth century. The Mission Revival renovation, likely completed within the district's stated period of significance (1810-1937), invokes Spanish influences and represents the home's adapted use as an office building. The building also has a notable history associated with women's entrepreneurship on Cooper Street, the experiences of childhood and youth, and health services (for sight and hearing). A graduate of Rutgers Law School had an office at this address for many years, and during a period in the 1970s Rutgers students lived in dormitory-style space upstairs. Rutgers acquired the building in 1999.
Architectural style
Originally a Greek Revival row house, 421 Cooper Street has been embellished by Mission Revival details added during the twentieth century renovation of the building for business uses.
Date of construction
c. 1848, remodeled c. 1926
History
<p>The adjoining rowhouses at 421 and <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/40" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">419</a> Cooper Street were among the first to be built on the north side of Cooper Street as Cooper family descendants began to divide and sell their inherited property during the 1840s and 1850s. A broker and volunteer firefighter living in Philadelphia, Joseph R. Paulson, and his wife Mildred K. Paulson bought these lots in 1847. At least one house existed on the property by the end of 1848, when Joseph Paulson, at the age of 36, drew up an agreement that revealed expectations of an early death: he placed the properties in trust with his mother-in-law, Hester Keen, with instructions that she collect rents to support his wife and children, a son also named Joseph (then 13 years old) and daughter Emily (then age 5).</p>
<p>A death notice for Joseph R. Paulson appeared in the <em>Philadelphia Inquirer</em> on November 29, 1849. The family invited relatives, friends, and members of the Humane Engine Company in Philadelphia to his funeral “from his late residence, Cooper Street, near Fifth, Camden, N.J.” They proceeded from there back to Philadelphia on the Arch Street ferry for his burial at Monument Cemetery. His cause of death was not made public. The property on Cooper Street, as he intended, remained a source of rental income and periodically a home for his descendants for the next 75 years.<strong> <br /><br />A Soldier's Family during the Civil War</strong><br /><br />From 1863 (perhaps earlier) until at least 1869, 421 Cooper Street was the rented home of the Harbert family: Samuel C. Harbert, a dealer in agricultural implements in Philadelphia; his wife, Georgianna; and daughters Mary Virginia and Ella. During the first two years of the Civil War, Harbert served as regimental quartermaster in the New Jersey Fourth Infantry Regiment. The <a href="https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/search-battle-units-detail.htm?battleUnitCode=UNJ0004RI01" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">New Jersey Fourth</a> participated in the defense of Washington until March 1862 and then advanced into Virginia and saw action in battles that included Yorktown, Bull Run, and Fredericksburg. Another Camden soldier, 17-year-old Thomas James Howell, demonstrated affection for Harbert's daughter Mary in <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/This_Will_Make_a_Man_of_Me/LyJsDAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">letters he wrote home</a> before being killed at the Battle of Gaines Mill on June 27, 1862.<br /><br /> Harbert mustered out of the New Jersey Fourth in January 1863 and thereafter served as an officer in the U.S. Volunteers Paymaster's Department Infantry Regiment until November 1865, reaching the rank of major. He also served on the Camden City Council from 1869 to 1871, when the family relocated to Philadelphia, his place of business. Samuel (1818-1888), Georgianna (1821-92), and the daughters are buried in Woodlands Cemetery in Philadelphia.</p>
<p><strong>Family Legacy</strong></p>
<p>As the original owner, Joseph Paulson, intended, the Cooper Street property supported his wife during her lifetime and upon her death conveyed to their two children. The siblings, adults by the time of their mother’s death in 1875, then divided ownership of the houses on their inherited land. Joseph Paulson, bearing the same name as his father, became the owner of 421 Cooper Street and a smaller house at the back of the property facing Lawrence Street. The homes continued to be rented to tenants.<br /><br /><strong>Hazards of Youth in the 1880s</strong><br /><br />From around 1883 until 1892, the home at 421 Cooper Street was rented by the Kean family (sometimes spelled Keen, but apparently not related to the property owners). William C. Kean, a clerk for the Pennsylvania Railroad, and his wife Sarah, headed a family with two daughters and five sons living at home during this period. Sarah Kean's brother, Robert W. Downing, served as Comptroller for the Pennsylvania Railroad, which by 1888 also employed one of the Kean sons, then 17-year-old Charles A., as a clerk.<br /> <br />Camden newspapers recorded some of the experiences of the Kean sons, illustrating some of the hazards of youth the late nineteenth century. In 1884, 18-year-old Edmund suffered a severe contusion of his foot during a rough ride on a ferry boat in fog. In 1885, he made the news again for impertinence to the pastor of Trinity Baptist Church, which expelled him. In 1888, 15-year-old Harry and 13-year-old Joseph (known as Josie) were involved in a tree-cutting accident at their grandparents' farm near Woodbury, with Josie suffering axe cuts to his ankle. ("The shoe saved the foot from being entirely cut off, " the Camden Morning Post reported.) One of the boys, Robert (known as Bertie) did not live to adulthood. He died in the 421 Cooper Street home in July 1890 at the age of 13 from causes not publicly reported. The Camden Morning Post described him as "a bright and promising lad and his affection nature made him a favorite with his companions." As customary, his funeral service also took place at home.<br /><br />In 1893, the Camden city directory announced the Kean sons as "removed to Philadelphia," and their parents were also across the river by the time of the 1900 Census (at 527 Broad Street, an area favored by transportation magnates). One of the Kean sons, William Jr., became a real estate developer of homes in the Germantown section of Northwest Philadelphia.<br /><br /><strong>Security for a Widow<br /><br /></strong>The Paulson family returned to 421 Cooper Street by 1897, opening a new period when the house again served as a source of income for a widow with young children. <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/41" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Mary A. Maxwell</a> was 27 years old when she married a widower 30 years her senior, Joseph R. Paulson—the son of first owner of 421 Cooper Street. Joseph lived in Philadelphia, listed in public records variously as an optician, cutlery maker, and jewelry merchant.<br /> <br />With Joseph, Mary had two children and together they moved back to Camden and the 421 Cooper Street home. By the 1900 Census, the household consisted of Joseph, age 64; Mary, age 34; their sons Joseph Jr., age 6, and Charles, age 5, and a housekeeper, 55-year-old Clara Brewer. By 1905, Brewer's place had been taken by 21-year-old Rachel Ball, an African American who like many others in the early twentieth century had migrated north from Virginia. The family also added a daughter, Ruth, born 1902. The Paulsons lived at 421 Cooper Street for at least a decade and then, by 1910, made another move to the more fashionable suburb of Haddonfield. Still, they retained ownership of 421 Cooper Street.<br /><br />In 1911, when Joseph died, the family's former home became a source of financial security for Mary and her children. Mary rented out 421 Cooper Street to other families while living next door at <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/40" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">419 Cooper Street</a>, the other half of the Paulson family property that had passed to Joseph’s sister, Emily. The house at 421 for almost a decade became the rented home for another extended family headed by a widow, Clara Starn, until that family moved in 1920 to Merchantville. It remained a source of income for Mary Paulson and her family until 1925; its change of ownership that year warranted a story in the Camden Courier-Post to note that the property had been in the hands of only two families--the Paulsons and the Coopers--since Camden's earliest history. <br /><br /><strong>1920s Disruption, Opportunity, and Renovation<br /><br /></strong>During the 1920s, a series of disruptions and transitions led Camden boosters to view Cooper Street as a potential business corridor. Construction of the Delaware River Bridge (later renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge), completed in 1926, caused demolition of nineteenth-century homes in nearby blocks. Near the Delaware waterfront, the Victor Talking Machine Company demolished a block of Cooper Street homes to expand its factories. Commercial-scale buildings such as the Wilson Building, Camden's first skyscraper (620 Cooper, completed 1925), and the Plaza Hotel (500 Cooper, completed 1927), began to appear. Controversially for longtime residents, Cooper Street was widened in anticipation of increasing automobile traffic.<br /><br />In the midst of these transitions, 421 Cooper Street changed from a family home to an office building. It was one of a series of renovation projects managed by Julia M. Carey, a 26-year-old daughter of Irish immigrants who had worked as a stenographer and notary before finding new opportunity in real estate sales during the 1920s. On behalf of the Bell-Oliver Corporation, she sold three Cooper Street houses--321, 421, and 521--to investors and stayed on to manage and remodel them. The renovations by the "energetic realty lady" were reported in the Camden Courier-Post of September 11, 1926: at 421 Cooper Street, Carey turned the home into an office building, and leased an office there for herself. (Meanwhile, she turned 321 Cooper Street into an eight-unit apartment house and 521 into offices for lawyers.)<br /><br />It appears likely that Carey was responsible for the Mission Revival-style ornament that obscured the original facade of 421 Cooper Street. This Spanish-influenced style, which originated on the West Coast, had been rare in Camden but made two other appearances on Cooper Street during the 1920s: in a new commercial building at 525 Cooper and in the Chalcar Apartments building in the 200 block. The renovation of 421 Cooper Street, with enlarged windows and structural changes necessary to install the new Mission Revival ornament, is visible in an aerial photograph of the vicinity of the Delaware River Bridge approach taken c. 1926. The completed renovation can also be seen in the 1947 advertisement published at the top of this page.<br /><br />Julia M. Carey lived at least briefly, c. 1929-1931, in one of the apartments she created at 321 Cooper Street. She remained involved with the neighborhood until at least 1940, when the Camden city directory listed her as having a real estate office at 521 Cooper.<br /><br /><strong>Helen's Beauty Shop</strong><br /><br />After the renovation of 421 Cooper, the building had a variety of office tenants, including an insurance agency and promoters of the new Arlington Mausoleum in Pennsauken. But the business tenant who became most well-known to Camden during the 1930s and 1940s arrived in 1933, when <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/39" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Helen Waters</a> opened a beauty shop on the second floor. She vigorously promoted her business with display advertising and flattering promotional articles in the Camden newspapers, encouraging the women of Camden to come to her for the latest in hairstyling and cosmetics.<br /><br />By the time Helen opened her shop at 421 Cooper, she had been widowed and her work as a beautician supported two daughters. The 1930 Census found her at age 30 living at the Harding Villa Apartments on Federal Street while her daughters Patricia and Dorothy, then aged 9 and 10, lived with her parents Daniel and Lida Chester elsewhere in Camden. Helen, who had an eighth-grade education, worked as a beautician for Binder's Beauty Shop in Philadelphia before opening her own establishment at 421 Cooper Street, where she and her daughters also came to live. In 1938, Waters added cosmetics and facials to her business. Her daughters both graduated from high school, including at least one year at Mount St. Mary's Academy run by the Sisters of Mercy in Plainfield, New Jersey. In 1940, living with their mother at 421 Cooper, Dorothy worked as a typist and Patricia as a telephone operator. Patricia actively promoted a women's basketball league in Camden for former high school players.<br /><br />Other businesses and organizations, including the Camden County Real Estate Board and the Camden County Democratic Party, had offices in 421 Cooper while Helen operated the shop and lived upstairs. In 1945, after both of her daughters had married, Helen bought the building but retained ownership only until 1947. When she put 421 Cooper Street up for sale, it offered an office suite on the first floor, additional office space on the second floor, "plus three nicely planned apartments with modern tile baths." Helen continued to operate her beauty salon in the building until at least 1950, but after its sale she moved behind it to 426 Lawrence Street.<br /><br /><strong>Residential, Professional, Commercial</strong><br /><br />During the second half of the twentieth century, 421 Cooper Street served all elements of the transitions noted in the justification for naming Cooper Street a historic district on the New Jersey and National Registers of Historic Places in 1989. Its next owner, Ernest F. Birbeck, was an optician who moved his practice from the Plaza Hotel, then nearby at Fifth and Cooper Street, into 421 Cooper in 1950. He commuted from Pennsauken until he retired in 1967. His business tenants included a hearing aid center and a eyewear shop whose co-owner, B. Morozin, became the next owner of 421 Cooper. Under Morozin's ownership in the early 1970s, Rutgers-Camden students lived upstairs in space advertised as "dorm style" with a kitchen, dining room and air conditioning, for up to 10 people.<br /> <br />The Rutgers connection to 421 Cooper Street continued when another office tenant, lawyer Joseph Liebman, purchased the building in 1977. Liebman, a graduate of Rutgers Law School in Camden, lived in Philadelphia but according to information published in the Courier-Post had an office in 421 Cooper Street for fifty-five years. After one more change of ownership to another Philadelphia attorney/investor, Raymond Quaglia, Rutgers acquired the building in 1999.<br /><br /><strong>On February 27, 2020, the Camden Historic Preservation Commission voted unanimously to dismiss with prejudice an application by Rutgers to demolish 421 Cooper Street. It further recommended reconstruction of the building, including restoring the facade.<br /><br />On March 6, 2020, a request from Rutgers for emergency demolition of 421 Cooper Street was declined by the Historic Preservation Office of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection on the basis that the building's condition resulted from long-term deterioration.<br /><br />On June 11, 2020, the Camden City Planning Board voted unanimously to deny Rutgers' request to demolish 421 Cooper Street.</strong><br /><span style="font-size:13px;color:#000000;font-weight:normal;text-decoration:none;font-family:Verdana;font-style:normal;"></span></p>
Illustrations
1. 421 Cooper Street in 2019. (Photograph by Jacob Lechner)<br /> 2. 421 Cooper Street, indicated by arrow, early twentieth century prior to 1913. (Camden County Historical Society)<br /> 3. 421 Cooper Street, circled, c. 1926, showing renovation. (<a href="https://digital.librarycompany.org/islandora/object/digitool%3A61821?solr_nav%5Bid%5D=5ef67e7ccf54ba06b0c8&solr_nav%5Bpage%5D=0&solr_nav%5Boffset%5D=1" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Photograph detail</a>, Library Company of Philadelphia)<br /> 4. Advertisement, Camden Courier-Post, September 20, 1947.
Associated Individuals
All known residents and businesses are listed in the Cooper Street Database: <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15gz3_mGk3FcNl0TPaOZAq6B1CHvOpqRcY7a99xkp_l4/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">click here</a> and scroll to 421.
Sources
<p>Camden and Philadelphia Newspapers (Newspapers.com).<br /> Camden City Directories (Camden County Historical Society and Ancestry.com).<br /> Camden County Property Records.<br /> Cooper Street Historic District, National Register Nomination, U.S. Department of Interior.<br /> Digital Photographs Collection, Library Company of Philadelphia.<br /> New Jersey State Census, 1885, 1895, 1915, and U.S. Census, 1870-1950 (Ancestry.com).<br /> Property Report, 421 Cooper Street, New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection.<br /> Structures Survey, 421 Cooper Street, New Jersey Office of Cultural and Environmental Services.</p>
<p><strong>Note on sources: </strong>The historic structure report for this property dates it as “before 1885.” This research updates and corrects the record.</p>
Research by
Charlene Mires, Kaya Durkee
Posted by
Charlene Mires
Send corrections to cmires@camden.rutgers.edu.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
421 Cooper Street
Description
An account of the resource
Contributing structure, Cooper Street Historic District.
1840s
1850s
1860s
1870s
1880s
1890s
1900s
1910s
1920s
1930s
1940s
1950s
1960s
1970s
1980s
1990s
400 Block
421 Cooper Street
African Americans
Apartments
Attorneys
Beauticians
Bridge Impact
Childhood
Civil War
Cosmetics
Death
Domestic Life
Extended Family
Greek Revival
Haddonfield
Health and Medicine
Injuries
Merchantville
Mission Revival
Opticians
Pennsauken
Philadelphia
Railroad Workers
Real Estate
Renovations
Rutgers-Camden
Servants
Widows
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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.
Significance
419 Cooper Street is a contributing structure of the Cooper Street Historic District, which is listed on the New Jersey and National Registers of Historic Places. The district is defined as representing broad patterns of American history, including the importance of ferry connections between Camden and Philadelphia: "By its geographic location, Cooper Street literally became South Jersey's thoroughfare to downtown Philadelphia. The fortune of Cooper Street, and of Camden as a whole, rose when people and goods moved through them to board ferries to the larger city across the Delaware River." This is amply illustrated by the history of 419 Cooper Street, which through the nineteenth century housed a series of families with livelihoods tied to business in Philadelphia. As an investment property generating income, 419 Cooper Street also represents financial strategies of widows during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The building's twentieth century history reflects the historic district's stated significance as a place of "change from residential and professional to commercial." Rutgers connections to this property extend to the 1960s, when Rutgers students were among apartment tenants in the building. Rutgers purchased the property in 2007.
Architectural style
Originally a Greek Revival rowhouse; new brick facing added after 1985, when the original facade is visible in a photograph taken that year for structures surveys by the New Jersey Office of Cultural and Environmental Services.
Date of construction
c. 1848
Illustrations
1. 419 Cooper Street, photograph taken September 2010.
2. 419 Cooper Street, early twentieth century prior to 1913. (Camden County Historical Society)
History
The adjoining rowhouses at 419 and <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/38" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">421</a> Cooper Street were among the first to be built on the north side of Cooper Street as Cooper family descendants began to divide and sell their inherited property during the 1840s and 1850s. A broker and volunteer firefighter living in Philadelphia, Joseph R. Paulson, and his wife Mildred K. Paulson bought these lots in 1847. At least one house existed on the property by the end of 1848, when Joseph Paulson, at the age of 36, drew up an agreement that revealed expectations of an early death: he placed the properties in trust with his mother-in-law, Hester Keen, with instructions that she collect rents to support his wife and children, a son also named Joseph (then 13 years old) and daughter Emily (then age 5).
<p>A death notice for Joseph R. Paulson appeared in the <em>Philadelphia Inquirer</em> on November 29, 1849. The family invited relatives, friends, and members of the Humane Engine Company in Philadelphia to his funeral “from his late residence, Cooper Street, near Fifth, Camden, N.J.” They proceeded from there back to Philadelphia on the Arch Street ferry for his burial at Monument Cemetery. His cause of death was not made public. The property on Cooper Street, as he intended, remained a source of rental income and periodically a home for his descendants for the next 75 years.</p>
<strong>Philadelphia Commuters</strong><br /><br /> Some of the nineteenth-century tenants of 419 Cooper Street demonstrate the historic importance of Camden, and Cooper Street in particular, as a transportation corridor between South Jersey and Philadelphia. Homes on Cooper Street allowed for a short walk to the Delaware River ferries for commuting to Philadelphia. By 1862, during the Civil War, 419 Cooper Street had become home to Joseph Fearon, a wholesale grocer who had his business at 19 S. Water Street in Philadelphia. In addition to Joseph's wife, Catharine, the Fearon household included five children aged 12 and younger and two Irish-born domestic servants. Another Philadelphia-based food merchant, fruit importer Silas Warner, and his family lived at 419 Cooper for several years during the 1870s (c. 1871-73).<br />
<p><strong>Family Legacy</strong></p>
As the original owner, Joseph Paulson, intended, the Cooper Street property supported his wife during her lifetime and upon her death conveyed to their two children. The siblings, adults by the time of their mother’s death in 1875, then divided ownership of the houses on their inherited land. Joseph Paulson's daughter, Emily, became the owner of 419 Cooper Street and a smaller house at the back of the property facing Lawrence Street. The homes continued to be rented to tenants.<br /> <br /><strong>Camden, Philadelphia, and the World</strong><br /><br />In 1880, Census takers encountered an unusually international family who rented 419 Cooper Street for at least two years (c. 1880-82): The head of household, widowed Matilda Evans, age 54, reported her birthplace as Germany. Her three adult sons and one daughter, all in their twenties, reported having been born in South America and that their father was from New York. The household also included a servant, Jane Laverty, who had been born in Ireland. Some Camden city directories identified the adult children as boarders, suggesting that 419 Cooper may have operated as boarding house during this period.<br /><br /> From c. 1883 to 1897, a Philadelphia manufacturer of silk and wool hats, Robert S. Nickerson, resided at 419 Cooper Street with his wife Elizabeth and adult daughter Jennie Gay while commuting to his business across the river at 63 N. Second Street. The move marked a significant change for Nickerson, whose business had been operating in Philadelphia since 1836. But during the 1880s, Camden was growing rapidly and houses near the Delaware River waterfront offered attractive prices and easy access to the ferries. The sometimes-frantic nature of ferry commuting is suggested by a report in the Camden Morning Post on May 26, 1888, which described Nickerson attempting to leap onto a ferry departing from Philadelphia while clutching an umbrella and bottle of pickles. He ended up in the river, still clutching his possessions when rescued.<br /><br /> The Nickersons, who previously lived in Philadelphia, occupied 419 Cooper longer than most other nineteenth-century occupants, almost 15 years. They typically employed one live-in domestic servant, for at least five years Annie Redgate, a daughter of Irish immigrants living elsewhere in Camden. In 1897, Jennie Gay Nickerson's wedding took place in the home. In a Society of Friends ceremony, she married Richard Albert Wills, a widowed insurance agent. Robert and Elizabeth Nickerson, then in their late 50s, moved with their daughter into Wills' home farther east in Camden, at 752 Wright Avenue, where they formed an extended family with a granddaughter born in 1899 and Wills' two older sons.<br /><br /><strong>Dentistry on Cooper Street</strong><br /><br />When Cooper Hospital opened during the 1880s, medical professionals increasingly lived and practiced in homes on nearby Cooper Street. Among them, for more than thirty years Dr. Elmer E. Bower had his dental practice in the 400 block. Bower, a native of Berks County, established his practice in fast-growing Camden immediately after finishing dental school at the University of Pennsylvania in 1888. He and his wife Katherine raised a family in a series of three homes that also served as Elmer's dental office--419 Cooper Street, where they lived and worked between 1899-1908, was the second of the three (after <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/76" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">405</a> Cooper, 1889-1898, and before moving next door to <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/48" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">417</a>, 1908-c.1920).<br /><br />By the time the Bowers moved into 419 Cooper, their family had grown to three children: a son Chester, age 16, and daughters Helen, 12, and Sarah, 8. In the decade they spent at this address, the Bowers experienced both tragedy and joy. Much of the family's attention turned to the poor health of daughter Helen, whose particular illness is not known from public records. For the benefit of her health they relocated between 1904 and 1906 to more rural Hammonton, then well-known as the location of the Hammonton Sanitarium operated by Dr. James Peebles, a specialist in chronic illnesses. The move was to no avail, however. Helen Adaline Bower died in Hammonton on September 15, 1906, at the age of 20.<br /><br />The next family milestone occurred two years later, when the Bowers' son Chester Bertalette (his mother's maiden name) married and established his home next door to his parents, at 417 Cooper Street. The elder Bowers and their daughter Sarah soon moved there as well, creating an extended two-generation family. Elmer Bower continued his dental practice at the 417 Cooper address until he retired around 1920.<br /><br /><strong>A Widow's Family Home<br /><br /></strong>While 419 Cooper Street housed a series of renters during the nineteenth century, it passed by inheritance to the descendants of Joseph R. Paulson. Thus it offered an available refuge when <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/41" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Mary A. Paulson</a>--the widow of Joseph R. Paulson's son (also named Joseph R.)--established a new home for herself and three children following the death of her husband in 1911. The family had most recently lived in Haddonfield, but before that, from 1897 to 1907, they had resided in another Paulson family property, 421 Cooper Street. When the widowed Mary Paulson returned to Camden in 1912, she generated income for her family by renting out the 421 property while living next door in 419 with her children Joseph Jr., then age 19; Charles, then 17; and daughter Ruth, 9.<br /><br />The Paulsons' extended family at 419 Cooper also included Emily L. Paulson, the sister of Mary's late husband, who had inherited the home as well as the smaller house behind it at 424 Lawrence Street. Born c. 1841, Emily lived much of her adult life with her mother, Mildred, and then her brother. But for at least ten years, while in her 60s c. 1900-1910, Emily had lived as a patient at the Philadelphia Hospital for the Insane. The nature of her mental illness is not known from public records, but at this West Philadelphia institution she would have experienced the "moral treatment" philosophy advocated by the founder of the hospital, Quaker physician <a href="https://www.uphs.upenn.edu/paharc/timeline/1801/tline14.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride</a>. Kirkbride's philosophy advocated humane treatment in beautiful surroundings, and the institution in Philadelphia inspired many other "Kirkbride Plan" hospitals around the country. In this era, causes for admission to the institution could range from grief and anxiety to severe forms of insanity. At the time of Emily's residence, the hospital's roster of patients included wives and daughters of merchants, lawyers, and other people of prominence.<br /><br />At age 70, Emily returned to Camden as a member of Mary Paulson's household, and the Paulsons remained at this address for the next two decades. The two teen-aged sons, both musically inclined, opened a music studio in the home to teach other young men how to play the mandolin or violin. Soon they faced more life-altering choices as the Great War began in Europe and especially when the United States entered the conflict in 1917. By then, the oldest son, Joseph Jr., still claimed 419 Cooper Street as his home address but had landed a job as an orchestra leader for a theater in Juneau, Alaska. He served as a musician in the U.S. Navy, 1918-19. His younger brother Charles served closer to home, in the quartermaster's office of the U.S. Army in Sea Girt, New Jersey, 1917-18. Both returned home to 419 Cooper Street: Charles by 1920, when the household consisted of his mother, age 54, aunt Emily, 77, and 17-year-old sister Ruth, who later became a teacher at Hatch Junior High School. Joseph returned home during the 1920s after a brief wartime marriage and later divorce.<br /><br /> The Paulson family's association with 419 Cooper Street lasted until the 1930s. Transfer of the property from Emily to Mary Paulson for $1 in 1931 suggests that Emily had died, and by 1937 the house was up for sale. In the midst of the Great Depression, the original price of $10,000 plummeted by more than half over three years until the house finally ended up listed for sheriff's sale to satisfy back taxes. Charles Paulson made his living as a salesman and shopkeeper, married, and began his own family in Camden and later Haddonfield; by 1940, Joseph Paulson worked as a musician at Radio City Music Hall in New York. Mary Paulson, meanwhile, went to live with her by-then-married daughter Ruth Soistmann in Merchantville, ending the era of 419 Cooper Street as a single-family home.<br /><br /><strong>Apartments and Offices</strong><br /><br />In 1940, with new owners Richard Gebbie, who owned a radio shop, and his wife Alice, a nurse, 419 Cooper Street began its transition to multi-family housing and commercial uses. While living in the home, the Gebbies rented apartments to at least two other families. By the 1950s they moved to Moorestown but retained ownership of the building until 1960 and rented to a series of office tenants, including a doctor, an attorney, and real estate agents. Brokers Mortgage Service, a mortgage company located in the nearby Wilson Building, next held title to 419 Cooper Street while renting out apartments and offices. Among the renters in the early 1960s, Rutgers student Joan Jarema made news as a finalist for sweetheart of the Kappa Sigma Upsilon fraternity. She later married another Rutgers South Jersey student, Anthony Santerlas.<br /><br />Real estate and legal offices continued to occupy 419 Cooper Street from the 1960s to the 1980s as the building passed from ownership of attorneys William Keown and Philip Daniels, who had their office in the building from 1965 to 1982, to a series of absentee investors. In the mid-1980s, <a href="https://www.congress.gov/member/james-florio/F000215?r=11&q=%7B%22house-committee%22%3A%22Energy+and+Commerce%22%2C%22subject%22%3A%22Finance+and+Financial+Sector%22%7D" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Congressman James J. Florio</a> had an office on the first floor. AKJ Investment, based in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, sold the building to Rutgers University in 2007 for $510,000.
Associated Individuals
For all known occupants of 419 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 Database</a>.
Research by
Charlene Mires and Lucy Davis
Posted by
Charlene Mires
Communicate corrections to cmires@camden.rutgers.edu
Sources
Camden City Directories (Ancestry.com).
Camden County Property Records.
Camden and Philadelphia Newspapers (Newspapers.com).
National Register for Historic Places, Cooper Street Historic District Nomination, U.S. Department of Interior.
New Jersey Office of Cultural and Environmental Services Structures Surveys (1985) and Office of Environmental Protection, Historic Preservation Office, Property Reports (2007).
U.S. Census, 1850-1930; New Jersey State Census, 1885-1915; and U.S. Military Records (Ancestry.com).
Questions / needs for additional research
- Role of real estate agents in property turnover in Camden and flight to suburbs.
- Date for new brick facing on building (see change in property value during last investment owner prior to Rutgers).
- Seek interviews with Rutgers alumni who lived at this address.
- Add Rutgers uses after purchase.
- Occupation 1840s-1860s.
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
419 Cooper Street
Description
An account of the resource
Contributing structure, Cooper Street Historic District.
1840s
1850s
1860s
1870s
1880s
1890s
1900s
1910s
1920s
1930s
1940s
1950s
1960s
1970s
1980s
1990s
2000s
2010s
400 Block
419 Cooper Street
424 Lawrence Street
Aging
Apartments
Attorneys
Congressional Office
Death
Dentists
Extended Family
Germany
Greek Revival
Grocers
Haddonfield
Hammonton
Health and Medicine
Ireland
Manufacturers
Mental Illness
Merchantville
Moorestown
Musicians
New York City
Philadelphia
Real Estate
Renovations
Rutgers-Camden
Servants
Society of Friends
South America
Teachers
Weddings
Widows
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
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
-
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
-
https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/files/original/09cd35ef0f9280cb684e371c56c009e2.jpg
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https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/files/original/a831a01502a6088c87ab18727d45bd01.jpg
3fe2b67ee7bfa6870aa8e9d830ad511f
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Buildings
Description
An account of the resource
Houses and other structures on Cooper Street in Camden, N.J.
Place
Residence, business, or other entity.
Significance
417 Cooper Street is a contributing structure of the Cooper Street Historic District, listed on the New Jersey and National Registers of Historic Places. Together with others in the row 415-21 Cooper Street, 417 represents a significant transition in the evolution of Camden during the 1840s and 1850s as homes were built for the first time on land formerly owned by the Cooper family on the north side of the street. The building is are among the nineteenth-century structures that support the nomination of the Cooper Street Historic District for the National Register: "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." This transition is illustrated by 417 Cooper Street, where residents over time also reflect histories of public health, public safety, the experiences of widows as boarding house operators, and connections between Camden and Philadelphia. Rutgers purchased the building in 2010.
Architectural style
Greek Revival
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 417 and <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/45" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">415</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 417 and 415 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." Starting in 1860, the house at 417 was rented to others, first to a bookkeeper, William Farr, his wife Adelaide, and their three young children. The household also included a domestic servant, Rachael Askins, identified in the 1860 Census as "mulatto."<br /><br />Little is known about the next tenant, a dealer in boots and shoes named James J. Morrison, but in 1868 a public sale of contents of the home provided a glimpse of the Victorian-era ambiance at this address. As advertised in the <em>Philadelphia Inquirer</em>, the sale revealed a home with rosewood and brocatelle drawing-room furniture made in Philadelphia, velvet carpets, a marble-topped center table, and a fireplace with a French-plate mantel and pier mirror. Music filled the home from a seven-octave pianoforte made by the Philadelphia firm Schomacker & Co., which had been founded by a Viennese craftsman. The contents of 417 Cooper Street included dining room and chamber furniture, beds and bedding, china, glassware, and kitchen utensils. The furnishings provide a glimpse of domestic life on Cooper Street in the second half of the nineteenth century.<br /><br /><strong>Philadelphia Connections</strong><br /><br />By 1870 and continuing until at least 1874, 417 Cooper Street became home for the extended family of William Jenks, a produce dealer on the Philadelphia waterfront. In addition to his Irish-born wife, Kate, the household included Kate's sister Mary Cassidy, a music teacher; and her widowed mother, Catharine Cassidy. The household also included Henry Cooper, a bricklayer, who might have been a boarder. Domestic servants--Maggie Harrison in 1870 and Mary Mullene in 1873--worked and lived in the home. Another family with Philadelphia ties followed in the early 1880s: Robert E. Thompson, a Philadelphia insurance agent with his wife, Sarah, their adult son Charles (a clerk), and Sara's sister. They moved to this address from up the street, at <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/52" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">425 Cooper</a>, and stayed at least four years, from 1881 to 1885.<br /><br /><strong>Personal Losses, Property Losses</strong><br /><br />In the late 1880s, 417 Cooper Street became an owner-occupied home when Willard Hinchman, a fish merchant on the Philadelphia waterfront, purchased the house at this address as well as the house next door, 415 Cooper. While the Hinchman family lived in 417 Cooper, 415 continued to be a boarding house operated by a relative who had long lived at the address, Margaret Browning. The Hinchmans had other family connections in Camden as well, especially through Hinchman's wife, M. Ella Hinchman, one of six children of prominent local businessman John Stockham. He had made a fortune during the Civil War by importing Carolina pine from the South and then selling it to the U.S. government. By the 1880s, Stockham had retired to a Maryland farm, but he previously lived at 215 Cooper Street.<br /><br />The Hinchmans' early years at 417 Cooper were years of loss. First, John Stockham died in 1887 at the age of 70, and his funeral took place at the Hinchman home. Just three years later, the Hinchmans' infant son named for his grandfather, John Stockham Hinchman, also died at just eight months of age. His funeral, too, took place at 417 Cooper Street. Shortly thereafter, they rented out 417 Cooper to others; in 1896 both 417 and 415 Cooper Street went to sheriff's sale. The Hinchmans left New Jersey to farm on Stockham family land in Maryland, although they returned by 1905 to a rented home in Haddonfield.<br /><br /><strong>Health</strong> <strong>Professionals</strong><br /><br />At the turn of the twentieth century, 417 Cooper Street was an investment property that belonged to the new owner-occupant of the house next door at 415, <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/46" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Joshua B. Franklin</a>. The owner of a livery stable near the Camden waterfront, Franklin had become well-known as he rented horses and carriages to the city's social and political elites. This may have helped him attract tenants for 417 Cooper. He also improved the properties with wood front porches (added in 1913 but later removed).<br /><br />Cooper Street's evolution into a location for medical offices became evident at 417 Cooper Street with the tenants of the early twentieth century. For more than a decade, between 1908 and 1919, Franklin rented to the extended family of Dr. Elmer Bower, a dentist who previously had both home and office at two other Cooper Street addresses (<a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/76" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">405</a> and <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/40" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">419</a>). When Bower arrived in Camden in the 1880s, he had been fresh out of dental school at the University of Pennsylvania. Now, at 417 Cooper Street, he continued his practice from age 46 until retirement and shared the home with his wife, Catherine; his newly married son, Chester, and Chester's wife, Mary; and an adult daughter, Sarah. Dr. Bower was active in the Camden Republican Club, then at 312 Cooper Street, and his accomplishments as a fisherman occasionally made the Camden papers. When Bower retired in 1919 for health reasons, he moved briefly to another address in Camden and then returned to his birthplace, Berks County, Pennsylvania. <br /><br />The Bower family's successor at 417 Cooper Street also was culminating a long career in health care, particularly public health and the treatment of infectious disease. <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/51" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Dr. Henry Hill Davis</a>, 70 years old when he rented 417 Cooper, lived at this address with his wife, Harriett, for about five years while serving as medical inspector for Camden's public schools. He had been appointed to the position at the turn of the century--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. While continuing in this work, he 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 oubreaks and the influenza epidemic of 1918-19. When he retired from his Camden schools position 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 /><strong>A Widow's Boarding House</strong><br /><br />Emma Jarvis experienced two deep losses in the mid-1920s: the death by suicide of her brother, John Knott, who lived on Point Street, and the death of her husband, Edgar, who operated an auto repair shop in North Camden. Perhaps it was the automotive business connected her with 417 Cooper Street, whose owner next door also sold and serviced automobiles as they gained in popularity during the 1920s. By 1927, perhaps a year or two earlier, Emma Jarvis moved from her earlier home in the 700 block of Lawrence Street to operate a boarding house at 417 Cooper.<br /><br />Unusual documentation of Jarvis's new address appeared in the <em>Camden Courier-Post</em> of January 28, 1929: a <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/49" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">testimonial advertisement</a> featuring her photograph. name, and address, with the headline "Woman Cries Aloud with Joy When Rheumatic Pain Goes." The advertisement purported to describe Jarvis's excruciating pain and the miraculous cure afforded by a powder called Nurito, available nearby at Weiser's Pharmacy, Fifth and Market Streets. This was, however, one of many such advertisements that appeared across the country to tout the Chicago-manufactured product. The ads soon attracted the attention of the Federal Trade Commission, which found the powder to be akin to aspirin and ordered the ads to be discontinued. <br /><br />For her more sustained venture, the boarding house, Jarvis rented 417 Cooper Street for $60 a month from the owner next door, <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/46" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Joshua Franklin</a>. The 1930 U.S. Census found her at this address at age 59 with two of her four adult children (David, 35, an auto repairman, and Marion, 26, a book keeper) and six boarders. The boarders included a cook, a laundry manager, a saleswoman and a salesman, and a newspaper reporter. Many of the home's occupants shared the experience of being children of immigrants to the United States. Jarvis had been born in Pennsylvania to a father who immigrated from Germany (her mother had been born in Delaware). Jarvis's late husband had been born England. Among her boarders in 1930, one had parents born in Germany and another had parents born in Ireland. Two others demonstrated the fluidity of movement within the country; one had been born in New York and another, while born in New Jersey, had a father born in Montana.<br /><br />Jarvis operated the boarding house until at least 1931 (when she was listed in the last Camden city directory published during the 1930s) and likely longer, as advertisements offering furnished rooms or apartments at 417 Cooper Street continued to appear in Camden newspapers until 1938. In the late 1930s, she moved to Haddonfield to live with her daughter, Marion, who was employed there as a book keeper.<br /><br /><strong>Physician's Office, Retirement Home</strong><br /><br />By 1939, 417 Cooper Street had a new owner and transitioned to a common pattern of use for Cooper Street houses during the remaining decades of the twentieth century. The new owner, Dr. Edmund Hessert, lived in Collingswood (and later Rancocas) while maintaining his office on the first floor of the building he had purchased in Camden. He rented out the two floors above as apartments.<br /><br />The building remained in part a family home, however, because the most long-term occupants of the second-floor apartment were Hessert's in-laws, Thomas J. and Anna Murphy, both in their 70s, together with one and sometimes two of their adult sons. Thomas J. Murphy was retired from the Camden police force; his son Thomas P. Murphy had followed him onto the force and also retired in 1943. The other son living at 417 Cooper periodically, John, served in Europe during World War II and then returned to his office job with RCA (in Camden, later in Cherry Hill).<br /><br /> Maintaining a home for the Murphys seems to have been a factor in Hessert's continued ownership of 417 Cooper Street through the 1950s. A year after the death of Anna Murphy in 1958, at the age of 86, the building was advertised "for quick sale." The listing promised the buyer professional offices on the first floor and two apartments, completely modernized, including Venetian blinds and carpeting.<br /><br /><strong>Professional Services and Apartments</strong><br /><br />In the second half of the twentieth century, 417 Cooper Street transitioned to an office building for insurance and legal services, with rental apartments above. <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/43" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Richard C. Hardenbergh</a> operated his insurance agency at this address beginning in 1961, and in 1963 he bought the building. Although living in Haddon Township, he remained active in Camden civic activities, for example collecting registration forms for the Spring Queen competition held in Johnson Park in 1961. His business grew to twelve employees in Camden, with an additional office in Willingboro by 1966. During Hardenbergh's ownership, the tenants in the building included a training school for data processing equipment operators.<br /><br />A lawyer, Barry Weinberg, owned 417 Cooper in the 1970s and 1980s, when office tenants also included an accounting firm. Thereafter the building passed through a sequence of absentee and corporate owners and often appeared in notices for sheriff's sales to satisfy back taxes. In 2002, a Rutgers-Camden graduate, Elizabeth Ashley, bought the building and rehabilitated it into apartments for students while also opening a restaurant in the house next door (215). After one more change of ownership, to a Philadelphia entity Park Properties Unlimited, Rutgers University purchased the building in 2010 for $367,000.
Associated Individuals
For a list of individuals and businesses associated with this address, visit 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 417.
Illustrations
1. 417 Cooper Street in 2019. (Photograph by Jacob Lechner)
2. 400 block of Cooper Street, early twentieth century prior to 1913, with arrow indicating 417. (Camden County Historical Society)
Sources
Camden City Directories (Ancestry.com).<br /> Camden County Property Records.<br /> Camden and Philadelphia Newspapers (Newspapers.com and Geneaology Bank).<br />National Register for Historic Places, Cooper Street Historic District Nomination, U.S. Department of Interior.<br /> New Jersey Office of Cultural and Environmental Services Structures Surveys (1985) and Office of Environmental Protection, Historic Preservation Office, Property Reports (2007).<br /> U.S. Census, 1850-1950; New Jersey State Census, 1885-1915.<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.
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
417 Cooper Street
Description
An account of the resource
Contributing structure, Cooper Street Historic District.
1840s
1850s
1860s
1870s
1880s
1900s
1910s
1920s
1930s
1940s
1950s
1960s
1970s
1980s
1990s
2000s
2010s
400 Block
417 Cooper Street
Accountants
Aging
Apartments
Boarding House
Boarding House Operator
Childhood
Collingswood
Death
Dentists
Doctors
Domestic Life
England
Germany
Haddon Township
Haddonfield
Insurance
Interiors
Investment
Ireland
Merchants
Montana
New York
Philadelphia
Police
Rancocas
RCA
Rutgers-Camden
Toms River
Widows
World War II
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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.
Significance
425 Cooper Street is a contributing structure of the Cooper Street Historic District, listed on the New Jersey and National Registers of Historic Places. Together with the row 415-21 Cooper Street, 425 represents a significant transition in the evolution of Camden during the 1840s as homes were built for the first time on land formerly owned by the Cooper family on the north side of the street. The nomination of the Cooper Street Historic District 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." The home at 425 Cooper Street represents these transitions through its use for dental and medical practices from the 1880s through the 1970s. Furthermore, the house was built for an early public official of Camden who also developed houses at the back of the property on Lawrence Street. This first owner, Isaac Porter, also served as treasurer of the West Jersey Ferry Company, reflecting the historic significance of Camden as a point of connection between South Jersey and Philadelphia. In 2020, 425 Cooper Street was privately owned and divided into rental apartments.
Architectural style
Greek Revival row house.
Date of construction
c. 1846 (dated by New Jersey Office of Historic Preservation Sites Inventory, based upon deed transferring land from Alexander Cooper et al to Isaac Porter, June 5, 1846).
History
Three long-term owners of 425 Cooper Street reflect patterns of transition across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.<br /><br /><strong>Town Builder</strong><br /><br />In 1846, just two years after Camden became the governmental seat for newly-designated Camden County, Isaac Porter bought the land where 425 Cooper Street stands from a member of the region's most prominent founding family, Alexander Cooper. His purchase and subsequent building of a three-story brick row house was part of the first wave of home construction on the north side of Cooper Street. Porter (1807-1867) was in many ways a town builder and booster for Camden during the 1840s and 1850s as he developed his property, served in public office, and oversaw financial matters for the West Jersey Ferry Company between Camden and Philadelphia.<br /><br />The Porter family owned 425 Cooper Street for more than three decades. The U.S. Census in 1850 documents the Porter family during their early years at this address: Isaac, age 46; his wife, Esther (Ackley), age 40; and five children, a daughter and four sons ranging in age from 5 to 18. Isaac Porter served as Camden County Surrogate, an office responsible for recording wills and other matters related to settling estates.<br /><br />In 1849 Porter also had been appointed treasurer of the newly incorporated West Jersey Ferry Company. One of Camden's important connections to Philadelphia, this ferry had been operating since 1800 under management of the family and descendants of Abraham Browning, and thus was better known to local residents as "the Browning ferry." It had a prime location, running between Market Street in Camden and Market Street in Philadelphia. As the ferry took on its new status as a corporation, its presence on the Camden waterfront grew with a wharf that further extended filled land into the Delaware River, a ferry house, and a new West Jersey Hotel.<br /><br />Porter, meanwhile, developed his Cooper Street property by building two smaller houses at the rear of his lot, on Lawrence Street. The houses, numbered 432 and 434, were completed by 1855, when they served as models for an additional six two-story row houses contracted for construction by Benjamin H. Browning (a member of the ferry-operating family although not a participant in that venture). These rental properties attracted skilled tradesmen. The earliest that can be documented are in Camden city directories of the 1860s: at 434 Lawrence Street in 1865, a cabinet maker, Alexander Haines; and at 432 Lawrence Street in 1869, a carpenter, William Rotter.<br /><br />During the 1850s, Porter served twice as city treasurer for Camden (assisted by his oldest son, Joseph A. Porter, who lived down the street at 538 Cooper and later held the same office). By 1860, the Porters' older children had left the home, but the household also had gained two new female residents, likely extended family members (Eleanor Ackley, age 68, and Abigail Cooper, age 32). They also employed a domestic servant, Martha Butler, who was African American. To Census takers, she reported her age as 25, her birthplace as Delaware, and indicated that she had been married within the last year and could not read or write.<br /><br />A generational transition took place at 425 Cooper Street during the 1860s with the deaths of the senior members of the family: Esther Porter in 1863, followed by both Isaac Porter and Eleanor Ackley in 1867. As customary for the time, funerals for all three took place in the family home. For Isaac Porter, the flags of the ferry boats of the West Jersey Ferry Company flew at half-mast to honor his memory.<br /><br />Three of the Porters' sons remained at 425 Cooper Street through the 1870s, with the Census of 1870 recognizing the oldest of the three, 31-year-old Israel E. Porter, a store clerk, as head of the household. The family by that date included Israel's wife Ella and their infant son Harry; the other Porter brothers George, a coach maker, and Charles, a store clerk; and one or possibly two servants (in two separate listings for the family in 1870, two different servants were recorded: Margaret Brown, age 30 and described as mulatto, and Gattie Posley, age 20 and African American. This extended family remained until 1880, when they rented the property briefly to an insurance agent and his family. Financial difficulties may have contributed to the ultimate sale of the home, as it went to sheriff's sale in 1881 to satisfy back taxes.<br /><br /><strong>A Medical Family</strong><br /><br />The next long-term family came to 425 Cooper with the street's transition during the 1880s, with the founding of nearby Cooper Hospital. Proximity to the hospital made Cooper Street an idea location for medical professionals who established both home and office in structures that previously served strictly residential purposes. Such was the case for 425 Cooper Street and the Irwin family, who lived and provided health care at this address for more than forty years starting in 1884 (and for several years previous, next door at 427 Cooper).<br /><br />The owner of record for the Irwin home was Asbury Irwin, a stenographer for the Common Pleas Court in Philadelphia, but the head of the family was his father, a long-time physician, Samuel B. Irwin. The family had roots in the Brandywine region of Delaware and southeastern Pennsylvania, where the previous generation had operated iron furnaces. Samuel and his brother, the Philadelphia surgeon Hayes Agnew Irwin, inherited the iron business but also earned medical degrees at Jefferson Medical College.<br /><br />The primary medical practice during the Irwins' ownership of 425 Cooper was the dental office of Alphonso Irwin, who was about 25 years old when his brother Asbury bought the home. A recent graduate of the Philadelphia Dental School (which later became part of Temple University), he founded a Camden Free Dental Clinic as well as a private practice that continued until his retirement in the 1920s. While living at 425 Cooper Street (which he purchased from his brother Asbury in 1896), Alphonso married and with his wife, Anna, raised two children. He wrote frequently about dental hygiene, particularly for children, and became a noted authority on dental law.<br /><br />Alphonso Irwin became a leader in New Jersey dentistry, which for a time made 425 Cooper Street the headquarters for the New Jersey Dental Association. The association's need for a secretary brought into the Irwin household a boarder whose unusual background captured the attention of Camden residents between 1913 and 1915. The <em>Camden Courier-Post</em> reported frequently on the social and professional activities of Winifred de Mercier-Panton, who had been born in Australia but somehow had come to be employed by Irwin as secretary of the New Jersey State Dental Board. When she had a birthday party, when she attended a social event in Philadelphia, and when she met the governor of New Jersey, the <em>Courier-Post </em>noted the details. In November 1914, with the Great War underway in Europe, she announced her engagement to a captain in the British Colonial Force and soon thereafter departed Camden to serve with the <a href="https://livesofthefirstworldwar.iwm.org.uk/lifestory/4949680" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Voluntary Aid Attachment</a> of the British Army. In 1915, for circumstances unknown, she was awarded a Royal Red Cross for distinguished service.<br /><br /><strong>Office in Camden, Home Away</strong><br /><br />The next owner of 425 Cooper Street, osteopathic physician George W. Tapper, lived in the home for about five years during the 1930s. By 1940, however, he and his wife, Dorothy, had a new home in Medford Lakes, Burlington County. Like a number of other medical professionals on Cooper Street during the later decades of the twentieth century, Tapper treated his property as an office/apartment building with residential tenants living in the upper floors. The frequent turnover of apartment dwellers included Edgar J. Anzola (1937), a Venezuelan who worked in the international division of RCA; Eugene Gravener Jr. (1944), who earned the Air Medal for supplying materials to American and Chinese combat troops in north Burma during World War II; and Rosemary Tully (1958), an Irish woman joined by her new American husband after they married.<br /><br />George Tapper owned 425 Cooper Street until 1975, the first in a sequence of transfers of ownership to absentee landlords. Starting in 2007 and continuing in 2020, the property was owned by investors from the Bronx, New York, and served as rental apartments.
Associated Individuals
For all known residents and businesses at 425 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 Database</a>.
Illustrations
1. 425 Cooper Street in 2019. (Photograph by Jacob Lechner)
2. 425 Cooper Street indicated by arrow in photograph taken early in the twentieth century, prior to 1913. (Camden County Historical Society)
Research by
Charlene Mires, Kaya Durkee, and Lucy Davis
Posted by
Charlene Mires
Send corrections to cmires@camden.rutgers.edu
Sources
<em>Biographical Review Containing Life Sketches of Leading Citizens of Camden and Burlington Counties, N.J.</em> (Boston: Biographical Review Publishing, 1897).<br />Building Permits, Camden County Historical Society.<br />Charles Boyer, <em>Annals of Camden No. 3: Old Ferries </em>(Privately Printed, 1921).<br />Camden and Philadelphia Newspapers (Newspapers.com).<br />Camden City Directories and U.S. Census, 1850-1940 (Ancestry.com).<br />Camden County Property Records.<br />George R. Prowell, <em>History of Camden County, New Jersey </em>(Philadelphia: L.J. Richards & Co., 1886).<br />Structures Survey, New Jersey Office of Historic Preservation Sites Inventory.
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
425 Cooper Street
Description
An account of the resource
Contributing structure, Cooper Street Historic District.
1840s
1850s
1860s
1870s
1880s
1890s
1900s
1910s
1920s
1930s
1940s
1950s
1960s
1970s
1980s
1990s
2000s
2010s
400 Block
425 Cooper Street
432 Lawrence Street
434 Lawrence Street
African Americans
Aging
Apartments
Australia
Childhood
Death
Delaware
Dentists
Doctors
Economic Development
England
Extended Family
Ferries
Greek Revival
Health and Medicine
Investment
Ireland
Lawrence Street
Medford Lakes
Pennsylvania
Philadelphia
Public Health
Public Officials
Servants
Venezuela
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
<p>By all outward appearances, Henry Coy led a relatively unremarkable but prosperous middle-class life for roughly 15 years when he lived in the block of Cooper Street that later became Johnson Park. Only after his death in 1881 did rumors arise that created a macabre legend about Coy and his family. But were the rumors true?<br /><br />Coy, a Canadian, arrived in the Philadelphia-South Jersey region by 1858 and by 1860 lived at 101 Cooper Street, a three-story brick house that had been standing at the northeast corner of Front and Cooper since the late eighteenth century. His journey to the region may have included time in Massachusetts, where his wife, Sarah, was born. In 1860, at age 35, he headed an extended family household that consisted of Sarah, then age 25; their eight-month-old daughter, Mary Hannah; two women and a child who may have been Sarah's relations; and two servants. By 1870, the Coy family expanded to five children. Sarah Coy's mother, Mary, also lived with the family for a time and died at 101 Cooper Street in 1866, at age 74.<br /><br />To support the family, Coy commuted by ferry across the Delaware River to Philadelphia, where he worked as an agent for Wheeler & Wilson sewing machines. The company, based in Bridgeport, Conn., had emerged quickly during the late 1850s as the leading manufacturer of sewing machines, largely for industrial use. Coy had the only Wheeler & Wilson shop in Philadelphia, in second-floor space at 628 Chestnut Street; he offered machines and operators for hire as well as stitching done in the office. In addition to supporting his family, the income allowed for some minor luxuries, including two carriages and a gold watch.<br /><br />Around 1870, Coy left the sewing machine business to become a manager for the S.S. White Dental Manufacturing Company, the Philadelphia-based leading maker of high-quality dental instruments. He not only led the instrument-making shop, he also designed and made instruments himself. Forceps, mallets, punch instruments, and other dental tools bearing his maker mark, HC, remain in the <a href="https://temple.pastperfectonline.com/byperson?keyword=Coy%2C+Henry&page=2" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Historical Dental Museum</a> at Temple University and other collections.<br /><br />The Coy family left Cooper Street in 1874 and moved about three miles eastward to Stockton Township, Camden County, and from there to Palmyra in Burlington County. Henry Coy continued in the dental instruments business until his death in 1881.<br /><br />The next year, on May 1, 1882, a bizarre story appeared in the <em>Camden Morning Post:<br /><br /></em>AFTER TWENTY YEARS.<br />A FATHER'S ECCENTRICITY<br />Three Dead Bodies which a Camden Man Refused to Have Buried<br /><br />The report claimed that three bodies recently buried in Palmyra were long-dead children of Henry Coy. And, most shockingly, that during his years on Cooper Street Coy had kept the remains in coffins in his home. "He was a very eccentric man," said the <em>Post</em>, "and it is said he was unwilling to make the acquaintance of any one near him, and that he has found great pleasure during these long years, in sitting for hours at time in the room with the caskets containing his departed children."<br /><br />The tale, reprinted in the <em>Philadelphia Inquirer</em>, reappeared in a much longer, more obviously fictional version eleven years later. Published first in the <em>Philadelphia Times </em>in a section devoted to "Life's Thrilling Side," and then picked up again in Camden by the <em>Morning Post</em> on June 19, 1893, the new version retained the story about the deceased children. But it also spun a highly elaborate description of Coy (this time named Philip, "a long-bearded, impenetrable Canadian") and his haunted mansion replete with secret closets, concealed panels, vaults, and a coffin-shaped cupola. Attributing new details to two caretakers of the property after the Coys moved out, the 1893 version of the story portrayed a haunted house that echoed with sounds of infants wailing and feet shuffling in the cellar. For readers of the late nineteenth-century, the story may have offered a racist clue to its fictional nature by attributing the ghost stories to "Cyrus Green, an old colored man" and his wife, Sarah. Camden readers would have spotted an obvious confusion of references to the "Cooper mansion," which was not the house the Coys occupied, and other errors of local details. Philip was the name of Henry Coy's adult son who died in 1892, prior to publication of the second story.<br /><br />The Coy story also appeared in a pamphlet about Camden historic houses in 1920, characterized as a "rumor." Could there be any truth to the legends of the Coy family?<br /><br />The records of the family across the U.S. Census of 1860, 1870, and 1880 show no disappearing names of children, and hence suggest no deaths. However, New Jersey birth records document an earlier child, and perhaps twins, born in Camden to Henry Coy on March 7, 1858 (the records do not name the mother, and it is unclear whether two very similar records for the same date are duplications or documentation for twins). No Coy children of this age appear in the 1860 Census, so the 1858 infant or infants are unaccounted for.<br /><br /> Some elements of the later stories may suggest a plausible explanation: in the 1893 version, Coy is reported to have buried deceased twins in a Haddonfield cemetery without a proper funeral. It is conceivable--but speculation--that after his death in 1881, children buried elsewhere might have been exhumed to be buried with him in Palmyra. This would account for the story about burials that appeared in 1882, and at least one other Cooper Street family is known to have moved an earlier-buried child to rest with a later-deceased parent. Indeed, the Coys have a large, <a href="https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/46885440/henry-coy" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">enclosed family plot in the Epworth Methodist Church Cemetery</a> with just one headstone that is perhaps revealing in its silences: "Henry - Sarah S Coy / And Family."</p>
Time period on Cooper Street
c. 1858/60-1874
Location(s) - Cooper Street
101 Cooper Street (northeast corner of Front and Cooper, later Johnson Park)
Location(s) - Other
Philadelphia
Stockton Township, Camden County
Palmyra, Burlington County
Occupation
Sewing machine dealer (prior to 1870)
Dental instrument designer/manufacturer (after 1870)
Birth Date
c. 1825
Birthplace
Kingston, Ontario (Canada West)
Death Date
September 2, 1881 in Palmyra, Burlington County, N.J.
Associated Individuals
Sarah Coy (wife)
Mary Hannah Coy (daughter)
Elizabeth Coy (daughter)
Philip H. Coy (son)
Susan Coy (daughter)
Hellen Coy (daughter)
Susan, Haddie, and Addie Brown (possible relatives of wife Sarah)
Mary Seger (mother-in-law)
Ada Robbins Coy (daughter-in-law, married son Philip)
Lydia Everson (servant)
Jane Wilson (servant)
Emma Everman (servant)
Samuel Stockton White (employer at S.S. White Dental Manufacturing Co., Philadelphia)
Sources
"After Twenty Years." <em>Camden Morning Post, </em>May 1, 1882.<br />Boyer, Charles S. "The Old Houses in Camden, New Jersey." <em>Annals of Camden, </em>Vol. 1 (privately published, 1920).<br />"Camden's Pet Ghosts." <em>Camden Morning Post, </em>June 19, 1893.<br />Camden City Directories, Camden County Historical Society (Ancestry.com).<br />Edmunson, James M. <em>American Surgical INstruments: The History of Their Manufacture and a Directory of Instrument Makers to 1900 </em>(Novato, Calif: Norman Publishing, 1997), 61.<br />New Jersey Births and Christenings Index (Ancestry.com).<br />"S.S. White Dental Manufacturing Co." in Matos, William, comp. <em>Philadelphia: Its Founding and Development, 1683-1908 </em>(Philadelphia, 1908), 324.<br />U.S. Census, 1860, 1870, 1880.<br />"Wheeler and Wilson Manufacturing Co." in Hounshell, Davis, <em>From the American SYstem to Mass Production, 1800-1932: The Development of Manufacturing Technology in the United States </em>(Baltimore: Johns Hopkinson University Press, 1985), 68-75.
Research by
Charlene Mires
Send corrections to cmires@camden.rutgers.edu
Posted by
Charlene Mires
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Coy, Henry
Subject
The topic of the resource
Description
An account of the resource
Did the Coy family harbor a secret in their home at 101 Cooper Street?
100 Block
101 Cooper Street
1850s
1860s
1870s
1880s
1890s
Adult
Canada
Childhood
Death
Dental Implements
Ghost Stories
Johnson Park
Male
Massachusetts
Newspapers
Palmyra
Philadelphia
Sewing Machines
Stockton Township
-
https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/files/original/0bbd79ebafd8edf59bc80dc8af39f8c4.jpg
e13f19db68465ae2b4f99c509addff59
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
People
Description
An account of the resource
Residents of Cooper Street
Person
An individual.
Time period on Cooper Street
1867-88
Location(s) - Cooper Street
228 Cooper Street
Location(s) - Other
105 Cove Road, Pennsauken Township/Merchantville
Birth Date
c. 1840
Birthplace
Burlington County
Death Date
April 1, 1912
Biographical Text
Among the many women who headed households on Cooper Street, Sallie Ackley had a distinction: In 1867, while still in her 20s, she independently contracted for construction of a new home. The three-story Italianate townhouse at 228 Cooper Street survived into the twenty-first century. It represents a young woman's story of survival in the wake of tragedy and offers a connection to the early nineteenth-century settlement of Camden.<br /><br />Sallie Ackley was born into the Wilkins family, early settlers of Burlington County. Her grandfather, Isaac Wilkins, moved to Camden to go into the lumber business on the Delaware River waterfront, and in 1814 he purchased lots at Third and Cooper Streets as well as Third and Market. These properties passed by inheritance through the Wilkins family, including the land for 228 Cooper Street.<br /><br />Sallie Wilkins became Sallie Ackley in 1864, when she married a local doctor, Henry Ackley, at St. Paul's Episcopal Church. Her new husband had recently returned from service as U.S. Navy surgeon, but with his health irreversibly damaged by a bout with yellow fever aboard the USS San Jacinto in the Gulf of Mexico. He and Sallie had little more than a year together before he died of tuberculosis in December 1865. Six weeks later, Sallie gave birth to their son, Henry Wilkins Ackley, whom she had baptized at St. Paul's in July. Another tragedy followed, however, when the child died just short of his first birthday. It was the latest in a long line of family losses, in that Sallie's parents also had died during the war years.<br /><br />Although tragic, the circumstances conferred both independence and resources on Sallie Ackley, enabling her to contract for the house at 228 Cooper Street. The land was then owned by her brother, <a href="http://www.dvrbs.com/People/CamdenPeople-RichardCWilkins.htm" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Richard C. Wilkins</a>; it stood adjacent to her grandfather's former property on the corner of Third and Cooper, which had passed by inheritance to her aunt Eliza Davis. Sallie paid $7,500 to Harden and Brothers Contractors to build the house, and she specified the Trenton stone facade unlike anything else on the block. By 1870, at age 28, she headed a household consisting of her brother Richard, a 23-year-old veteran of the Civil War; her aunt Eliza (then age 73, she sold the corner house next door); and two domestic servants. Her activities included serving as a manager for the <a href="http://www.dvrbs.com/camden/CamdenNJ-Home-Friendless-Children.htm" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Camden Home for Friendless Children</a>, and in 1874 she bought the land under her house from her brother for $1,000.<br /><br />Sallie Ackley's life took a new turn by 1877, when she married a Camden bank teller, Nathan F. Cowan. They continued to live at 228 Cooper Street while rearing three healthy sons, two of them twins. Around 1888, they followed the trend of many of Cooper Street's professional-class families and moved to a suburban home on the Pennsauken Township border with Merchantville.
Associated Individuals
Isaac Wilkins (grandfather)
Richard M. Wilkins (father, died 1861)
Elizabeth Ann Coate Wilkins (mother, died 1861)
Richard C. Wilkins (brother)
Henry Ackley (first husband, died 1865, buried Woodlands Cemetery, Philadelphia).
Henry Wilkins Ackley (son, died 1867, buried Woodlands Cemetery Philadelphia)
Nathan F. Cowan (husband)
William Cowan (son)
Herbert Cowan (son)
Edgar Cowan (son)
Sources
Building Contracts, Camden County Historical Society. Camden/Gloucester County Deeds (Familysearch.org).<br /> Camden and Philadelphia Newspapers (Newspapers.com).<br />New Jersey State Census; New Jersey Church Records, Birth Records, and Death Records (Ancestry.com).<br /> U.S. Census, 1860, 1870, 1880.<br /><br /> Photographs of the Wilkins family, including Sallie and Richard, are posted on the <a href="http://www.dvrbs.com/People/CamdenPeople-RichardCWilkins.htm" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">website dvbs.com</a>.
Research by
Charlene Mires, Robbie DeSimone, and Lucy Davis. Photograph above, 228 Cooper Street in 2019, by Jacob Lechner.
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
Ackley, Sallie (Wilkins)
Description
An account of the resource
In the wake of the Civil War, a young widow contracted for a new house to be built at 228 Cooper Street.
1860s
1870s
1880s
200 Block
228 Cooper Street
Adult
Childhood
Civil War
Death
Extended Family
Female
Investment
Italianate
Widows
-
https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/files/original/2d498dfb78c6f4708ed8fb1be0a67b81.jpg
6dfb2c8a871b4e2a67041d28eb27e498
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
On the northwest corner of Fifth and Cooper Streets, 429 Cooper Street is among the residences of the late nineteenth century that represent the evolution of the street into one of Camden’s most fashionable addresses and its subsequent transitions following the 1926 completion of the first bridge across the Delaware River to Philadelphia. In its uses over time, the house demonstrates transitions from nineteenth-century trades to real estate development and the practice of medicine in the houses on Cooper Street. In this way it supports the statement of significance of the Cooper Street Historic District for the National Register of Historic Places: “These buildings [in the district] demonstrate the street's change from residential and professional to commercial." Documentation by the City of Camden Division of Planning in 1980 described 429 Cooper Street as “an excellent vernacular working of the Second Empire style [that] contributes to the late nineteenth century quality of Cooper Street with its variety of residential structures.”
Architectural style
Second Empire vernacular
Date of construction
c. 1850s-1885
History
<p>The northwest corner of Fifth and Cooper Streets has been occupied by a residence since at least 1857, when it was represented on a map of Camden County as part of a row of structures spanning most of the 400 block of Cooper Street. Houses rose rapidly on the north side of Cooper Street for the first time during the late 1840s and early 1850s as heirs of the Cooper family sold their land for development.</p>
<p>Among the early owners of the lot at this address was Thomas W. Dyott Jr., a Philadelphia wholesaler of patent medicines who bought the property in 1846 and then the lot next door (<a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/71" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">427 Cooper Street</a>) in 1852. In business with his father, also named Thomas, Dyott sold remedies such as <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/exhibits/show/excavation/item/2">Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup</a> for quieting babies and cures for rheumatism, liver ailments, and other maladies. The business had grown to one of the nation's leading purveyors of patent medicine under <a href="https://blog.phillyhistory.org/index.php/2012/01/thomas-w-dyott-snake-oil-soda-water-and-the-perennially-seductive-philadelphia-bottle/">his father</a>, who had immigrated England in 1805, claimed without foundation to be a doctor, and started selling miracle cures. Seeking bottles for his remedies, the elder Dyott also went into the bottle manufacturing business and by the 1820s had a thriving complex of factories in the Kensington section of Philadelphia. That venture grew into a company town called Dyottville but collapsed in bankruptcy after a run on its bank during the panic of 1837. The patent medicine business remained active during the 1850s as T.W. Dyott & Sons.<br /> <br /> City directories list Thomas Dyott Jr. as a Camden resident from 1855 to 1857 at "Cooper above Fourth" (not "Fifth and Cooper"), suggesting that he and his family lived next door at 427 Cooper Street, not on the corner. When he sold both properties in 1860, the 429 Cooper Street lot included a frame house next occupied by Lewis Wilkins, a livery stable operator. Wilkins, who had moved into Camden from Burlington County in the 1850s, had a good location for a stable in the growing city, near the ferries that crossed to Philadelphia. At 51 years old in 1860, his household at 429 Cooper included his wife, Rebecca; their 20-year-old daughter Katura (Kate); Rebecca’s mother, Katura Moore, and her sister, Emeline Dobbins, a nurse. In a later U.S. Census, Kate was noted as having a “spine disease,” which could explain the presence of a nurse in the family.</p>
<p>Wilkins, his immediate family, and various other relatives lived at 429 Cooper Street for twenty years, and during that time Wilkins improved the house in keeping with architectural fashion. In 1869, he added a <a href="https://www.oldhouseonline.com/house-tours/the-mania-for-mansard-roofs/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">mansard roof</a>, a hallmark feature of the French-inspired Second Empire architectural style very popular in the United States during the 1860s and 1870s. In the same year, Second Empire mansards were adopted for a new mansion built nearby by a member of the Cooper family (406 Cooper Street, still standing in the twenty-first century) and for other less grand houses rapidly filling Penn and Linden Streets. Across the river, Philadelphia officials chose the same style for the new <a href="https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/city-hall-philadelphia/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">City Hall</a> then under construction.</p>
<p><strong>Renovation Mystery</strong></p>
<p>After Rebecca Wilkins died in 1880, Lewis Wilkins at age 70 sold his property to a real estate broker, Joseph J. Read. The experiences of the real estate man had spanned the changing worlds of work and opportunity in the nineteenth century. Born in Camden in 1815, in his youth in South Philadelphia Read learned the craft of coopering—barrel-making—and he practiced this trade in Camden as late as the 1860s. But in the 1860s and 1870s Read also began to buy and renovate houses and at least one office building in Camden, and he amassed enough wealth to also invest in property in Philadelphia and Atlantic City. Established in the real estate business, the former cooper moved to Cooper Street.</p>
<p>Read’s purchase of 429 Cooper Street occurred at the start of the greatest takeoff of Camden’s population, which nearly tripled between 1880 and 1920, from about 41,000 to more than 116,000 people. In the early 1880s, residents of Cooper Street sought to distinguish their thoroughfare in this growing city by narrowing the street to create front yard spaces that allowed for gardens, small yards, or front porches. The change in the streetscape prompted a wave of construction of grander, architect-designed houses. For his part, Joseph Read gained approval from the Camden City Council “to alter and change the frame dwelling house at the northwest corner of Fifth and Cooper streets by extending the same to the house line on the north side of said Cooper Street.”</p>
<p>Read’s proposed renovation in 1882 raises a question of when – and how – the original frame house at 429 Cooper Street became the brick house that remained standing at 429 Cooper Street in the twenty-first century. The historic building survey conducted in 1980 prior to National Register listing dated the house as c. 1880, consistent with Read’s purchase of the property. But the sources for this report did not include two key pieces of evidence: local newspaper reports that Lewis Wilkins added a mansard roof in 1869 and that Read in 1882 requested to renovate a house that was frame (wood), not brick. The still-standing brick house has both a mansard and a front bay consistent with Read’s 1882 proposal – could it be the same house, further renovated with brick facing by Read, or did he rebuild entirely? There is no answer in the known public record, but by 1885 the Sanborn Insurance Company map for Camden lists only brick houses in the 400 block, and the 1891 map depicts a brick house on this corner of Fifth and Cooper Streets.</p>
<p>For Read, a recent widower, 429 Cooper Street became the home of his second marriage, in 1881 to Elizabeth Schellenger (in public records of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century also spelled Schellinger), the widow of a sea captain. Their extended household included Elizabeth’s son William Schellenger, a clerk, and Edward A.Y. Schellenger (known as Ned), who during the 1890s completed medical school at the University of Pennsylvania and returned to Camden to practice. While William moved to the Philadelphia suburbs after his marriage in 1891, Ned remained in the household at Fifth and Cooper. After Joseph Read died in 1898, Ned headed the extended family including his mother, his wife Lillian, their son also named Edward, and their daughter Elizabeth. The family also employed domestic servants and a driver for the doctor; those that can be documented were African Americans: Julia Burse, a 36-year-old widow at the time of the 1900 Census, was born in Maryland. Mary Taylor, who worked in the household in 1910, was also a widow, 61 years old and born in New Jersey. She cooked for the Schellengers for at least a decade.</p>
<p><strong>Medical Treatments and Tragedies<br /></strong></p>
<p>The house at 429 Cooper Street also served as a medical office for Edward A.Y. Schellenger, adding to Cooper Street’s reputation as a location for medical professionals. Front parlors on the first floors of nineteenth-century homes served well as offices, and the physicians were within walking distance of Camden’s Cooper Hospital. Schellenger specialized in surgery, and in addition to a growing practice served on the Board of Managers of the County Tuberculosis Hospital.<br /><br />While occupying 429 Cooper Street, the Schellenger family confronted medical challenges of their own: their daughter, named Elizabeth after her grandmother, contracted polio in 1913. She lived six years longer, until age 18, when a cold developed into pneumonia and caused her death. The <em>Camden Morning Post</em> noted that “although handicapped by deformities,” Elizabeth took an active part in combatting the <a href="https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/influenza-spanish-flu-pandemic-1918-19/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">influenza epidemic</a> of 1918-19. “She was an accomplished automobile driver, despite her tender years and day after day … she was busy conveying nurses, attendants, patients, and Red Cross workers to and from hospitals.”</p>
<p>By the time of Elizabeth’s early death, her father also had succumbed to complications from an illness that was publicly described only as a “serious ailment” that he had treated in others as a surgeon. In 1917, he cited ill health when he resigned his position with the Tuberculosis Hospital. While hospitalized shortly thereafter, he experienced burns from an x-ray that were blamed for a subsequent burst artery that ended his life. He was 47 years old.<br /><br /><strong>Office Building</strong></p>
<p>The house at Fifth and Cooper Streets remained home for Schellenger’s widow, Lillian, and son Edward until the mid-1920s, but then they joined other prominent Camden families in relocating to suburban Merchantville. Cooper Street was by that time taking on a distinctly more commercial atmosphere as the opening of the Delaware River Bridge (later renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge) prompted changes such as the construction of the Plaza Hotel diagonally across the street from the Schellenger home. The Schellengers retained ownership of 429 Cooper Street, but a real estate firm renovated the building into offices and at least one apartment. In 1930, the apartment was rented by a church organist and his family. By 1940, the residential tenants included a German-born Naval draftsman and his family and a second household consisting of a widowed artist and her adult daughter, a secretary.</p>
<p>In the 1940s, 429 Cooper Street once again became a location for medical offices, this time for doctors who practiced in Camden but chose to live in the suburbs. Among them was the son of the original Dr. Schellenger, also named Edward. The younger Schellenger, a gynecologist, opened his practice after graduating from Thomas Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia. World War II interrupted his career in Camden as he served with the U.S. Army Medical Corps in Africa and the Middle East. While overseas, he met the Army nurse who became his wife, Margaret Clayton; they raised their family of two daughters and a son in Merchantville.</p>
<p>The younger Edward Schellenger donated 429 Cooper Street to Rutgers University in 1977. After housing student health services for Rutgers-Camden during the 1990s, the building gained a new purpose in 2011 through a renovation that joined it with adjacent <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/71" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">427 Cooper Street</a> to create office spaces for the Rutgers-Camden <a href="https://history.camden.rutgers.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Department of History</a> and the <a href="https://philosophyandreligion.camden.rutgers.edu/">Department of Philosophy and Religion</a>.</p>
Associated Individuals
For a list of all known occupants of 429 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 429.
Sources
<p>Camden City Directories, 1840-1940, Camden County Historical Society and Ancestry.com.<br /> Camden County Property Records (FamilySearch.org).<br />Camden and Philadelphia newspapers (Newspapers.com and Genealogy Bank).<br />Dorwart, Jeffery M. <em>Camden County, New Jersey: The Making of a Metropolitan Community, 1926-2000.</em> New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001.<br />Jones, Carmita De Solms. "Thomas W. Dyott Boot-Black, Glass Maker and FInancier." <em>Bulletin of the Pennsylvania Museum </em>(October 1926): 226-34.<br /> New Jersey Census, 1885-1915, and U.S. Census, 1870-1950 (Ancestry.com).<br /> <br /> <strong>Note on sources:</strong> Previous documentation dated the construction of this house as c. 1880 and labeled it the “Joseph J. Read House.” This research updates the record and raises questions about the date of construction.</p>
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
429 Cooper Street
Description
An account of the resource
Contributing structure, Cooper Street Historic District.
1850s
1860s
1870s
1880s
1890s
1900s
1910s
1920s
1930s
1940s
1950s
1960s
1970s
1980s
1990s
200s
2010s
400 Block
429 Cooper Street
African Americans
Apartments
Death
Doctors
Druggists
Livery Stable
Mansard
Merchantville
Polio
Real Estate
Renovations
Rutgers-Camden
Servants