1
10
7
-
https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/files/original/733102c43e0b8f4acab96b99ad5de365.jpg
9d23d325c2e895cf6bffd6d406ce0aaf
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Buildings
Description
An account of the resource
Houses and other structures on Cooper Street in Camden, N.J.
Place
Residence, business, or other entity.
Illustrations
Photograph by Jacob Lechner
Significance
<p>The office building at 315 Cooper Street reflects Camden’s transitions and needs during an era of industrial decline. Built in 1966, the building first served as headquarters of the Amalgamated Food and Allied Workers Union Local 56, creating a tie between Cooper Street and Camden’s longstanding role in the food processing industry. In the 1980s, the building became home to the Camden County Juvenile Resource Center (later known as the Camden Center for Youth Development). The modern building took the place of a c. 1855 Greek Revival-style home owned by prominent Camden residents, including John W. Mickle, the namesake for Mickle Street and the former Mickle School. During a period as a rental property in 1870-71, the residence served as home to the Collegiate School of Camden, a private school. From the 1920s through the 1940s, before it was demolished for construction of the office building, the house at 315 Cooper Street was a hub of men’s club activity as headquarters for the Camden Club and later the Moose Lodge.</p>
Architectural style
Modern
Date of construction
1966, on site of previous residence built c. 1855.
History
<p>During the 1850s, the north side of Cooper Street began to fill with houses as Cooper family heirs sold their land for development. Among this first generation of structures in the 300 block, 315 Cooper Street ranked as one of the largest and most substantial. A double-lot, brick, Greek Revival residence, 315 Cooper Street first served as home for a retired physician from Cape May, Joseph Fifield, and his wife, Lydia. After Lydia Fifield’s death in 1858, the home was owned briefly by Albert W. Markley, a recent president of the Farmers’ and Mechanics’ Bank in Philadelphia (who lived at other times at 218 and 420 Cooper Street).</p>
<p>The 315 Cooper Street house gained a notable new connection in 1861, when it was purchased by John W. Mickle, whose family roots extended to seventeenth-century settlement in the region that became South Jersey. Mickle, a retired sea captain with extensive investments in turnpikes, railroads, and ferry operations, lived a scant few months in 315 Cooper Street before his death later in 1861. But he brought with him an extended household that included widows of his brother and nephew, who remained in the home through the end of the 1860s. John W. Mickle’s memory lived on in Camden through the naming of <a href="http://msr-archives.rutgers.edu/archives/Issue%2014/features/schoop.htm" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Mickle Street</a> and the <a href="http://www.dvrbs.com/camden-school/camdennj-school-mickle.htm" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">John W. Mickle School</a>. Mickle was honored not only for his prominence in business but for his public service in the New Jersey State Assembly and in the convention that drafted the New Jersey Constitution of 1844. His survivors also recalled his seafaring days carrying trade between the Port of Philadelphia, Europe, and South America. His distinctions included transporting Princess Charlotte of France to join her father, Joseph Bonaparte, while he lived on an <a href="https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/point-breeze-bonaparte/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">estate in Bordentown</a>, Burlington County.</p>
<p><strong>Collegiate School and Boarding House</strong></p>
<p>The heirs of John W. Mickle rented 315 Cooper Street to tenants beginning in 1870, although family members returned to live there intermittently when it was not otherwise occupied. For about two years beginning in 1870, the home became a girls’ boarding school. The Ladies’ Department of the Collegiate School of the City of Camden at 315 Cooper was an extension of a private day school that Reverend Martin L. Hoffer, a Presbyterian minister, had been running since 1868 in a former Odd Fellows’ Hall at Fourth and Market Streets. Hoffer, who lived in Beverly, Burlington County, had previously operated a boys’ boarding school in Beverly and a military boarding school for boys in Allentown, Pennsylvania. His Collegiate School in Camden offered instruction in classical and commercial subjects for boys and girls (in separate classrooms). Viewed by the <em>West Jersey Press </em>as “important step in the permanent growth and prosperity of our city,” Hofford’s school on Market Street and its boarding school extension at 315 Cooper nevertheless proved to be short-lived. By 1874 he moved to other ministerial posts. The girls’ boarding school, acquired by new teachers and with a different name, continued two years longer nearby at 312 Cooper Street. The Collegiate School on Market Street, after a brief closure, reopened on Market Street under a new principal.</p>
<p>After the departure of the Collegiate School, the owners of 315 Cooper Street continue to offer it for rent or for sale: “A three-story brick house ten minutes’ walk from the ferry,” read an advertisement in the Camden <em>Morning Post </em>in 1879. “Contains all conveniences; heated throughout; stationary wash stands in bed rooms; two water closets; two kitchens; stationary wash tubs; underdrained; dry cellar.” For about five years, 1878 to 1883, 315 Cooper Street became a boarding house operated by Mary A. Lanning, who lived there with her husband and adult son, as many as seven boarders, and two servants. Recorded in the 1880 Census, the boarders included a lawyer, a bank teller and his wife, a sea captain and his wife, and a hardware dealer. The servants were Susan Boyer, a Black woman who was widowed, and likely her son John, age 12. Neither of the Boyers could read or write.</p>
<p><strong>Family Home</strong></p>
<p>The house at 315 Cooper Street became a family home once again in 1883, when a dispute among heirs of John W. Mickle led to a court-ordered sale of the property. For the next 26 years, 315 Cooper Street was owned and occupied by attorney Peter V. Voorhees, his wife Louisa Voorhees, their son James Dayton Voorhees, and usually three to four domestic servants. They previously lived several blocks away at 430 Linden Street, part of the 1870s development known as Linden Terrace.</p>
<p>The names of the new residents of 315 Cooper reflected the depth and breadth of their family histories. Peter V. Voorhees had a family lineage that traced to seventeenth-century Dutch settlement of Long Island, New York. Peter V., born in New Brunswick in 1852, graduated from Rutgers College in 1873 and then moved to Camden to study law with his uncle, Peter L. Voorhees. The younger Voorhees followed his uncle’s specialization in real estate law and became, among other roles, a representative of the Cooper family trust. In 1881, he married Louisa Clarke Dayton, whose family history extended to seventeenth-century English settlers of Boston. Later generations lived in Somerset County, New Jersey, and Louisa’s father, a lawyer, moved to Camden after graduating from Princeton College. Louisa’s uncle, <a href="https://nj.gov/oag/oag/ag_1857-1861_dayton_bio.htm" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">William L. Dayton</a>, served in the United States Senate and in 1856 was the young Republican Party’s candidate for vice president of the United States. Honoring Louisa’s family legacy, the Voorhees’s son was called by his middle name, Dayton.</p>
<p>Peter V. and Louisa Voorhees had been married about two years when they moved to 315 Cooper Street with one-year-old Dayton. A second child, a daughter named Elsie born in 1883, died just before her first birthday while the family vacationed at Lake Minnewaska, New York. A death notice in the <em>Philadelphia Times </em>stating that she died “suddenly” suggests an accident or other unexpected cause, but the details were not publicly disclosed. Thereafter, they remained a family of three as Peter prospered as a lawyer, Louisa engaged in charitable activities, and Dayton grew up at 315 Cooper Street and went on to college at Princeton.</p>
<p>The domestic workers in the Voorhees household included Celina (or Selina) Kammerer, who stood apart from other domestic help on Cooper Street through an unusually long term of service and her nationality. While most white domestics on Cooper Street were Irish immigrants or native-born, Kammerer was born in France. No evidence exists to explain how she came to be employed in the Voorhees household or why she stayed so long, but she was present throughout their time at 315 Cooper Street. Public records reveal only that Kammerer was born between 1850 or 1860, that her mother was French and her father either French or Prussian, and that she immigrated to the United States in 1866. Most other domestic servants who worked for the Voorhees family were Irish immigrant women, but by 1900 the family also employed a Black butler, Jesse Bailey. Born in Virginia in 1850, Bailey likely came to Camden as part of the emerging wave of Black migration out of the South to northern cities.</p>
<p>In addition to the large home on Cooper Street and domestic servants, the affluence of the Voorhees family enabled extended summer vacations to the Jersey Shore, Maine, the Adirondacks, and Florida. Like others of their social and economic standing, they had leisure time and resources for tourism to resorts by rail. During the 1890s, they also traveled by ocean liner to Europe and from the West Coast by sea to Japan.</p>
<p>At home, Peter V. Voorhees’s legal work included handling the Cooper family’s sale of their Cooper Street land between Front and Second Street for use as a public park—later known as Johnson Park. At the pinnacle of his legal career, between 1900 and 1905, he served as an appointed lay judge of the New Jersey Court of Errors and Appeals. Like other men of his station, Voorhees maintained a network of positions on local boards of directors, including the Camden Republican Club (at 312 Cooper Street, across from his house), the Camden City Dispensary (which provided medical care to the indigent), the West Jersey Title and Guarantee Company, and the First National Bank. He served as a vestryman of St. Paul’s Protestant Episcopal Church on Market Street. (He was not, however, connected with the 1899 creation and naming of Voorhees Township, which took its name from then-governor <a href="https://www.nga.org/governor/foster-mcgowan-voorhees/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Foster McGowan Voorhees</a>.)</p>
<p>The Voorhees family remained at 315 Cooper Street until the 1906 death of Peter V. Voorhees from multiple ailments that followed a serious bout with pneumonia the previous year, and the 1909 death of Louisa Voorhees from unspecified diseases. This ended the era of single-family ownership at this address. Dayton Voorhees, who served in World War I and then became a professor of politics at Princeton University, did not return to the family home. By 1915 it was rented out and divided between two households, one headed by James Buckelew, the superintendent of the West Jersey and Seashore Railroad Company, and the other headed by Lewis Larsen, a salesman. By 1920, the tenants were real estate dealer William P. Hollinger with his wife, Frances; three young children; and two domestic servants, a married Black couple James and Susan Taylor.</p>
<p><strong>A Domain of Men</strong></p>
<p>During the 1920s, Cooper Street experienced transition from a residential to commercial thoroughfare, largely through the efforts of real estate interests who anticipated a business boom coming with the 1926 completion of the Delaware River Bridge (later renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge). While many former residences on Cooper Street became apartments or office buildings, 315 Cooper Street gained a new purpose as a club house for Camden’s professional men.</p>
<p>The Camden Club came into existence through the efforts of a Camden undertaker, Fithian Simmons, who lived at <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/85" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">319 Cooper Street</a>, next door to the vacated Voorhees home. The club filled two voids: on a personal level, Simmons poured his energy into the club following the death of his wife, Alverta, during the <a href="https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/influenza-spanish-flu-pandemic-1918-19/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">influenza epidemic</a> in 1919. For Camden’s elite, the club offered a gathering place for men following the demise of the Camden Republican Club, which had been an anchor of men’s sociability on Cooper Street for decades. Supporters of the new Camden Club contributed $1,000 each to raise the funds to transform the Voorhees “mansion,” as the <em>Morning Post </em>described it, into a “luxurious clubhouse.” Membership required a $100 initiation fee and the same amount each year in annual dues.</p>
<p>With Simmons serving as president, the Camden Club sought to be the equivalent of the leading clubhouses for men in Philadelphia. The remodeled building offered a restaurant open day and night; parlors and reception rooms; rooms for billiards, card-playing, and other games; and four bedrooms on the third floor. By all outward appearances, the club thrived during the 1920s and celebrated its tenth anniversary with a dinner at 315 Cooper Street early in 1931 with “members and guests comprising leading business, professional and political notables,” the <em>Morning Post </em>reported. By that time, Simmons remained involved as president emeritus.</p>
<p>The Camden Club’s finances were not secure enough to survive the Great Depression, however. After purchasing the building for $14,000 in 1920, the club had taken out a mortgage for $100,000 to finance its ambitious remodel. By 1938, the club had fallen into default on the mortgage and owed thousands in back taxes to the City of Camden. With numerous prominent individuals and companies implicated as bond holders for the club, the building went up for sale to settle its debts.</p>
<p>Another fraternal organization in similar straits benefitted from the Camden Club’s demise. The <a href="https://www.mooseintl.org/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Loyal Order of the Moose</a>, Lodge 111, founded in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1888, had been active in Camden since 1909. The local lodge had opened a grand new headquarters on Market Street in 1929, but it fell into default on the mortgages and receivership by 1934. Having lost ownership of its hall to banks, the Moose Lodge opted in 1939 to buy the former Camden Club at 315 Cooper Street. For the next twenty-five years, the clubhouse became the hub of social and service activity for the men’s Moose lodge and the auxiliary Women of the Moose. Sports banquets, movie nights, dances, and other events were occasionally punctuated by police attention to liquor sales on Sundays and the presence of slot machines. Like other fraternal organizations of its time, the lodge restricted its membership to white people only, a limitation not overturned by Moose International until 1973.</p>
<p><strong>Union Headquarters</strong></p>
<p>By the 1960s, Cooper Street stood at the edge of an urban renewal zone. Between 1962 and 1964 Rutgers University created a new Camden campus through demolition of houses in the blocks between Cooper Street and the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, between Third and Fifth Streets. Although Cooper Street was spared wholesale destruction because of its perceived commercial value, the longstanding houses at 315 and 319 Cooper Street fell to demolition. Both became the sites for new union headquarters buildings, with 315 the site of a new, modern office building built in 1966 for the Amalgamated Food and Allied Workers Union, Local 56. Next door at 319 Cooper Street stood another strikingly modern structure built in 1960 for the International Union of Electrical Workers, Local 103. Together, the buildings created ties between Cooper Street and two of Camden’s longstanding industries, food processing and sound recording.</p>
<p>The Amalgamated Food and Allied Workers Union Local 56 – Meat Packing Division purchased 315 Cooper Street as the previous longtime occupant, the Moose Lodge, moved to temporary new quarters farther east on Cooper Street at the Walt Whitman Hotel. Formed in 1940, by the 1960s Local 56 represented workers in fisheries, canneries, farms, grocery stores, and food processing plants throughout New Jersey and at the General Foods plant in Dover, Delaware. Its work included organizing migrant labor in South Jersey, which in 1967 prompted a visit to Cooper Street by a delegation of Vietnamese tenant farmers escorted by the U.S. Department of Labor.</p>
<p>Later known as the United Food and Commercial Workers, Local 56 remained at 315 Cooper Street until 1982, when it opted to leave Camden for a building in Pennsauken that offered more space and easier, more ample parking.</p>
<p><strong>Youth Services</strong></p>
<p>By the time of the union’s departure, the economic and social circumstances of Camden had produced needs for greater social services for residents experiencing poverty, homelessness, or other effects of the sharp decline of industry in the late twentieth century. Responding to the needs of youth in these conditions, a nonprofit organization, New Ventures Management, purchased 315 Cooper Street and made it the headquarters for the Juvenile Resource Center (JRC). The center, led by former Camden school board member Stella Horton since its founding in 1978, provided juvenile offenders with alternatives to incarceration, including an alternative school, counseling, and employment programs.</p>
<p>The JRC continued its work on Cooper Street for decades, changing its name in 2003 to the Camden Youth Development Center (CYDC) after receiving a $1.2 million grant from the William Penn Foundation to join forces with the Camden City Youth Services Commission. Surrounded by that time by buildings purchased by Rutgers University, in 2012 the CYDC also gained an executive director, Felix James, with connections to Rutgers as a graduate of the university’s law school in Camden. Continuing operations in the 2020s, the CYDC stated its mission as “embracing and using the assets of young people to meet their needs and successfully address the complex work they must do to transform their communities and neighborhoods.” Its services encompassed leadership development, tutoring, employment preparation, college preparation, and “providing emotional, social, spiritual, physical, and cultural proficiencies.” Evolving from the original JRC focus on alternatives to incarceration, the CYDC in the 2020s stressed civic engagement as a pathway to success.</p>
Associated Individuals
For a list of all known occupants of 315 Cooper Street, visit the <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15gz3_mGk3FcNl0TPaOZAq6B1CHvOpqRcY7a99xkp_l4/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Cooper Street Residents Database</a> and scroll down to 315.
Sources
<p>Camden and Philadelphia Newspapers (Newspapers.com and Genealogy Bank).<br /> Camden City Directories (Ancestry.com).<br /> Camden County Property Records.<br /> New Jersey State Census, 1885-1915, and U.S. Census, 1850-1950 (Ancestry.com).<br /> New Jersey Office of Cultural and Environmental Services, Historic Sites Inventory No. 0408205 (315 Cooper Street), 1985.<br /> Prowell, George R. <em>The History of Camden County, New Jersey.</em> Philadelphia: L.J. Richards & Co., 1886.</p>
Research by
Charlene Mires and Lucy Davis
Posted by
Charlene Mires
Send corrections to cmires@camden.rutgers.edu
Questions / needs for additional research
Papers of the Amalgamated Food and Allied Workers Union Local 56 are available for future research at Rutgers University Libraries Special Collections (New Brunswick).
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
315 Cooper Street
Description
An account of the resource
Modern office building on former site of a c. 1855 residence.
1850s
1860s
1870s
1880s
1890s
1900s
1910s
1920s
1930s
1940s
1950s
1960s
1970s
1980s
1990s
2000s
2010s
2020s
300 Block
315 Cooper Street
African Americans
Attorneys
Banking
Beverly
Black Migration
Boarding House
Bridge Impact
Burlington County
Camden Dispensary
Cape May
Death
Demolition
Doctors
Domestic Life
Dutch
Food Industry
France
Greek Revival
Influenza
Judges
Labor Unions
Maritime
Men's Clubs
Modern
Pennsauken
Pneumonia
Presbyterians
Renovations
Republicans
Schools
Social Services
Tourism
-
https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/files/original/b371944a6a69dc0e6345a7e81c94c62e.jpg
9ca6b9724bb3a108ca1e7b5c6f1db82c
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Buildings
Description
An account of the resource
Houses and other structures on Cooper Street in Camden, N.J.
Place
Residence, business, or other entity.
Illustrations
Photograph by Jacob Lechner
Significance
325 Cooper Street is a contributing structure of the Cooper Street Historic District, which is listed on the New Jersey and National Register of Historic Places. The west end of a row of three houses built in the early 1850s, it supports the district’s significance as a collection of residences representing the nineteenth-century history of Camden. Its past residents include Camden’s second female physician, Lettie Ward. Since 2016, offices in this building have included the <a href="https://march.rutgers.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities</a> (MARCH) at Rutgers-Camden.
Architectural style
Greek Revival
Date of construction
c. 1852-1854
History
<p>As Cooper family heirs sold their land for development in the 1850s, they used two adjoining lots at 325 and <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/81" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">327</a> Cooper Street to set an aesthetic for the future. The deeds for both properties, executed in 1852, specified that “three story brick buildings only shall be erected upon Cooper Street.” This ruled out wood-frame structures and assured houses of a size and scale that would only be affordable to similarly substantial owners. The lot later numbered 325 became the west end of a row of three similar residences at the northwest corner of Fourth and Cooper Streets. The house, built between 1852 and 1854, was rented out by its first owners, who lived in Burlington County.</p>
<p><strong>From Countryside to City</strong></p>
<p>The first known tenants of 325 Cooper Street were members of the large and prominent Browning family, whose ancestors immigrated to the region from Holland in the early eighteenth century. Maurice Browning, who rented 325 Cooper Street beginning in 1854, grew up among a dozen siblings on his father Abraham’s farm in Stockton Township, about three and a half miles from Camden. The elder Browning, in addition to farming, also played a role in the city’s growth by establishing the Market Street Ferry, which passed to his heirs (including his son Maurice) when he died in 1836.</p>
<p>Maurice Browning, born in 1811, left the farm and pursued a career in pharmacy, working first in a drug store in Mount Holly, then studying pharmacy in Philadelphia, and then opening a drug store on Market Street in Camden. By the time he rented the house on Cooper Street, he had expanded his business activities to manufacturing and banking. With other family members, in 1840 he established the Aroma Mills, which extracted and sold dyes from woods. In 1855, around the time he moved to Cooper Street, Browning became a director of the newly formed Farmers’ and Mechanics Bank (later the First National Bank of Camden).</p>
<p>The Browning family at 325 Cooper Street in 1860 was headed by Maurice, then in his 40s, and his wife Anna, in her 30s, the daughter of a Philadelphia merchant who also owned a farm near Haddonfield. Married since 1840, their years on Cooper Street began in sadness in 1854 with the death of their oldest daughter, Ellen, who was 14 years old. The cause of her death was not publicly reported, but in the custom of the time her funeral was held at home prior to burial in Colestown Cemetery. The Brownings had earlier lost another child, a son named Maurice after his father, who died in 1850 when less than 2 years of age. These losses left the Brownings a family of five. When documented by the 1860 Census, the children were a son, Abraham, 15 years old, and two daughters, Josephine, 6, and Alice, 3. Another son, Lehman, was born the next year, in 1861. The Brownings employed two domestic servants, both Irish immigrants: Rebecca Caffrey, 36 years old, and Catherine McMullen, 17.</p>
<p>During the family’s years on Cooper Street, Maurice Browning joined in the enthusiasm for the new Republican Party, founded in 1854. At a mass meeting in Camden in 1856, Browning was among the local party supporters who turned out to voice support for the Republican platform and its national candidates, John C. Fremont for president and William L. Dayton for vice president. In 1862, Browning was among the original members of the Union League of Philadelphia, founded to support the Union cause during the Civil War.</p>
<p><strong>Camden, Philadelphia, and the World</strong></p>
<p>The Browning family left 325 Cooper Street by 1863, the year before the property’s original owners sold the home to Charles A. Sparks, a partner in a Philadelphia wholesale grocery and imports business. With his wife, Amelia, and their four children, Sparks lived at 325 Cooper Street during a decade, from 1864 to 1874, that proved pivotal in his career. Like other merchants with Camden and Philadelphia ties, his interests widened to investments that aided Camden’s growth and the region’s reach outward in the nation and the world.</p>
<p>Charles Sparks had family roots in <a href="https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/locations/salem-county-new-jersey/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Salem County</a>, New Jersey, but his father (a mariner), mother, and a brother had moved to Camden by 1850. Sparks began his adult working life across the river in Philadelphia as a clerk in the wholesale grocery, importing, and exporting business of Edward C. Knight, a Camden County native, and soon became a partner in the E.C. Knight Co. While remaining with the firm, Sparks chose to live in Camden after his 1852 marriage to Amelia Ross, who was born in England, the daughter of a merchant who became an extensive landholder in Stockton and Pennsauken Townships. They moved to Cooper Street from their earlier home near Third and Market Streets. By the time of the 1870 Census their household at 325 Cooper Street included four children, a son and three daughters ranging in age from 5 to 13; Charles by this time was 43 years old, and Amelia was 40. They employed at least one domestic servant, Sarah McHale, likely an Irish immigrant.</p>
<p>Charles Sparks' association with the E.C. Knight Co. placed him in an extensive network of trade between Philadelphia, the Pacific, and the Caribbean. Around the time that Sparks went to work for Knight, the firm expanded its trade from importing coffee from the West Indies to seagoing trade with California. As he became a partner in the company, Knight initiated imports of molasses and sugar from Cuba. At first acting as an agent for other refineries in Philadelphia, by 1870 the E.C. Knight Co. established its own refinery complex in the Southwark section of the city, with Charles Sparks in charge. Edward Knight also invested in railroads and steamship lines; in 1874, Sparks joined him as an incorporator of the <a href="http://cnhillsborough.blogspot.com/2021/03/delaware-and-bound-brook-railroad.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Delaware River & Bound Brook Railroad Company</a>, a 27-mile line reaching northward from Trenton that posed a challenge to the Camden & Amboy Railroad’s dominance of rail connections with New York.</p>
<p>Sparks' success in business returned benefits in Camden. At home at 325 Cooper Street, he initiated interior and exterior renovations. The <em>West Jersey Press </em>observed in 1869 that Sparks “has made a decided and tasteful alteration, both internally and externally, in his dwelling. He has replaced the ordinary window glass with French plate, in walnut sash, giving the front a pleasing effect.” The house in 2022 retains an impressive nineteenth-century hallstand, marble fireplace, and ornately framed parlor mirror that may attest to these improvements. Sparks also invested time and funds in Camden institutions, for example serving on the board of the Farmers’ and Mechanics’ Bank (later the First National Bank of Camden) with the previous occupant of 325 Cooper Street, Maurice Browning. He served on the building committee for the First Presbyterian Church, supported the Republican Party, and became known for a fine pair of horses that he drove in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park and while on vacation in Atlantic City.</p>
<p>The role of Amelia Sparks in these activities, or others independent of her husband, did not leave traces in the public record. She did, however, nurture a lasting connection with Camden. The Sparks family moved to Philadelphia in 1874 but kept 325 Cooper Street as a rental property. Many years later, after the death of Charles Sparks in 1904, Amelia Sparks returned to the house on Cooper Street. Then in her 70s, she spent another decade in her earlier home with one of her daughters, a niece, and servants to take care of the housework.</p>
<p><strong>Rental Property</strong></p>
<p>The Sparks family’s removal to Philadelphia in 1874 opened a period of three decades of varied tenancy at 325 Cooper Street. For most of the 1880s, the tenants were members of the Browning family who had lived at the same address two decades before—in this later era, George G. Browning, the brother of Maurice Browning and his partner in the dye industry. His household included Mary White, his mother-in-law but also mother of Dr. J. Orlando White, who lived two doors away at <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/80" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">329 Cooper Street</a>.</p>
<p>After this return of the Brownings, the house was offered for rent or sale periodically through the economic downturn of the 1890s until it became a boarding house in 1897. For a short period until 1901, the boarding house was run by Catherine Fisler, who lived in the home with her husband, Leonard, a Philadelphia produce dealer and Civil War veteran who fought for the Union with the Pennsylvania Third Cavalry. Their household included a grown son, his wife, and a grandchild, in addition to as many as eight boarders. When recorded in the Census of 1900, the boarders reflected the coalescing population of the growing industrial city—all were born in New Jersey or Pennsylvania, but their parents had birthplaces that included Delaware, Virginia, England, and Germany. The boarders held jobs ranging from unskilled laborer to railroad conductor to white-collar professions.</p>
<p>The last renter before Amelia Sparks returned to Cooper Street was Alfred G. McCausland, a railroad superintendent who rented the house for two years before purchasing another at 521 Cooper Street. Formerly a longtime resident of Wilmington, Delaware, McCausland and his family arrived in Camden by 1903 when the Reading Railroad transferred him from the Wilmington and Northern Railroad to the Atlantic City line. In his late 40s at the time of the move, McCausland’s household on Cooper Street included his second wife, Elizabeth (Lizzie), and two grown children from his first marriage. His son Frank also worked in railroading as a brakeman.</p>
<p><strong>Business and Professional Women</strong></p>
<p>The house at 325 Cooper Street remained in the ownership of the Sparks family until 1924, passing from Amelia Sparks to her daughter Emma and then to a niece, also named in Amelia Sparks. They remained in the home after the death of the elder Amelia in 1915 but also rented to other tenants—in 1920, a widowed designer of ladies’ gowns, Blanche Morse, and her family of four children, three of whom were adults working and adding to the household income. A daughter worked as a clerk in a department store, a son was a bank clerk, and another son a secretary for a leather company.</p>
<p>By the 1920s, Cooper Street was experiencing a transition to commercial uses caused indirectly by the construction of the Delaware River Bridge (later renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge), which opened in 1926. Expecting an economic boom in Camden, boosters and real estate interests sought to remake Cooper Street into a commercial corridor. With many former residences converting into apartments and offices, it was therefore newsworthy when 325 Cooper Street sold in 1924 to an undisclosed buyer, “to remain as a residence,” the Camden <em>Morning Post</em> reported.</p>
<p>In fact, the residence became both a home and an office for its notable new owner, Dr. Lettie Ward. She was a longtime physician by the time she purchased 325 Cooper Street, but when she became a doctor in the 1890s she was only the second woman to practice medicine in the city. A Camden native, born in 1859, Ward initially followed a more common career path for unmarried, college-educated women and became a schoolteacher and principal. She was inspired, though, by Camden’s first female physician, <a href="https://njwomenshistory.org/discover/biographies/sophia-presley/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Sophia Presley</a>, who also had begun her career in teaching. In 1894, Ward resigned her position as principal of the Jesse Starr School and enrolled in the <a href="https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/womans-medical-college-of-pennsylvania/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania</a>. Graduating in 1898, she returned to Camden to practice.</p>
<p>Ward purchased 325 Cooper Street in 1924 after being displaced from her previous longtime home and office three blocks away, on Cooper Street near Sixth, because it stood in the path for extending a street to connect with the new Delaware River Bridge. In her new home, she had her office on the first floor, and in addition to providing health care she hosted executive board meetings of the Camden County Business and Professional Woman’s Club. For her fourteen years at this address, Ward lived upstairs from her office in a household with other unmarried women of her generation. When recorded by the 1930 Census, Ward was 70 years old and shared the living quarters with three other women, one of them her cousin Alice Hibbs, 60 years old. The other two, described in the Census as lodgers, were lifelong companions and recently retired principals of Camden schools: Laura J. Harrop, 64, and Lillie T. Osler, 63. After Ward retired and moved in 1938, Harrop and Osler also left to live with other family members and remained together for the rest of their long lives, each of them reaching 101 years of age. They were buried side-by-side in the Haddonfield Baptist Cemetery.</p>
<p><strong>Rooms and Apartments</strong></p>
<p>After Lettie Ward’s period of ownership, 325 Cooper Street followed a trajectory more typical of older rowhouses in North Camden, increasingly deteriorating yet becoming more densely populated with roomers and apartment dwellers. By 1940, a family of six rented the house and in turn let rooms to six additional lodgers. An ad offering an apartment in 1943 promised “refined surroundings,” but by 1949 a landlord was ordered by the city to install a shower and a toilet to bring the building up to code. In the 1950s, the house was marketed as a potential office location at a “reduced price” and later marketed for sale as a rooming and apartment house.</p>
<p>Tenants at 325 Cooper Street beginning in the 1940s reflected the changing demographics of Camden, especially the growing presence of <a href="https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/puerto-rican-migration/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Puerto Rican residents</a>. The Campbell Soup Company had recruited Puerto Rican workers to Camden during the Second World War, at first housing them near the soup factory on the waterfront. As workers stayed, created lives and families, and started businesses and institutions, they became increasingly dominant in the population of North Camden. Tenants with Spanish surnames were common at 325 Cooper Street; three born in Puerto Rico were documented in the 1950 Census: Vincent Porrata, 37, a kitchen helper in a hotel; and Arthur Cruz, 29, and Ralph Maldonado, 24, both laborers for a metal specialty company.</p>
<p>Sometime prior to 1980, 325 Cooper Street became the property of Edward Teitelman, a psychiatrist by profession but also a historic preservation activist. Teitelman purchased and maintained several of Cooper Street’s most notable houses remaining from the nineteenth century, including two others in the same block, <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/78" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">303</a> and <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/79" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">305</a>. He lived in 305 Cooper Street, the distinctive Queen Anne Revival residence designed by Philadelphia architect Wilson Eyre. By the late 1980s, however, 325 Cooper Street was appearing in legal notices for overdue back taxes.</p>
<p>Rutgers University acquired 325 Cooper Street from trustees for Edward and Mildred Teitelman in 2001, and renovations created offices for the New Jersey Small Business Development Center of Rutgers-Camden. The building later served as home to the Rutgers-Camden Institute for Effective Education, offices for civic engagement activities, and beginning in 2016 as co-working space for the <a href="https://march.rutgers.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities</a> (MARCH). Among other activities, MARCH initiated the “Learning from Cooper Street” project to recover and raise awareness of the Cooper Street Historic District and adjoining blocks occupied by Rutgers-Camden.</p>
Associated Individuals
<p>For a list of all known occupants of 325 Cooper Street, link to the <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15gz3_mGk3FcNl0TPaOZAq6B1CHvOpqRcY7a99xkp_l4/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Cooper Street Residents Database</a> and scroll down to 325.</p>
Sources
Camden and Philadelphia Newspapers (Newspapers.com and Genealogy Bank).<br /> Camden City Directories (Camden County Historical Society and Ancestry.com).<br /> Camden County Property Records.<br /> New Jersey State Census, 1885-1915, and U.S. Census, 1850-1950 (Ancestry.com).<br /> Prowell, George R. <em>The History of Camden County, New Jersey.</em> Philadelphia: L.J. Richards & Co., 1886.<br /><br /><strong>Note on sources:</strong> A structure survey prepared by the Camden Division of Planning in 1980 identified 325 Cooper Street as the "George Bockius House." Further research in property deeds has established that George Bockius lived instead in the similar house at 329 Cooper Street.
Research by
Charlene Mires and Lucy Davis
Posted by
Charlene Mires
Send corrections to cmires@camden.rutgers.edu
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
325 Cooper Street
Description
An account of the resource
Contributing structure, Cooper Street Historic District.
1850s
1860s
1870s
1880s
1890s
1900s
1910s
1920s
1930s
1940s
1950s
1960s
1970s
1980s
1990s
2000s
2010s
300 Block
325 Cooper Street
Apartments
Boarding House
Burlington County
Civil War
Doctors
Dyes
Greek Revival
Grocers
Merchants
Philadelphia
Puerto Ricans
Railroad Executives
Republican Party
Rooming House
Rutgers-Camden
Salem County
Sugar
Teachers
-
https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/files/original/b10abf82678c25d65658b12871051317.jpg
a1f973f83b5728f4de6caf2dca4e53cd
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Buildings
Description
An account of the resource
Houses and other structures on Cooper Street in Camden, N.J.
Place
Residence, business, or other entity.
Illustrations
Photograph by Jacob Lechner
Significance
401-03 Cooper Street is a contributing structure of the Cooper Street Historic District, listed on the New Jersey and National Registers of Historic Places. Documentation prepared by the Camden Division of Planning in 1980 noted, “In spite of stuccoing and alterations to the door, it remains one of the important visual links between Cooper Street’s pre- and post- Civil War development.” The scale of the house reflects the wealth and status of pioneers in Camden’s lumber industry during the nineteenth century; occupants over time included a prominent banker, a leader of the New Century Club of Philadelphia and the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, a female physician who founded a clinic for underprivileged women and children in West Philadelphia, and a future dean of Rutgers-Camden. In the 1920s the building transitioned to office and apartment use, thus exemplifying one of the Cooper Street Historic District’s stated qualities of significance, “the street's change from residential and professional to commercial." Owned by Rutgers University since the 1970s, the building became home to the Departments of <a href="https://polisci.camden.rutgers.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Political Science</a> and <a href="https://dppa.camden.rutgers.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Public Policy and Public Administration</a>.
Architectural style
Greek Revival
Date of construction
1849-50
History
<p>The double-lot residence at Fourth and Cooper Streets, originally the home of a lumber dealer’s family, is a testament to the prominence and prosperity of the lumber industry in nineteenth-century Camden. Lumber yards and sawmills began to populate the Camden riverfront in the 1830s and thrived for decades as the city’s dominant industry. Unlike Philadelphia across the river, Camden had an advantage of undeveloped river flats where rafts of cut timber could be accumulated. Timber came down the Delaware River from northern Pennsylvania and southern New York and filled Camden’s riverfront from Cooper Street north to Cooper’s Point. Lumber entrepreneurs also obtained Pennsylvania white pine after it traveled down the Susquehanna River to Marietta, Pennsylvania, in Lancaster County and to Port Deposit, Maryland. Once in Camden, the timber became the lumber and building products that railroads carried across South Jersey to build newly developing towns.</p>
<p><strong>A Business Pioneer</strong></p>
<p>The financial success of one of Camden’s lumber dealers, George W. Carpenter, can be seen in his home at 401-03 Cooper Street – a residence double the size of any other built in this block of Cooper Street during its first generation of development. Carpenter bought the adjoining lots in 1849 from an heir of the Cooper family, which had begun to sell land on the north side of Cooper Street for development. The purchase was among sixteen real estate purchases by Carpenter during the period from 1846 to 1859, a pace of investment enabled by his success as a lumber dealer. Carpenter, who was born in Massachusetts, had migrated to New Jersey sometime before 1830, the year he married Susan Heigh in Cumberland County. By 1841, together with a partner he was operating a lumber mill on Front Street near the riverfront.</p>
<p>As it rose during late 1849 and early 1850, the new house attracted attention from the Philadelphia <em>Inquirer</em>, which called it "one of the handsomest mansions any where near Philadelphia," and from the Philadelphia <em>Public Ledger,</em> which noted its front facade constructed of Connecticut brownstone. When they moved into their new home in 1850, the Carpenter household consisted of George and Susan Carpenter, their three sons ages 11, 13, and 14, and a sister or other female relative of Susan. The Carpenters added to their holdings in 1854 by purchasing the adjacent lot at <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/76" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">405 Cooper Street</a>, which remained undeveloped until its sale to one of their grown sons in 1868. George Carpenter’s business endeavors meanwhile extended from lumber into manufacturing, and he became regarded as “one of the business pioneers of our city,” in the words of the <em>Camden Democrat.</em> By the time of his death in 1870, he was taking an interest in the development of <a href="https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/atlantic-city/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Atlantic City</a> as a member of the Board of Directors of the Camden and Atlantic Railroad Company. His widow, Susan, remained in the Cooper Street house until 1887.</p>
<p><strong>Wealth and Activism</strong></p>
<p>A family that united two of Camden’s economic foundations – lumber and banking – became the next owners of 401-03 Cooper Street. Wilbur F. Rose, a banker, and Mary Whitlock Rose, the daughter of a lumber merchant, moved into the grandest house on the block from a smaller house across the street (406 Cooper Street) that had been in her family since before their marriage in 1869. By the time of the move in 1888, Wilbur Rose had advanced from clerk to cashier of National State Bank of Camden. The family included two young daughters, 13-year-old Elsie and 10-year-old Mary Caroline, and Mary’s widowed mother, Ann Whitlock. (A son had died in infancy.) At various times the Rose household included other extended family members and Black domestic servants.</p>
<p>With the benefits of substantial income and help to run the household, Wilbur and Mary Rose both became active in civic and charitable causes. As Wilbur Rose continued to advance to the position of vice president of the bank, he invested energy in a vast array of Camden business and charitable activities, from directorships with railroads and insurance firms to service on behalf libraries, poverty relief, and child welfare. Mary Rose, known for her interest in literature and the arts, expanded her public activities after two personal losses in 1891: the death of her mother as well as her younger daughter, who succumbed from scarlet fever at the age of 13. In keeping with the usual custom of the time, their funerals were held in the home.</p>
<p>During the 1890s, Mary Whitlock Rose became especially prominent in <a href="https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/womens-clubs/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">women’s club circles</a> in Philadelphia and nationally. She ascended to the presidency of the New Century Club in Philadelphia, a group that had formed after the nation’s Centennial in 1876, and she became a vice president of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. The New Century Club, originally devoted to literature and other cultural pursuits, had become active in progressive reform work by the time of Rose’s leadership. In speeches, Rose promoted the idea that clubs should become increasingly democratic and less defined by social class. She spoke on contemporary issues, including immigration and “The Possibilities of <a href="https://dp.la/primary-source-sets/the-new-woman" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">the New Woman</a>.” During this era, the New Century Club’s guests at its clubhouse on Twelfth Street included Susan B. Anthony and Jane Addams, the Chicago reformer who addressed the group on the subject of child labor.</p>
<p>Mary Rose’s surviving daughter, Elsie (known in adulthood as Elise Whitlock-Rose), accompanied her on trips to General Federation of Women’s Clubs meetings, and together they toured in Europe. Elise, who was educated at the Springside boarding school in Philadelphia’s Chestnut Hill section, acquired fluency in French and a passion for French culture and history. After her school days she channeled this interest into a series of books about cathedrals and cloisters of France, researched in Europe and published between 1906 and 1914.</p>
<p>The death of Mary Whitlock Rose from “a lingering illness” in 1907 left a $50,000 estate to Elise and her father, Wilbur, who remained at 401-03 Cooper Street together. They employed two domestic servants, recorded in the 1910 Census as Black women born in Delaware: Mary Harris, 19, and Rosa Johnson, 64. It was around this time that Elise Whitlock-Rose embarked on her own path of community service. In her late 20s she enrolled in the <a href="https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/womans-medical-college-of-pennsylvania/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania</a>, where she completed her M.D. degree in 1914. With another Woman’s Medical College graduate, Elizabeth F.C. Clark, she opened a clinic in West Philadelphia to serve underprivileged women and children, the Clinic of Notre Dame des Malades (Our Lady of the Sick). The clinic served patients for more than 30 years. Following the outbreak of World War I, which occurred while she was traveling in Europe with her father, Elise also sought to aid France by starting a war relief agency, which she called the Little House of Saint Pantaleon. She revived it in 1939 to help France at the start of World War II.</p>
<p>Elise Rose’s career as a physician entailed a move to Philadelphia, where she was joined by her father, who retired from business in 1912, in a home on Twenty-Second Street near Rittenhouse Square. The Rose family’s occupation of 403 Cooper Street came to an end in 1916.</p>
<p><strong>Offices and Apartments</strong></p>
<p>During the 1920s, 401-03 Cooper Street converted from a family home into physicians’ offices and apartments, a common pattern on Cooper Street during the period of construction of the nearby Delaware River Bridge (later renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge), which opened in 1926. Expecting a business boom in Camden, real estate interests promoted Cooper Street as a potential New York-style Fifth Avenue lined with offices and apartment buildings. They bought, renovated, and sold or managed numerous former residences in pursuit of this vision. (It is perhaps during this period of renovations that 401-03 Cooper Street gained its coating of stucco.) The physicians who subsequently owned 403 Cooper Street from the 1920s through the 1960s maintained practices in Camden but primarily lived in suburban Haddonfield. In addition to other doctors’ offices, tenants in the building included a dressmaker, Eva Smith, who lived in one of the apartments from 1929 until at least 1945. Her neighbors over that span of time included schoolteachers, a secretary, a boiler fireman, and a returning World War II veteran.</p>
<p>By the 1960s, students at Rutgers University were among the apartment tenants at 401-03 Cooper Street as the university expanded its campus north of Cooper Street through urban renewal demolitions in 1962-64. During this period of significant growth for Rutgers-Camden, one of 401-03 Cooper’s apartment dwellers was student <a href="https://mmarsh.camden.rutgers.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Margaret Marsh</a>, Class of 1967. Later earning graduate degrees at Rutgers and becoming a renowned scholar of the histories of women, gender, and medicine, Marsh returned to Rutgers-Camden in 1998 as Dean and later Executive Dean of the Rutgers-Camden Faculty of Arts and Sciences. She also served as Chancellor - twice, from 2007 to 2009 and from 2020 to 2021 - on an interim basis.</p>
<p>By the late 1970s Rutgers University owned 401-03 Cooper Street, which became home to the Departments of <a href="https://polisci.camden.rutgers.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Political Science</a> and <a href="https://dppa.camden.rutgers.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Public Policy and Administration</a>.</p>
Associated Individuals
For list of known occupants of 401-03 Cooper Street, visit the <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15gz3_mGk3FcNl0TPaOZAq6B1CHvOpqRcY7a99xkp_l4/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Cooper Street Residents Database</a> and scroll down to 403.
Sources
Camden and Philadelphia Newspapers (Newspapers.com and Genealogy Bank).<br /> Camden City Directories (Camden County Historical Society and Ancestry.com).<br /> Camden County Property Records. New Jersey State Census, 1885-1915, U.S. Census, 1850-1950 (Ancestry.com).<br /> Prowell, George R. <em>The History of Camden County, New Jersey.</em> Philadelphia: L.J. Richards & Co., 1886.<br /><br /><strong>Note on sources:</strong> Previous documentation estimated the construction date of this house as 1850. The revised date 1849-50 is based on the following account published in the Philadelphia <em>Inquirer </em>on September 28, 1849: "We observe with pleasure that within the last few months a very active spirit of improvement has been evident in Camden. On Cooper street, one of the handsomest mansions any where near Philadelphia, has been erected by Mr. George Alexander Carpenter, of the Flour and Saw Mills, Camden. It is now nearly completed, under the superintendence of Mr. [illegible] Hall, contractor -- Mr. J.W. Brister, bricklayer, Mr. Simpson, stone mason, and Mr. S. Sexton, cementer and plaster. The rooms of the different stories vary from 10 to 15 in height. Mr. Hoxie, we learn, was the architect." A subsequent article in the Philadelphia <em>Public Ledger, </em>January 26, 1850, noted the house was "nearly finished." This article also described the materials: "Its front, door and window frames are constructed of Connecticut borwn stone of a superior quality and dimensions."
Research by
Charlene Mires
Posted by
Charlene Mires
Send corrections to cmires@camden.rutgers.edu
Associated architects/builders
Attributed to <a href="https://www.philadelphiabuildings.org/pab/app/ar_display.cfm/51793" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Joseph C. Hoxie</a> (Philadelphia Inquirer, September 28, 1849)
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
401-03 Cooper Street
Description
An account of the resource
Contributing structure, Cooper Street Historic District.
1850s
1860s
1870s
1880s
1890s
1900s
1910s
1920s
1930s
1940s
1950s
1960s
1970s
1980s
1990s
200s
2010s
400 Block
Activism
Banking
Death
Doctors
Dressmakers
Greek Revival
Haddonfield
Lumber
Renovations
Rutgers-Camden
Scarlet Fever
Servants
Teachers
Women's Clubs
-
https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/files/original/e6d095749280003cc512cb78a109e073.jpg
788b6862485144125bd6fb1fc623ed4a
https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/files/original/bfc6a7b032eccf390cca76cc9a9c3947.jpg
fec7335650ea1fdd808c433f8678f688
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
-
https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/files/original/bccf2be593494953528898fa92b4a99a.jpg
d34376f3b4da30b37055cb4a19f090d2
https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/files/original/9d3e59ea1482fc62da01e3035b708308.jpg
f1e123e52e6c1ac1142a7e8b04fbc5d5
https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/files/original/5f894fd3ae04bf37fbdcb639ecceacb5.jpg
b360f4fd1bdc23c4ae7b84d6441ac541
https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/files/original/e1f81fe58d97f03a530b4074c3ec01c1.jpg
f9329f8aa7bf2c05257b0caffed7ff20
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
-
https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/files/original/1a58545206a4032c8a0b31422adb830d.jpg
b4d8fa46048454ef5ab9b406158ecd92
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Buildings
Description
An account of the resource
Houses and other structures on Cooper Street in Camden, N.J.
Place
Residence, business, or other entity.
Illustrations
Early twentieth-century photograph, Camden County Historical Society.
Significance
423 Cooper Street was the site of a contributing structure of the Cooper Street Historic District, which is listed on the New Jersey and National Registers of Historic Places. The district is defined as representing broad patterns of American history, including: "The buildings within the district include Camden's best remaining examples of Federal houses and its most intact examples of nineteenth-century houses as well as important office and bank buildings of more recent vintage. These buildings demonstrate the street's change from residential and professional to commercial." The latter transition was well illustrated by 423 Cooper Street, which began as a family home then became a funeral home from the 1920s through the 1960s. The house was demolished in the early 1990s.
Date of construction
c. 1847, renovated 1875.
History
<p>The house that stood at 423 Cooper Street for nearly 150 years was among the first houses built on the north side of Cooper Street as Cooper family heirs sold their land for development. When they began to divide their land into building lots in the 1840s, Camden was seeking new status as the seat of government for newly designated Camden County, formed from Gloucester County in 1844.</p>
<p><strong>Building Lives in Camden</strong></p>
<p> Jesse Townsend and his wife, Elizabeth, came to Camden in 1847, two years after they were married at the Byberry Friends Meeting in the rural northern reaches of Philadelphia. They had one infant daughter when Jesse took a job as a clerk at the State Bank of Camden, one of the institutions that marked the emergence of Camden as a city in its own right, not merely a satellite of Philadelphia across the river. The Townsends purchased the 423 Cooper Street lot and in their new house, likely a Greek Revival brick rowhouse like others in the 400 block, their family grew during the 1850s to include five children – four girls and a boy – in addition to Elizabeth Townsend’s mother, Mary Wilson. Jesse Townsend ascended to cashier of the bank. When he also entered into partnership in a flour and grain business, his business partner Caleb Parry also lived with the family for a time.</p>
<p> In 1862, the Townsend family sold the house and moved to 215 Cooper Street, closer to the bank at Second and Market Streets. New owners who lived in Woodbury rented out the house for the rest of that decade. Notably, in 1870 the tenants of the house included Richard and Mary Esterbrook, immigrants from England. Richard Esterbrook was the founder of the Esterbrook Steel Pen Company, founded in Camden in 1858 and on its way to becoming one of the world’s leading producers of steel pen nibs.</p>
<p> The house underwent a major renovation by its next owner, Frederick Rex, a bank clerk in his 20s who later became a prominent attorney. When advertised for sale by its previous owners from Woodbury, the house was described as having “six chambers, and bath room, parlor, dining room and kitchen; water and gas in the house which is in good order.” Rex apparently saw room for improvement and contracted with a builder in 1875 to “tear down, build up, and repair” the 30-year-old rowhouse. The result was a home that stood out from others on the block with Italianate details. Rex then sold the house to the family who also lived there with him, feed and flour dealer Charles C. Reeves, his wife Elizabeth, and their two children.</p>
<p><strong>Hardware and Prosperity</strong></p>
<p> A sheriff’s sale of 423 Cooper Street in 1886 opened more than three decades of occupancy by members of a prominent Camden retail family, William and Clara Fredericks and their daughter, Edna, born the same year they moved into the house. William Fredericks, born in Camden in 1854, managed the hardware store that his father, Harry, had founded in the 1850s. The store carried the goods that helped to build the growing city – window sashes, doors, and building supplies. While the business prospered, the elder Fredericks also organized the Camden Merritts baseball team, which lasted just a year (1883) but started the career of pitcher William (Kid) Gleason, who later played for the Baltimore Orioles, the Detroit Tigers, and Philadelphia Nationals.</p>
<p> When the Fredericks family moved into 423 Cooper Street, the <em>Camden Daily Telegram </em>noted that their “handsome new residence” was being “fitted up in an elegant manner.” The Fredericks family displayed other signs of affluence while living at this address, including the employment of domestic servants even though they remained a small family of three. When Edna Fredericks reached adulthood, at age 20 in 1906 she sailed with relatives to Europe for a summer tour. The family also spent summers at the Jersey Shore, favoring Atlantic City.</p>
<p> In 1916, approaching retirement from business, Fredericks put the house up for sale, advertising it as a “three-story brick house in one of the finest residential sections of Camden.” It offered “twelve rooms and handsome tiled bathroom; hardwood floors; pier and mantle mirrors; crystal chandelier; gas and coal ranges, cemented cellars; large yard and side entrance; front and side porches.” After a lifetime in Camden, in 1918 Fredericks retired and the family moved to an apartment in West Philadelphia.</p>
<p><strong>Funeral Home</strong></p>
<p> The next long-term occupant of 423 Cooper Street reflected the transition of the thoroughfare to commercial uses during the 1920s. The transition, promoted by Camden real estate interests, included conversion of many former residences into offices or apartment buildings. The redevelopment activity accompanied construction of the Delaware River Bridge, later renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, which opened in 1926.</p>
<p> Beginning in 1923, 423 Cooper Street became the residence and funeral home of Charles W. Hiskey, who was assisted in the business by his wife, Matilda. Previously on Sixth Street, the Hiskeys described their new location as a “modern funeral home.” Charles Hiskey developed an extensive network of acquaintances that could be expected to aid the business as he joined various lodges, the Masons, the Kiwanis Club, and other organizations. Matilda Hiskey was a lifelong member of the First Methodist Church. The funeral home remained in operation until 1961, when Charles Hiskey died, five years after his wife.</p>
<p><strong>Offices and Demolition</strong></p>
<p>A real estate firm next acquired the building and leased to office tenants, including physicians. As an office building, 423 Cooper Street changed hands several times during the 1960s and 1970s, then became the property of Rutgers University in 1984. When surveyed for inclusion in the Cooper Street Historic District in 1985, the building was described as “a highly intact example of one of the most prevalent styles of architecture on Cooper Street” and “a significant contributor to the heritage of the streetscape.” The building was demolished in the early 1990s, creating a vacant lot that remained three decades later.</p>
Associated Individuals
For a list of known residents of 423 Cooper Street, visit the <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15gz3_mGk3FcNl0TPaOZAq6B1CHvOpqRcY7a99xkp_l4/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Cooper Street Residents Database</a> and scroll down to 423.
Sources
<p>Camden and Philadelphia Newspapers (Newspapers.com and Genealogy Bank).<br /> Camden City Directories (Camden County Historical Society and Ancestry.com).<br /> Camden County Property Records.<br /> Cooper Street Historic District, National Register Nomination, U.S. Department of Interior.<br /> New Jersey State Census, 1855-1915, and U.S. Census, 1850-1950 (Ancestry.com).<br /> Prowell, George R. <em>The History of Camden County, New Jersey.</em> Philadelphia: L.J. Richards & Co., 1886.</p>
Research by
Charlene Mires
Posted by
Charlene Mires
Send corrections to cmires@camden.rutgers.edu
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
423 Cooper Street
Description
An account of the resource
Vacant lot, site of demolished contributing structure, Cooper Street Historic District.
1840s
1850s
1860s
1870s
1880s
1890s
1900s
1910s
1920s
1930s
1940s
1950s
1960s
1970s
1980s
1990s
400 Block
423 Cooper Street
Banking
Baseball
Demolition
Doctors
Esterbrook Steel Pen Company
Funeral Homes
Greek Revival
Hardware Dealers
Philadelphia
Quakers
Renovations
Rutgers-Camden
Woodbury
-
https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/files/original/274f82540cabe5cba90e18fbffa8b07f.jpg
95466047631d0a1772284d16836fdbaf
https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/files/original/a8ead66e3e94647b1a8a54e7d03d82fc.jpg
bd5e4bd3b06f33d6995ba09db2a9635b
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