The office building at 315 Cooper Street reflects Camden’s transitions and needs during an era of industrial decline. Built in 1966, the building first served as headquarters of the Amalgamated Food and Allied Workers Union Local 56, creating a tie between Cooper Street and Camden’s longstanding role in the food processing industry. In the 1980s, the building became home to the Camden County Juvenile Resource Center (later known as the Camden Center for Youth Development). The modern building took the place of a c. 1855 Greek Revival-style home owned by prominent Camden residents, including John W. Mickle, the namesake for Mickle Street and the former Mickle School. During a period as a rental property in 1870-71, the residence served as home to the Collegiate School of Camden, a private school. From the 1920s through the 1940s, before it was demolished for construction of the office building, the house at 315 Cooper Street was a hub of men’s club activity as headquarters for the Camden Club and later the Moose Lodge.
During the 1850s, the north side of Cooper Street began to fill with houses as Cooper family heirs sold their land for development. Among this first generation of structures in the 300 block, 315 Cooper Street ranked as one of the largest and most substantial. A double-lot, brick, Greek Revival residence, 315 Cooper Street first served as home for a retired physician from Cape May, Joseph Fifield, and his wife, Lydia. After Lydia Fifield’s death in 1858, the home was owned briefly by Albert W. Markley, a recent president of the Farmers’ and Mechanics’ Bank in Philadelphia (who lived at other times at 218 and 420 Cooper Street).
The 315 Cooper Street house gained a notable new connection in 1861, when it was purchased by John W. Mickle, whose family roots extended to seventeenth-century settlement in the region that became South Jersey. Mickle, a retired sea captain with extensive investments in turnpikes, railroads, and ferry operations, lived a scant few months in 315 Cooper Street before his death later in 1861. But he brought with him an extended household that included widows of his brother and nephew, who remained in the home through the end of the 1860s. John W. Mickle’s memory lived on in Camden through the naming of Mickle Street and the John W. Mickle School. Mickle was honored not only for his prominence in business but for his public service in the New Jersey State Assembly and in the convention that drafted the New Jersey Constitution of 1844. His survivors also recalled his seafaring days carrying trade between the Port of Philadelphia, Europe, and South America. His distinctions included transporting Princess Charlotte of France to join her father, Joseph Bonaparte, while he lived on an estate in Bordentown, Burlington County.
Collegiate School and Boarding House
The heirs of John W. Mickle rented 315 Cooper Street to tenants beginning in 1870, although family members returned to live there intermittently when it was not otherwise occupied. For about two years beginning in 1870, the home became a girls’ boarding school. The Ladies’ Department of the Collegiate School of the City of Camden at 315 Cooper was an extension of a private day school that Reverend Martin L. Hoffer, a Presbyterian minister, had been running since 1868 in a former Odd Fellows’ Hall at Fourth and Market Streets. Hoffer, who lived in Beverly, Burlington County, had previously operated a boys’ boarding school in Beverly and a military boarding school for boys in Allentown, Pennsylvania. His Collegiate School in Camden offered instruction in classical and commercial subjects for boys and girls (in separate classrooms). Viewed by the West Jersey Press as “important step in the permanent growth and prosperity of our city,” Hofford’s school on Market Street and its boarding school extension at 315 Cooper nevertheless proved to be short-lived. By 1874 he moved to other ministerial posts. The girls’ boarding school, acquired by new teachers and with a different name, continued two years longer nearby at 312 Cooper Street. The Collegiate School on Market Street, after a brief closure, reopened on Market Street under a new principal.
After the departure of the Collegiate School, the owners of 315 Cooper Street continue to offer it for rent or for sale: “A three-story brick house ten minutes’ walk from the ferry,” read an advertisement in the Camden Morning Post in 1879. “Contains all conveniences; heated throughout; stationary wash stands in bed rooms; two water closets; two kitchens; stationary wash tubs; underdrained; dry cellar.” For about five years, 1878 to 1883, 315 Cooper Street became a boarding house operated by Mary A. Lanning, who lived there with her husband and adult son, as many as seven boarders, and two servants. Recorded in the 1880 Census, the boarders included a lawyer, a bank teller and his wife, a sea captain and his wife, and a hardware dealer. The servants were Susan Boyer, a Black woman who was widowed, and likely her son John, age 12. Neither of the Boyers could read or write.
Family Home
The house at 315 Cooper Street became a family home once again in 1883, when a dispute among heirs of John W. Mickle led to a court-ordered sale of the property. For the next 26 years, 315 Cooper Street was owned and occupied by attorney Peter V. Voorhees, his wife Louisa Voorhees, their son James Dayton Voorhees, and usually three to four domestic servants. They previously lived several blocks away at 430 Linden Street, part of the 1870s development known as Linden Terrace.
The names of the new residents of 315 Cooper reflected the depth and breadth of their family histories. Peter V. Voorhees had a family lineage that traced to seventeenth-century Dutch settlement of Long Island, New York. Peter V., born in New Brunswick in 1852, graduated from Rutgers College in 1873 and then moved to Camden to study law with his uncle, Peter L. Voorhees. The younger Voorhees followed his uncle’s specialization in real estate law and became, among other roles, a representative of the Cooper family trust. In 1881, he married Louisa Clarke Dayton, whose family history extended to seventeenth-century English settlers of Boston. Later generations lived in Somerset County, New Jersey, and Louisa’s father, a lawyer, moved to Camden after graduating from Princeton College. Louisa’s uncle, William L. Dayton, served in the United States Senate and in 1856 was the young Republican Party’s candidate for vice president of the United States. Honoring Louisa’s family legacy, the Voorhees’s son was called by his middle name, Dayton.
Peter V. and Louisa Voorhees had been married about two years when they moved to 315 Cooper Street with one-year-old Dayton. A second child, a daughter named Elsie born in 1883, died just before her first birthday while the family vacationed at Lake Minnewaska, New York. A death notice in the Philadelphia Times stating that she died “suddenly” suggests an accident or other unexpected cause, but the details were not publicly disclosed. Thereafter, they remained a family of three as Peter prospered as a lawyer, Louisa engaged in charitable activities, and Dayton grew up at 315 Cooper Street and went on to college at Princeton.
The domestic workers in the Voorhees household included Celina (or Selina) Kammerer, who stood apart from other domestic help on Cooper Street through an unusually long term of service and her nationality. While most white domestics on Cooper Street were Irish immigrants or native-born, Kammerer was born in France. No evidence exists to explain how she came to be employed in the Voorhees household or why she stayed so long, but she was present throughout their time at 315 Cooper Street. Public records reveal only that Kammerer was born between 1850 or 1860, that her mother was French and her father either French or Prussian, and that she immigrated to the United States in 1866. Most other domestic servants who worked for the Voorhees family were Irish immigrant women, but by 1900 the family also employed a Black butler, Jesse Bailey. Born in Virginia in 1850, Bailey likely came to Camden as part of the emerging wave of Black migration out of the South to northern cities.
In addition to the large home on Cooper Street and domestic servants, the affluence of the Voorhees family enabled extended summer vacations to the Jersey Shore, Maine, the Adirondacks, and Florida. Like others of their social and economic standing, they had leisure time and resources for tourism to resorts by rail. During the 1890s, they also traveled by ocean liner to Europe and from the West Coast by sea to Japan.
At home, Peter V. Voorhees’s legal work included handling the Cooper family’s sale of their Cooper Street land between Front and Second Street for use as a public park—later known as Johnson Park. At the pinnacle of his legal career, between 1900 and 1905, he served as an appointed lay judge of the New Jersey Court of Errors and Appeals. Like other men of his station, Voorhees maintained a network of positions on local boards of directors, including the Camden Republican Club (at 312 Cooper Street, across from his house), the Camden City Dispensary (which provided medical care to the indigent), the West Jersey Title and Guarantee Company, and the First National Bank. He served as a vestryman of St. Paul’s Protestant Episcopal Church on Market Street. (He was not, however, connected with the 1899 creation and naming of Voorhees Township, which took its name from then-governor Foster McGowan Voorhees.)
The Voorhees family remained at 315 Cooper Street until the 1906 death of Peter V. Voorhees from multiple ailments that followed a serious bout with pneumonia the previous year, and the 1909 death of Louisa Voorhees from unspecified diseases. This ended the era of single-family ownership at this address. Dayton Voorhees, who served in World War I and then became a professor of politics at Princeton University, did not return to the family home. By 1915 it was rented out and divided between two households, one headed by James Buckelew, the superintendent of the West Jersey and Seashore Railroad Company, and the other headed by Lewis Larsen, a salesman. By 1920, the tenants were real estate dealer William P. Hollinger with his wife, Frances; three young children; and two domestic servants, a married Black couple James and Susan Taylor.
A Domain of Men
During the 1920s, Cooper Street experienced transition from a residential to commercial thoroughfare, largely through the efforts of real estate interests who anticipated a business boom coming with the 1926 completion of the Delaware River Bridge (later renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge). While many former residences on Cooper Street became apartments or office buildings, 315 Cooper Street gained a new purpose as a club house for Camden’s professional men.
The Camden Club came into existence through the efforts of a Camden undertaker, Fithian Simmons, who lived at 319 Cooper Street, next door to the vacated Voorhees home. The club filled two voids: on a personal level, Simmons poured his energy into the club following the death of his wife, Alverta, during the influenza epidemic in 1919. For Camden’s elite, the club offered a gathering place for men following the demise of the Camden Republican Club, which had been an anchor of men’s sociability on Cooper Street for decades. Supporters of the new Camden Club contributed $1,000 each to raise the funds to transform the Voorhees “mansion,” as the Morning Post described it, into a “luxurious clubhouse.” Membership required a $100 initiation fee and the same amount each year in annual dues.
With Simmons serving as president, the Camden Club sought to be the equivalent of the leading clubhouses for men in Philadelphia. The remodeled building offered a restaurant open day and night; parlors and reception rooms; rooms for billiards, card-playing, and other games; and four bedrooms on the third floor. By all outward appearances, the club thrived during the 1920s and celebrated its tenth anniversary with a dinner at 315 Cooper Street early in 1931 with “members and guests comprising leading business, professional and political notables,” the Morning Post reported. By that time, Simmons remained involved as president emeritus.
The Camden Club’s finances were not secure enough to survive the Great Depression, however. After purchasing the building for $14,000 in 1920, the club had taken out a mortgage for $100,000 to finance its ambitious remodel. By 1938, the club had fallen into default on the mortgage and owed thousands in back taxes to the City of Camden. With numerous prominent individuals and companies implicated as bond holders for the club, the building went up for sale to settle its debts.
Another fraternal organization in similar straits benefitted from the Camden Club’s demise. The Loyal Order of the Moose, Lodge 111, founded in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1888, had been active in Camden since 1909. The local lodge had opened a grand new headquarters on Market Street in 1929, but it fell into default on the mortgages and receivership by 1934. Having lost ownership of its hall to banks, the Moose Lodge opted in 1939 to buy the former Camden Club at 315 Cooper Street. For the next twenty-five years, the clubhouse became the hub of social and service activity for the men’s Moose lodge and the auxiliary Women of the Moose. Sports banquets, movie nights, dances, and other events were occasionally punctuated by police attention to liquor sales on Sundays and the presence of slot machines. Like other fraternal organizations of its time, the lodge restricted its membership to white people only, a limitation not overturned by Moose International until 1973.
Union Headquarters
By the 1960s, Cooper Street stood at the edge of an urban renewal zone. Between 1962 and 1964 Rutgers University created a new Camden campus through demolition of houses in the blocks between Cooper Street and the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, between Third and Fifth Streets. Although Cooper Street was spared wholesale destruction because of its perceived commercial value, the longstanding houses at 315 and 319 Cooper Street fell to demolition. Both became the sites for new union headquarters buildings, with 315 the site of a new, modern office building built in 1966 for the Amalgamated Food and Allied Workers Union, Local 56. Next door at 319 Cooper Street stood another strikingly modern structure built in 1960 for the International Union of Electrical Workers, Local 103. Together, the buildings created ties between Cooper Street and two of Camden’s longstanding industries, food processing and sound recording.
The Amalgamated Food and Allied Workers Union Local 56 – Meat Packing Division purchased 315 Cooper Street as the previous longtime occupant, the Moose Lodge, moved to temporary new quarters farther east on Cooper Street at the Walt Whitman Hotel. Formed in 1940, by the 1960s Local 56 represented workers in fisheries, canneries, farms, grocery stores, and food processing plants throughout New Jersey and at the General Foods plant in Dover, Delaware. Its work included organizing migrant labor in South Jersey, which in 1967 prompted a visit to Cooper Street by a delegation of Vietnamese tenant farmers escorted by the U.S. Department of Labor.
Later known as the United Food and Commercial Workers, Local 56 remained at 315 Cooper Street until 1982, when it opted to leave Camden for a building in Pennsauken that offered more space and easier, more ample parking.
Youth Services
By the time of the union’s departure, the economic and social circumstances of Camden had produced needs for greater social services for residents experiencing poverty, homelessness, or other effects of the sharp decline of industry in the late twentieth century. Responding to the needs of youth in these conditions, a nonprofit organization, New Ventures Management, purchased 315 Cooper Street and made it the headquarters for the Juvenile Resource Center (JRC). The center, led by former Camden school board member Stella Horton since its founding in 1978, provided juvenile offenders with alternatives to incarceration, including an alternative school, counseling, and employment programs.
The JRC continued its work on Cooper Street for decades, changing its name in 2003 to the Camden Youth Development Center (CYDC) after receiving a $1.2 million grant from the William Penn Foundation to join forces with the Camden City Youth Services Commission. Surrounded by that time by buildings purchased by Rutgers University, in 2012 the CYDC also gained an executive director, Felix James, with connections to Rutgers as a graduate of the university’s law school in Camden. Continuing operations in the 2020s, the CYDC stated its mission as “embracing and using the assets of young people to meet their needs and successfully address the complex work they must do to transform their communities and neighborhoods.” Its services encompassed leadership development, tutoring, employment preparation, college preparation, and “providing emotional, social, spiritual, physical, and cultural proficiencies.” Evolving from the original JRC focus on alternatives to incarceration, the CYDC in the 2020s stressed civic engagement as a pathway to success.
Camden and Philadelphia Newspapers (Newspapers.com and Genealogy Bank).
Camden City Directories (Ancestry.com).
Camden County Property Records.
New Jersey State Census, 1885-1915, and U.S. Census, 1850-1950 (Ancestry.com).
New Jersey Office of Cultural and Environmental Services, Historic Sites Inventory No. 0408205 (315 Cooper Street), 1985.
Prowell, George R. The History of Camden County, New Jersey. Philadelphia: L.J. Richards & Co., 1886.
Before a classroom building stood at 319 Cooper Street, the lots beneath it were the site and side yard of a three-story, brick Italianate rowhouse built in 1867. It was one of a pair that included the surviving structure next door (321). The houses were built for two prominent two prominent Camden business and civic leaders, Benjamin Archer (319) and Joseph De La Cour (321). They were advancements in architectural style from Cooper Street’s Greek Revival rowhouses of the 1850s, so striking that they stirred the West Jersey Press to describe them with a reference to the popular song of the Civil War era, “Home Sweet Home.” Noting the superior workmanship and the latest in home comforts, the newspaper commented, “It is by the addition of such buildings as these that will make Cooper Street in reality what it has been jokingly styled, the ‘Fifth Avenue’ of Camden.” Completing the picture, Archer and De La Cour installed iron fences on white marble foundations between the street and the side yards of their adjoining homes.
Urban Prosperity and Reform
For more than four decades, 319 Cooper Street was home to the Archer family, headed by Benjamin F. and Mary W. Archer. They moved to the new residence from their previous home at 227 Cooper Street, and by 1870 their household consisted of Benjamin, then 36 years old; his second wife, Mary, 31; a 12-year-old son from Benjamin’s first marriage, George; and a 1-year-old daughter, Helen. They employed two domestic servants, both Irish immigrants: Rosie MacEntire, 40, and Bridget Rogers, 35.
Benjamin Archer was near-lifelong resident of Camden, born in 1833 to Philadelphia parents who moved to the emerging city across the river when he was an infant. Both cities remained important in Benjamin’s life; in his early adult years, while still living in Camden he worked as a wholesale grocer in Philadelphia near the riverfront. His life took a turn, however, after he married Kate Starr, the daughter of a Camden iron manufacturer, in 1857. His new father-in-law, Jesse W. Starr, took him into the family business: the Camden Iron Works, a massive foundry that produced pipes for the water, sewage, and gas works of growing American cities. The company held contracts and franchises from Boston to San Francisco, generating employment for foundry workers and wealth for the Starr family.
Benjamin and Kate Archer had one son, George, while they lived in the Starr household in Haddonfield early in their marriage. But struggles lay ahead. In 1864, Kate Archer died at the age of 26 from causes that were not publicly disclosed, leaving Benjamin a widower with a young son while still in his early 30s. He remained a partner in the Camden Iron Works, but in 1865 he remarried. Mary W. Sloan, a schoolteacher prior to their marriage, bore one child before the family moved to 319 Cooper Street—a daughter who died in 1866 at the age of 3 months. The next was Helen, born in the new home in 1869, who survived.
Struggles in business also lay ahead. The financial panic of 1873 strained the iron foundry, leading Benjamin Archer to depart the business in 1875 before it reached the stage of voluntary bankruptcy. His familiarity with urban utilities from those years at Camden Iron Works apparently worked to his advantage, however. After a short period with another iron foundry in Burlington, Archer took a lasting position as manager of the Camden Gas Light Company, which held the city’s franchise for gas street lighting. He had also attained a degree of status and business reputation to qualify as a director on important corporate boards, including the National State Bank of Camden. During the 1870s he was among the incorporators of a company to build a turnpike between Haddonfield and Berlin; in the 1880s he was among the investors who built the first cottages at Barnegat City on the Jersey Shore. His prominence in Camden included elective office; a Republican, he served on the City Council and Board of Chosen Freeholders.
Benjamin and Mary Archer’s family grew to include an additional son, F. Morse Archer, born in 1873. They were active members of the Centenary Methodist Episcopal Church at Fifth and Cooper Streets, where Benjamin served on the board of trustees and led Sunday School and Mary, who had been educated at the M.E.-affiliated Pennington Seminary, took leading roles in the Ladies’ Aid Society and the Women’s Home Missionary Society. When the church contemplated expanding with a new building in 1893, the Archers hosted the meeting for reviewing the plans. When a new pastor arrived, the Archers were the couple in the receiving line who introduced their neighbors.
The Archers’ affluence gave them the means to contribute to social welfare. During the financial panic of the 1870s, Benjamin Archer joined committees to provide aid for the poor through a Relief Society and a Soup Society. But it was Mary Archer who took the most prominent role as a social reformer, especially in the 1890s after her children were grown. She joined the Camden branch of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), a national organization that had formed in the 1870s to promote prohibition and abstinence from alcohol. By the 1890s, the organization also engaged campaigns for prison reform, labor laws, and woman suffrage. Mary Archer served as treasurer of the Camden branch and as a representative at regional and national conferences. She supported the WCTU prison reform platform by advocating for a matron to be appointed to oversee the Camden City Jail.
Mary Archer was one of the driving forces in the WCTU’s creation of a Camden “Boys’ Parlor,” envisioned as a wholesome environment to divert news boys and other youth from juvenile delinquency. Opened in 1891 in rooms on Arch Street, the project sought ways “by which neglected boys may be lured from the resorts now enticing them, such as the pool room, and similar places frequented by the idle and vicious, and by the aid of such a helping hand, lifted to good citizenship,” the Camden Morning Post reported. The project evolved to offer carpentry lessons and entertainment, albeit alongside lectures on temperance. Archer, the treasurer of the project, instituted a savings program that encouraged the boys to deposit pennies into a collective bank account instead of spending them on cigarettes. Over time, the project added programs for girls and additional training for industrial trades. When boys were too old for the parlor, they were referred to the YMCA or assisted with job placement.
The house at 319 Cooper Street remained the Archers’ residence until 1910. At times they provided homes for elder relatives, and they always employed two domestic servants – for a remarkably long period from the mid-1880s until 1910, an Irish immigrant woman named Jane Lynn, and for a time her daughter with the same name. The children grew up, married, and left home. Both boys went to Princeton. George joined his father at the gas lighting company; Morse continued to Harvard Law and later returned to Camden, where he was appointed assistant prosecutor. Helen Archer followed her mother into church and reform activism, nurtured in this direction by childhood fund-raising fairs for the Camden Home for Friendless Children. When she married in 1892, her first home with husband Richard Develin was directly behind her parents at 318 Penn Street (although the Develins later moved to Merchantville).
In the first years of the twentieth century, Benjamin Archer advanced to president of the Camden National Bank after many years on the board of directors. He was by then in declining health with debilitating rheumatism, however, and sought respite with long stays at hot springs and mountain resorts. When he died at home in Camden in 1903, the Camden Courier eulogized his contributions to the city. “During his active business career [he] was identified with most of the public enterprises that have promoted the growth and prosperity of the city, and was ever among the foremost to participate in any movement having its welfare in view,” the newspaper editorialized. Helen Archer remained at 319 Cooper Street until her death in 1910, when she was recalled as “quite active in religious and charitable work,” especially the Boys’ Parlor, the WCTU, the YMCA, and the Centenary M.E. Church.
Funeral Director and Banker
After the Archer family, 319 Cooper Street briefly became a rental property that was converted into rooming house and restaurant called the New Stratford. By the middle of 1912, however, the house had a new owner and full-time resident, prominent funeral home director Fithian S. Simmons. Perhaps best known as the director of 1892 funeral for the poet Walt Whitman, Simmons had been in business in Camden for decades. By moving to Cooper Street, he established a residence separate from the funeral parlor on Market Street that had previously been his home.
Simmons was born in Port Elizabeth in Cumberland County, New Jersey, in 1855, and by 1870 moved to Millville to learn undertaking and cabinetmaking. At the age of 20, he went to work as a salesman for a Philadelphia undertaking supplies firm, but he left after two years, moved to Camden, and started his own funeral home. He married a young woman from Millville, Alverta Stanger.
By the time they moved to 319 Cooper Street in 1912, Fithian and Alverta Simmons were in their 50s – roughly the same age as their new home. They quickly commissioned alterations that added porches to the front and side, suburban-style upgrades that were becoming common for Cooper Street’s older residences. They had no children, but a nephew, Dr. Harry H. Grace, lived nearby at 303 Cooper Street; they also had a vast network of acquaintances created through Fithian Simmons’ many memberships in clubs and fraternal organizations. The household typically employed one domestic servant, in 1915 a second-generation Irish maid and, unusually, in 1920 a woman who had recently immigrated from Jamaica. The Simmons’ affluence also supported trips to Europe, and they were early adopters of the automobile.
Fithian Simmons’ customary life transformed during the 1920s, at home and in business. He was left a widower when Alverta died from influenza in 1919, the second year of the global epidemic. Shortly thereafter he created a new family of sorts when he co-founded the Camden Club in an available house next to his own (315 Cooper Street). He was immediately elected president of the businessmen’s club, which remained an institution on Cooper Street for nearly two decades. Simmons also remarried in 1922, making 319 Cooper Street also the home of his new wife, Roberta, who had also been previously widowed.
In the early 1920s, Fithian Simmons retired from undertaking and focused on other business interests, which included directorships of building and loan associations and the Central Trust Company, which he had co-founded with other Camden businessmen in the 1890s. From 1922 until 1927 he served as president of the bank. Fithian and Roberta Simmons remained at 319 Cooper Street until 1939, when he died at the age of 83 and she several months later at 71. They left bequests to siblings, to nieces and nephews, and to Cooper and West Jersey hospitals. The household belongings, including antiques and a 1938 Packard sedan, went up for auction to settle the estate.
Union Headquarters
The era of 319 Cooper Street as a single-family home ended with Fithian and Roberta Simmons. The street had largely transformed to commercial uses during the 1920s, indirectly as a result of the Delaware River Bridge (completed in 1926, later renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge). Camden boosters and real estate interests, expecting a business boom, promoted the transition of Cooper Street into a commercial thoroughfare. They bought, sold, and converted former residences into office buildings and apartments, including the twin to 319 Cooper Street (321), which became a six-unit apartment house. The next house to the west, 315 Cooper Street, became the Camden Club headed by Fithian Simmons.
The next chapter for 319 Cooper Street reflected another aspect of Camden’s history, its emergence and decline as an industrial powerhouse. By 1943, during World War II, the rowhouse at 319 Cooper Street became headquarters for the union that represented workers at the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), Local 103 of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers. RCA’s massive production complex at the foot of Cooper Street was then running at full strength to fulfill defense contracts. But in the wake of a series of labor conflicts and strikes in Camden during the 1930s, RCA had begun to move most of its production work to other parts of the country with cheaper labor. Wartime production masked the full impact of these moves on Camden, which after World War II retained primarily high technology elements of the company.
The union headquarters at 319 Cooper Street was a place for shop steward meetings, elections of officers, and charitable activities of the union. But rival unions also struggled over representation of RCA workers, with consequences for the headquarters building. By 1950, the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America lost its role as bargaining agent to its rival, the International Union of Electrical Workers (IUE). In a settlement between the unions, the IUE received title to 319 Cooper Street in 1951.
In 1959, the IUE broke ground for a new two-story office building in place of the rowhouse at 319 Cooper Street and its undeveloped side yard. The demolition was in keeping with urban renewal practices of the era, including plans by Rutgers University to demolish adjacent blocks of nineteenth-century rowhouses to create an expanded Camden campus. In place of the Italianate house built in 1867, the union commissioned a thoroughly modern, glazed brick and glass commercial headquarters designed by William L. Duble of Erlton, N.J. The new building housed an auditorium, administrative workspaces, and a wood-paneled conference room and office for the union president.
The new IUE headquarters, opened in 1960, became the setting for the mass meetings about prospects of RCA layoffs and for voting on contracts that averted a strike in 1967 and ended a 10-week walkout in 1970. In 1963, the headquarters also was a point of departure for busloads of Camden industrial workers bound for the August 28 massive March on Washington, where Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
Renovations for Classrooms
The IUE remained at 319 Cooper Street until 1973, then moved its local headquarters a block away to Market Street. A new era opened for 319 Cooper Street as a classroom building for a series of educational institutions, signaling Cooper Street’s emergence as an educational corridor. Renovations in 1974 transformed the union headquarters into the “urban campus” for Camden County College, which had its main campus in suburban Blackwood. With offerings that included classes in Spanish for Camden’s growing Puerto Rican population, Camden County College stayed until moving to a new building at Seventh and Cooper Street in 1978.
After Camden County College, 319 Cooper Street served as home to the Juvenile Resource Center (JRC) Alternative School and, next, the proprietary Kane Business Institute. Owned by Rutgers University since 2000, the building became a temporary location for the high school of the LEAP Academy University School, then a Rutgers-Camden classroom building, and beginning in 2013 home for the Rutgers-Camden Honors College. Multiple renovations for educational uses left the building unrecognizable as a landmark of Camden’s labor history. The modern office building of 1960 disappeared behind a brick façade that harmonized with the traditional materials used in Cooper Street’s older rowhouses—yet at the same time, obscured much of the building’s past.
Camden and Philadelphia Newspapers (Newspapers.com and Genealogy Bank).
Camden City Directories (Camden County Historical Society and Ancestry.com).
Camden County Property Records.
Cowie, Jefferson. Capital Moves: RCA’s 70-Year Quest for Cheap Labor. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999.
Dorwart, Jeffrey M. and Philip English Mackey. Camden County, New Jersey, 1616-1976: A Narrative History. Camden County, N.J.: Camden County Cultural & Heritage Commission, 1976.
New Jersey State Census, 1885-1915, and U.S. Census, 1850-1950 (Ancestry.com).
Prowell, George R. The History of Camden County, New Jersey. Philadelphia: L.J. Richards & Co., 1886.
327 Cooper Street is a contributing structure of the Cooper Street Historic District, which is listed on the New Jersey and National Register of Historic Places. The middle of a row of three houses built in the early 1850s, it supports the district’s significance as a collection of residences representing the nineteenth-century history of Camden. Its past residents include a Civil War soldier who became an officer of the U.S. Colored Troops, a prominent physician, and a journalist who became a United States Congressman. Since 2018, this building combined with the adjacent 329 Cooper Street has housed the Rutgers-Camden Department of Childhood Studies.
As Cooper family heirs sold their land for development in the 1850s, they used two adjoining lots at 327 and 325 Cooper Street to set an aesthetic for the future. The deeds for both properties, executed in 1852, specified that “three story brick buildings only shall be erected upon Cooper Street.” This ruled out wood-frame structures and assured houses of a size and scale that would only be affordable to similarly substantial owners. The lot later numbered 327 became the middle house of a row of three similar residences at the northwest corner of Fourth and Cooper Streets. The house, built between 1852 and 1855, was rented out by its first owners, who lived in Burlington County.
Civil War Family
The earliest tenants of 327 Cooper Street who can be documented are the Trimble family, who moved to this address by 1858. The Trimbles lived in Philadelphia before moving to Camden, but they had roots that extended to Chester County, Pennsylvania, and Baltimore, where family members went into the shipping and mercantile business. The head of the household on Cooper Street, Joseph Trimble, descended from those Baltimore merchants. He joined his father and grandfather’s business, and he and his wife Sarah, who married in 1840, started their family in Baltimore. By 1847, however, they moved to Philadelphia, and by 1852 they were in Camden.
The Trimbles filled their rented home at 327 Cooper Street with as many as 13 residents. The 1860 Census recorded Joseph, 45 years old, as an importer of soda ash (sodium carbonate), a chemical that would have been useful to South Jersey’s glassmaking industry. Sarah, 43 years old, by this time had borne ten children, seven of whom lived with the family, ranging in age from 2 to 18. Joseph’s brother James and his wife, Jane, both age 40, also lived at 327 Cooper Street, and the extended family employed two domestic servants: a Black woman, Asha Bocha, age 60, who was born in Maryland, and a white woman, Mary Murphy, an Irish immigrant 45 years old.
While the Trimbles lived at 327 Cooper Street, the Civil War rocked Camden and the family. Joseph Trimble, an early adherent of the Republican Party, plunged immediately into home front support for the Union. He joined the Camden Relief Society to collect and distribute funds to support the families of men who enlisted as soldiers; in 1862 he served as its president and hosted at least one meeting at his home. Trimble also served as a lieutenant in Camden’s regiment of the Home Guard, formed to defend New Jersey from aggression. Sarah Trimble, meanwhile, became a leader of the Ladies’ Soldiers Aid Society, which collected old clothing to be remade into bandages and other items for sick and wounded soldiers. She invited donations to be sent to her home. Joseph Trimble’s brother James did commissary work for the Union army.
The Trimble family also had a son of military age, their oldest, Armon, who was 19 years old when southern forces attacked the federal Fort Sumter in South Carolina. Armon soon enlisted for three months’ service as a private with the New Jersey Third Infantry Militia, which deployed to Washington and guarded trains carrying provisions to Union troops. He re-enlisted in 1862 as a second lieutenant with the Third Cavalry of the U.S. Army, a regiment then fighting Confederates as well as Native Americans in New Mexico. Armon joined the unit there, but it soon moved east to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and from there to St. Louis and Memphis, where he received notice in February 1863 that his services were no longer needed. Apparently not content to be idle during wartime, Armon next joined the Thirty-Third Regiment, Pennsylvania Infantry Militia, for emergency service during Robert E. Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania, serving from June 26 to August 4, 1863, a period that spanned the Battle of Gettysburg.
In his final act of Civil War service, Armon Trimble applied to become one of the white officers being placed in command of U.S. Colored Troops (USCT). After appearing before a board of examiners in Washington, at 22 years of age he gained appointment as a first lieutenant of the Twenty-Eighth Infantry Regiment USCT. His unit suffered heavy losses in the campaign at Petersburg, Virginia, and was among the Union forces to enter Richmond after the city fell. The regiment took charge of prisoners in Richmond, and thereafter redeployed to Texas, where Trimble and the rest of his troops mustered out in 1865.
While Armon Trimble was away in service, the rest of the Trimble family moved back to Philadelphia. It had made such a mark in Camden that a testimonial dinner held at the West Jersey Hotel in 1863 saluted Joseph Trimble as “a public man and a politician in the cause of justice, right, and humanity.”
The Lure of Science
After the departure of the Trimbles, 327 Cooper Street ceased to be a rental property. In 1864, the earlier owners from Burlington County sold the house to Sarah S. Moody, the daughter of a Philadelphia tailor who had been married for ten years to Edward F. Moody, a bank clerk and cashier. Sarah Moody’s family had local roots that extended to the American Revolution, when a direct ancestor fought at the Battle of Red Bank; her husband’s were similarly deep but in Boston, Massachusetts, where he was born. Edward Moody and his father, Paul, relocated to Philadelphia by the late 1840s. While Edward Moody held a series of clerk and cashier positions with Philadelphia banks, he and his father moved to Camden. They lived in the 200 block of Federal Street, close to the most direct ferry crossing to Philadelphia, when Edward and Sarah married in 1854.
By the time they bought the Cooper Street house, the Moodys had one son, 5-year-old Edward Jr., and another, Nicholas, was born after the move. Edward’s banking career progressed to his election as cashier of the New Republic Bank in Philadelphia in 1869 and of the Fourth National Bank of Philadelphia in 1871. The luxuries of the Moody household included a gold watch and a piano, and by 1870 the family employed a domestic servant, a Black woman who was born in Delaware, Louisa Wiggins, who was 20 years old. That year the Census recorded Edward as 39 years old, a bank agent; Sarah Moody, 35 years old, keeping house; and the boys Edward Jr., 11, and Nicholas, 3.
Edward Moody was also known locally as “Professor Moody” for his vocational devotion to science. He had been attending meetings at Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute since at least 1862, and he frequented the amateur scientific societies that formed in Camden in the late nineteenth century. This may account for his brief service as chief engineer of the Camden Water Works during 1872-73. But he was better known for his lectures and demonstrations of experiments in settings that included the Franklin Institute, the Wagner Free Institute of Science, and the Camden Microscopical Society. Promoting one of his talks on chemistry in 1874, the New Republic newspaper in Camden commented, “what has rendered his discourses so entertaining are his experiments, which are not only invariably successful, but so clearly and distinctly explained that even those who have a very limited knowledge of the science can understand and appreciate them.”
In 1873, after his stint with the Water Works, Edward Moody went to work for the newly founded Camden Safe Deposit Company. He remained with the company for the rest of his career, but in 1883 the Moodys sold their Cooper Street house and moved to Philadelphia. They continued to maintain ties in both cities, however, and returned to Camden in the 1890s.
City of Medicine
The growth of Camden in the decades after the Civil War drew increasing numbers of physicians to the city, among them the owner of 327 Cooper Street for the next 13 years, Dr. Alexander M. Mecray. His path to Camden followed a common pattern of an aspiring physician from a rural county who trained at a Philadelphia medical school and then found Camden to be a promising setting to begin practice. The opening of the new Cooper Hospital in 1887 encouraged the trend.
Alexander Mecray was born in 1839 in Cape May County, New Jersey, where his father was a river pilot and proprietor of the Delaware House hotel. The younger Mecray’s path to medical practice took him first to study in Camden with his brother-in-law, Dr. Alexander Marcy, and from there to the University of Pennsylvania medical school. During the Civil War, he worked as a medic at Satterlee Hospital in Philadelphia. After his service concluded, he married a woman with similar family ties to the region’s maritime activity, Lydia Etris, the daughter of a Philadelphia ship joiner.
Alexander and Lydia Mecray moved to Camden when he started his practice by purchasing a drug store at Fourth and Pine Streets in 1865. He became active in the Camden city and county medical societies and served on the board of managers for the Camden Dispensary, which provided medical services to the indigent. She bore three children and engaged in charitable activities, including raising funds for the dispensary and for the Women’s Park Association for Children. Mecrays were, therefore, well established in their professional, civic, and family life by the time they moved to Cooper Street in 1883.
Cooper Street was becoming an increasingly prestigious address during the 1880s, spurred by a more attractive streetscape accomplished by moving curbs on both sides of the street 12 feet toward the center. This created space for small front lawns and gardens for the length of the thoroughfare, which benefitted the older rowhouses built in the 1850s as well as the newer, architect-designed homes that began to appear in the 1880s. Among the Mecrays’ neighbors on Cooper Street were longtime associates in the medical community, J. Orlando and Elizabeth White, who lived in the house next door (329 Cooper) and Henry Genet and Helen Taylor, who had been their neighbors on Market Street and a few years later built a new home at 305 Cooper.
The Mecray household when they moved into 327 Cooper Street included Alexander, then 43 years old; Lydia, 35; a 17-year-old son, James, and two daughters, 13-year-old Julia, and 4-year-old Anna. When documented in the 1880 Census at their previous home on Market Street, the Mecrays employed a Black woman as a domestic servant: Emma Savage, who was 25 years old, illiterate, and born in Virginia. Her presence reflects the increasing population of African Americans moving to Camden and Philadelphia in the decades following the Civil War. There is no record of whether she worked for the family after they moved to Cooper Street, but the Mecrays continued to employ domestic servants throughout the years in their new home. They had others in their household as well: for a time, a widow and two daughters who may have been relatives; a German roomer who advertised private lessons in German, classics, and mechanical drawing; and Alexander Mecray’s father, James.
When Cooper Hospital opened in 1887, Alexander Mecray was among the first physicians appointed to its staff. The Mecray family continued to live at 325 Cooper Street through the 1890s, but they also acquired a farm in Maple Shade, Burlington County. In 1899 they put 327 Cooper Street up for sale and moved to the country.
Publishing and Politics
The next transfer of 327 Cooper Street made it the eventual home of a United States Congressman. Francis (Frank) F. Patterson Jr., 32 years old in 1900, was firmly entrenched in Camden circles of newspaper publishing and Republican politics. The son of a newspaperman, he had been around journalism since he was a boy in Woodbury doing odd jobs for printers and selling papers. After his father bought the Camden Courier, he became a typesetter at the age of 15 and city editor at 18. Moving in and out of jobs as a reporter and editor in Camden, Philadelphia, and Baltimore during his 20s, he found his way into politics as a protégé of Camden’s Republican power broker, David Baird. He edited the paper that Baird and other Republican organization leaders bought in 1894, the Camden Evening Telegram, and gained a share of ownership. In 1899 he joined with his brother Theodore and two other partners to merge the Telegram with another Camden paper, the Post, to create the Post-Telegram—which they sold to a syndicate headed by Baird.
By the time Patterson, his wife Isabel, and two-year-old son (also named Frank) moved into 327 Cooper Street, the newspaperman had taken his first explicit step into politics by serving one term in the New Jersey Assembly. Next, in 1900, his loyalty to the Republican Party was rewarded by an uncontested nomination to serve as Camden County Clerk, a position he held for the next two decades while he and Isabel raised their family on Cooper Street. Three additional children were born at home by 1910. That year, the U.S. Census recorded the household as Frank Jr., age 41; Isabel, age 37; and the children Frank 3d, age 12; Robert, 9; Isabel, 6; and Mary, 5. The Pattersons also employed domestic servants, in 1910 two Black women, both 29 years old: Addie Trader, who was born in Maryland, and Laura Anderson, born in Delaware. In addition to the servants, the Pattersons’ affluence gave them the ability to send their children to private Quaker schools (the boys to Penn Charter in Philadelphia).
While serving as County Clerk, Patterson remained publisher of the Post-Telegram and in 1911 served a one-year term as president of the Camden Republican Club across the street from his house, at 312 Cooper Street. His influence widened to banking circles as he became president of the Pyne Point Building and Loan Association and the West Jersey Trust Company. Isabel Patterson joined other Camden women in raising funds for charitable causes such as hospitals and the Red Cross. The era of the First World War touched the Patterson family as Frank Jr. served on the local draft board and his oldest son enlisted in the Army. Frank 3d served in the Quartermaster Corps in Newark during 1917-18, but he encountered his greatest risk during the global influenza pandemic that reached Camden in 1918. The first of the Patterson family to contract the illness was his mother, Isabel, then Frank 3d also contracted the disease while home on leave. Both survived.
Patterson’s next reward as a Republican loyalist came in 1920, when he was elected to the United States Congress from the First District following the death of the incumbent, his North Camden neighbor William J. Browning. Although dividing his time between Camden and Washington, Patterson remained deeply engaged in local matters, for example urging that the envisioned location for the new Delaware River Bridge be shifted northward so that it would not cut through the lumberyard of his longtime political patron, David Baird. His habits of attention to local politics soon played a role in his political demise. He easily gained re-election to Congress in 1922, but by 1924 he had a challenger who called attention to his minimal impact on the national stage. He lost his seat in Congress in 1926 to that challenger, Charles A. Wolverton, a former prosecutor and state assemblyman who ultimately served sixteen terms representing the First District.
By the time Patterson’s tenure of Congress ended, the Pattersons also departed the house at 327 Cooper Street. Like other many affluent Camden residents during the 1920s, in 1925 they moved to Merchantville, thus ending the era of 327 Cooper Street as a single-family home.
Rooming House
Cooper Street during the 1920s experienced transition brought on indirectly by construction of the Delaware River Bridge. Anticipating an economic boom for Camden, boosters and real estate interests sought to redevelop Cooper Street as a commercial corridor, akin to New York’s Fifth Avenue. Many nineteenth-century rowhouses underwent conversions into offices or apartments, while others slipped into a period as rental properties. This was the case of 327 Cooper Street, which for more than two decades provided financial support for a rooming house operator, Lillian Hertlein (often Anglicized as Hertline).
Hertlein, a single woman in her late 30s, had been living across the street in an apartment at 408 Cooper Street when she saw the opportunity to rent the former Patterson home. She paid $85 a month rent, placed ads in the newspapers, and by 1930 had filled the house with lodgers and one person who also paid for meals in addition to a room. The residents recorded in the 1930 Census reflected an array of working-class employment in Camden: factory workers, construction contractors, and a store manager. Two were employed at the enormous RCA-Victor complex at the foot of Cooper Street, one as an assembler of “talking machines” and the other as an electrician for radios. The mix was similar by 1940, although her roomers then included a family of three, including a seven-month-old infant. By 1940, Hertlein owned the home.
At some point in the 1940s, a man who came to live in Hertlein’s rooming house also became her husband. John F. Britt was a veteran of the First World War who had served with the 110th Machine Gun Battalion in France, earning a Purple Heart medal. When he filled out his draft registration card for World War II in 1943, he listed 327 Cooper Street as his address and Hertlein as a friend who would serve as his emergency contact.
Britt and Hertlein were married by 1947, when the Camden Courier-Post noted that “Mr. and Mrs. John F. Britt, of 327 Cooper Street…are at their summer home at Beach Haven Crest.” Like the earlier owner of their house, the new couple shared an interest in Republican politics, and both served as members of the local Republican Party committee. They became leaders in the local chapter of the Military Order of the Purple Heart and its auxiliary, and they formed a club to collect and repair toys to give to children in county shelters at Christmastime. John Britt worked as a machinist for the Scott Paper Company, a job he held for twenty-eight years.
The Britts lived on the first floor of 327 Cooper Street and rented out apartments on the second and third floors. They owned the building until at least 1954, and in their later years lived close by near Fourth and Market Streets. Reflecting the changing character of Cooper Street, an ad offering 327 for sale in 1953 described it as an “income property” with eight apartments. For sale again in 1958, it was described as vacant and “available for conversion to offices.”
Puerto Rican Neighborhood
When a new landlord advertised apartments at 327 Cooper Street in 1959, the ad promised renovated, three-room units and called attention to their location in a “Puerto Rican neighborhood.” The tenants with Spanish surnames who lived at this address in the late 1950s and early 1960s represented the Puerto Rican presence in North Camden that had been growing since the Second World War. During the war, the Campbell Soup Company had recruited workers from the island to keep its factory in operation. Housed at first near the plant on the Delaware River waterfront, the new Puerto Rican residents of Camden subsequently found apartments in nearby neighborhoods, started businesses and community institutions, and raised families. The ad for apartments at 327 Cooper Street documents one landlord’s recognition of the likely tenants for a building on Cooper Street in 1959.
The owners of 327 Cooper Street during this period were Saul and Frances Artis, a dentist and his wife who also bought the adjoining rowhouse at the northwest corner of Fourth and Cooper Streets (329). Saul Artis was among many other professionals during the 1950s and 1960s who made their living in Camden but chose not to live there – a common pattern in the decades following World War II. Saul, a graduate of Camden High School and the University of Pennsylvania Dental School, had served in the Army Dental Corps in the Panama Canal Zone. Following the war, he established his dental practice in Camden, but after marrying Frances they and their three children lived in Haddon Township.
The Artis's Cooper Street buildings served as Saul’s office as well as rental apartments. While other buildings in North Camden suffered from the neglect of absentee landlords, the Artises participated in the Cooper Street Association, which carried out beautification and maintenance projects. In 1960, they remodeled the house adjacent to 327 Cooper Street, 329, into modernized offices and apartments.
While the Artises invested and remodeled, in the nearby blocks to the north Rutgers University carried out an urban renewal plan that replaced the adjacent rowhouse neighborhood to the north with a campus of new buildings. Appreciating the growth of the university in their backyard, by 1981 the Artises donated their buildings to Rutgers; 327 Cooper Street served as a home for the Rutgers-Camden Department of Social Work, the campus’s first Hispanic Affairs Office, and the Bursar’s office. Since 2018 the building, joined with 329 Cooper Street and named the Artis Building after the donors, has housed the Rutgers-Camden Department of Childhood Studies.