1
10
8
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https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/files/original/0d9b5e8aa2d0a322030100729f9a6991.jpg
41ec076e0f91f685c84b7410d9ca645c
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
426 Lawrence Street forms part of a row of nineteenth-century, working-class houses that originated as rental properties erected by owners of grander homes facing Cooper Street. The row was included in the Cooper Street Historic District’s nomination to the National Register of Historic Places in 1989 to provide a “comprehensive view of Cooper Street’s social history” and “a clear view of the economic and social dichotomy that has continued to typify Camden.”
Date of construction
c. 1847-54
History
<p>At the back of two Cooper Street-facing properties (<a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/40" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">419</a> and <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/38" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">421</a>), two smaller houses with a small alley between them were added facing Lawrence Street sometime after 1847. The collective development of four residences stood on land purchased that year by Joseph R. Paulson, a Philadelphia merchant active in that city’s volunteer fire companies. Although just 35 years old when he bought the lots, Paulson apparently anticipated a need to assure future financial security for his family by 1848, when he placed the land and its ‘premises” in trust with his mother-in-law so that rents could be collected to support his wife and two young children. Paulson died in 1849 from a gastrointestinal hemorrhage while living in one of the Cooper Street-facing houses, and true to his wishes the four structures on his land generated income and at times provided shelter to his heirs for the next eight decades.</p>
<p><strong>426 Lawrence Street</strong></p>
<p>The 400 block of Lawrence Street had residents beginning in 1854, according to city directories. The earliest tenants who can be identified at 426 Lawrence Street included a man who later rose to prominence in Camden, Charles E. Derby, who rented the house between 1859 and 1861. Derby, a journeyman machinist born in Massachusetts, was a white man in his early 30s when he lived at 426 Lawrence with his wife, Susan (also white and in her early 30s), and their infant daughter Orilla. Shortly after they left Lawrence Street, in 1863, Derby co-founded the firm Derby & Weatherby (also known as the Camden Machine Works). Over the next four decades, the company grew at Delaware and Cooper Streets, where it produced machines for many of Camden’s waterfront industries. The firm specialized in building marine engines, including the engines that powered ferryboats operated by the Pennsylvania Railroad. By the time Derby died in 1901, he was described as “well known to machinists throughout the country.”</p>
<p>By 1865, the house at 426 Lawrence Street became home to a family that stayed for three decades, longer than any other residents of the block during the nineteenth century. The location would have been ideal for a house carpenter, the occupation of the head of household, William C. Bates. At that time and into the 1870s, builders were buying lots of land north of Cooper Street and rapidly putting up houses in pairs, groups of three, and entire rows. The distinctive Linden Terrace block (Linden Street between Fourth and Fifth Street) developed in 1871, for example. From Lawrence Street, Bates would have had a direct view, and potentially an opportunity for work, as builder Joseph Cooper constructed his unusually large, grand mansion at 406 Penn Street in 1869. Another of the city’s prominent builders, William Severns, had a carpentry shop across the street from Bates while that project was underway.</p>
<p>The Census of 1870 documented the Bates family as William, 54 years old, a white man; his wife Sarah, a white woman 55 years old; and their son Samuel, who was 30 years old and employed as a box maker. All were born in New Jersey. Unusual among their neighbors on working-class Lawrence Street, the Bates family employed or had a boarder who was a domestic servant, 19-year-old Maggie Johnson, for at least that one year. The family stayed on Lawrence Street until William Bates’s death in 1895, when he was 80 years old. His funeral took place from the house they had occupied for the last three decades.</p>
<p>Another relatively long-term tenant family occupied 426 Lawrence Street between 1896 and 1904. Like others on Lawrence Street during these years, William J. Roche and his wife, Rose, were immigrants—both had immigrated separately from Ireland during the 1870s and later married in the United States. They lived in Pennsylvania prior to moving to Camden sometime after 1888, following the birth of two children. William Roche appeared in Camden city directories as a clerk, but during the 1900 Census he identified his occupation as musician. That year while living on Lawrence Street, he was 49 years old; his wife, Rose, was 40 years old, and their two children, 13-year-old Regina and 12-year-old Gerald, were attending school. The family left Lawrence Street by 1905 and by 1910 had moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where William Roche worked as a piano polisher.</p>
<p>Tenants moved in and out frequently for the next two decades. Their occupations included steam fitter, printer, and molder, driver, machinist, bank watchman, and woodworker. At least one tenant family offered boarding for one or two working men. For a time during 1905, an unlicensed <a href="https://sciencehistory.org/collections/blog/stomping-the-margarine/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">oleo margarine</a> manufactory was set up at 426 Lawrence Street by an operator who sought to evade taxes by producing an unlabeled product for local stores. Inspectors hauled away 1,000 pounds of margarine as well as the machinery that produced it. The incident was an exceptional manufacturing use of the property, which otherwise remained rented to residential tenants.</p>
<p>By the 1920s, construction of the Delaware River Bridge (later renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge) prompted changes on Cooper Street as local real estate interests pushed to transform the residential street into a commercial thoroughfare. During this period, the longtime owners of 426 Lawrence Street, the Paulson family, put the house up for sale along with its companion Cooper Street-facing house (<a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/38" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">421 Cooper Street</a>). At the time, a daughter-in-law of the original Paulson property owner, <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/41" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Mary Paulson</a>, lived in 421 Cooper Street and derived income from renting out the other inherited houses. The sale of 421 Cooper and 426 Lawrence Street from Mary Paulson to the Bell-Oliver Corporation of Camden made news for the property’s lineage in Camden history. The Camden <em>Daily Courier</em> noted that only two families—the Paulsons and, before them, the Coopers—had owned the parcel since the time of the city’s founding.<br /><br />While Cooper Street transitioned to business uses, Lawrence Street remained a row of residential rental properties. For most of the 1920s, spanning the period of the sale of the property and renovation of the Cooper Street-facing house, 426 Lawrence Street was the home of a shipyard worker, Frank Kenny, and his wife Jeannette (who had previously lived down the street at 418 Lawrence). By 1930, a machine hand at the RCA Victor radio factory, Maybel Gray, rented the house. A white female, 33 years old, Gray headed a household of two children, ages 12 and 14, who were attending school.<br /><br /> The continued pairing of 426 Lawrence and 421 Cooper Street as one parcel was evident through the presence and transactions of <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/39" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Helen C. Waters</a>, a widow, who rented space in the remodeled 421 Cooper Street beginning in 1934. At that address, she operated her business, Helen’s Beauty Shoppe, and made a home for herself and two daughters. By 1943, after her daughters were grown, she moved to the smaller Lawrence Street house and subsequently bought the entire property, including 421 Cooper Street, in 1945. The property changed ownership again in 1947, transferring to an optometrist who ran his business in the Cooper Street-facing house but continued to rent 426 Lawrence Street to residential tenants. In 1950, Census takers recorded the occupant as Marguarite A. Graves, a 46-year-old white female working as a professional singer.</p>
<p>Frequently put up for rent or sale during the 1950s and 1960s, 426 Lawrence Street apparently also benefitted from a facelift to meet modern expectations. In 1953, a rental ad for the property described the house for potential tenants: “Teacher, business couple or widow looking for a modern central city home, here is a lovely tile bath, modern kitchen with dinette, one large bedroom, gas heated, living room and storage room.” The house, which had been standing for a century by the 1950s, also began to attract interest as a remnant of Camden history. One of Camden’s active preservationists, Edward Teitelman, purchased 426 Lawrence Street and its neighbor, <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/94" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">424 Lawrence</a>, in 1969. Teitelman, a psychologist by profession, saved other properties on Cooper Street and nearby during this period, including the distinctive <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/79" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">305 Cooper Street</a> designed by Philadelphia architect Wilson Eyre (later the Rutgers-Camden Writers House). He owned the pair of Lawrence Street houses until 1989; by 2004 they were in the hands of a real estate broker who sold them to Rutgers University in 2005.</p>
Associated Individuals
For a list of known residents of 426 Lawrence Street, link to the <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1oOkUYd5Qa7w5M0Ga0vWhq9evz980wMElF8jhPuw3GHM/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Lawrence Street Database</a>. For earlier residents of the block (prior to house numbering), see <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1cI-_IVB-ei-no50oQzzTn36wz6gTgtHiIXCxq8_s9Rw/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Lawrence Street by Block, 1854-1860</a>.
Sources
Camden and Philadelphia City Directories.<br /> Camden and Philadelphia Newspapers.<br /> Camden County Deeds.<br /> Sanborn Insurance Maps, 1885-1950.<br /> U.S. and New Jersey Census, 1870-1950.<br /><br /><strong>Note on sources</strong>: When documented for the National Register of Historic Places, the Lawrence Street rowhouses were thought to have been occupied by servants for the homeowners on Cooper Street. This research updates and corrects the record. At this address, research located one individual identified as a domestic servant, but she lived within the household of a tenant family.
Research by
Charlene Mires and 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
426 Lawrence Street
Description
An account of the resource
Nineteenth-century working-class rental property, Cooper Street Historic District.
1840s
1850s
1860s
1870s
1880s
1890s
1900s
1910s
1920s
1930s
1940s
1950s
1960s
1970s
1980s
1990s
2000s
426 Lawrence Street
Beauticians
Boarder/Lodger
Box Makers
Bridge Impact
Carpenters
Childhood
Children
Clerks
Crime
Death
Derby & Weatherby
Drivers
Hemmorhage
Historic Preservation
Investment
Ireland
Lawrence Street
Machinists
Massachusetts
Merchants
Molders
Musicians
Oleo
Philadelphia
Printers
RCA
Renovations
Rutgers University
Servants
Shipyard Workers
Steam Fitters
Watchmen
Woodworkers
-
https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/files/original/71e6707f8bcef09179ba518f552651c3.jpg
7271153aa049bf97d08cbbba199e6528
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
424 Lawrence Street forms part of a row of nineteenth-century, working-class houses that originated as rental properties erected by owners of grander homes facing Cooper Street. The row was included in the Cooper Street Historic District’s nomination to the National Register of Historic Places in 1989 to provide a “comprehensive view of Cooper Street’s social history” and “a clear view of the economic and social dichotomy that has continued to typify Camden.”
Date of construction
c. 1847-54
History
<p>At the back of two Cooper Street-facing properties (<a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/40" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">419</a> and <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/38" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">421</a>), two smaller houses with a small alley between them were added facing Lawrence Street sometime between 1847 and 1854. The collective development of four residences stood on land purchased in 1847 by Joseph R. Paulson, a Philadelphia merchant active in that city’s volunteer fire companies. Although just 35 years old when he bought the lots, Paulson apparently anticipated a need to assure future financial security for his family by 1848, when he placed the land and its "premises” in trust with his mother-in-law so that rents could be collected to support his wife and two young children. Paulson died in 1849 from a gastrointestinal hemorrhage while living in one of the Cooper Street-facing houses, and true to his wishes the four structures on his land generated income and the Cooper Street-facing houses at times provided shelter to his heirs for the next eight decades.</p>
<p><strong>424 Lawrence Street</strong></p>
<p>The 400 block of Lawrence Street had residents beginning in 1854, according to city directories. The earliest tenants who can be identified at 424 Lawrence Street were a family of five headed by a journeyman tailor, Charles Lewis, who lived in this house from 1858 until 1869. Lewis, a white man who was 38 years old in 1860, headed a family that included his wife, Sarah, age 32, and three children ranging in age from 2 years old to 11 (the older two attending school). The parents and their oldest child were all born in Pennsylvania; the two younger children were both born in New Jersey, indicating a move across the river in the early 1850s. While living at 424 Lawrence Street, by 1868 Charles Lewis changed his occupation or added a second position as collector of water rents for the Camden Water Works. Shortly thereafter, the family moved to a different home on Eighth Street.</p>
<p>During the last decades of the nineteenth century, tenants at 424 Lawrence included a barber, machinists, a boot and shoe maker, a sawyer, and a laborer. One of the longest-residing tenants during this period was a widow, Mary Davis, who earned her living as a dress trimmer while living at this address between 1881 and 1888. Davis, a white woman in her 30s, had previously boarded in another family’s home with her two children, so the move to a rented house on Lawrence Street may have been a step forward for the family. For most of the 1890s and into the first year of the new century, the tenants at 424 Lawrence were an extended family including Irish immigrants and their second- and third-generation children and grandchildren. Most consistently through this period, a laborer named William Thompson and his wife, Mary—a daughter of Irish immigrants—headed the household. By 1897, they shared the home with Mary Thompson’s Irish parents, John and Mary Reilly (or Riley), who moved in around the time Mary gave birth to the couple’s third child. The need for additional adults in the home may have been related to Mary’s health; she died in 1900 at the age of 33 from causes not publicly disclosed, leaving behind three children then aged 2 to 15. As the family circumstances changed, William Thompson’s occupation advanced from laborer to policeman, with the family economy also supported by John Reilly’s work as a carpenter and Mary Reilly’s work as a tailor. They left 424 Lawrence Street in 1901.</p>
<p>Additional nationalities were represented among tenants at this address in the early decades of the twentieth century, reflecting the diversity of Camden’s immigrant population. During 1904 and 1905, the residents were a Dutch family headed by John Vendengenten, a coachman who was 48 years old in 1905. He and his wife, Elizabeth, age 42, and their older son Johann, 19, had immigrated from Holland nine years before; a younger son, 7-year-old Rudolph, was born after they arrived in New York. While at 424 Lawrence Street, Elizabeth Vendengenten placed a newspaper advertisement offering her labor to do washing or cleaning. By 1910, the residents at this address included a woman born in French-speaking Canada, Corrine Barkley, whose Pennsylvania-born husband William worked in a livery stable and later as a driver. Both of their children had been born in New Jersey. From 1915 to 1923, a second-generation couple whose parents had been German immigrants, Gilbert and Emma Hicks, occupied the home. Gilbert worked as a carpet-layer and department store clerk, and his wife apparently did not work outside the home. And in 1930, another second-generation couple whose parents had been born in Ireland lived at this address.</p>
<p>The house at 424 Lawrence Street also had a connection with Camden’s emergence as an industrial center through the life experience of Mary Gibson, a tenant during the 1920s who worked at the <a href="https://ethw.org/Victor_Talking_Machine_Company" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Victor Talking Machine Company</a>. In her 70s by the time she lived on Lawrence Street, Gibson had been a widow since 1895, when her husband, Joshua, died from pulmonary consumption at the age of 37; their only son, Howard Sands Gibson, died in 1905 at the age of 19 from tuberculosis. Dependent on her own labor for support, Gibson went to work at the Victor Talking Machine Company by 1905, within a few years of the company’s founding. She remained in the Victor workforce as an inspector, assembler, and record maker for more than two decades as the company grew to one of Camden’s major industries. She was still making records at Victor when she moved to 424 Lawrence Street. Previously she had lived as a boarder or roomer with other families; at Lawrence Street she shared the house with her brother William Sands, an artist, until 1928. She died one year later, at age 74, then living in Audubon, New Jersey.</p>
<p>The long history of 424 Lawrence Street as an income generator for the original owners, the Paulson family, came to an end during the late 1930s. <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/41" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Mary Paulson</a>, a daughter-in-law of the first Paulson owner, had lived in one of the property’s Cooper Street-facing houses (<a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/40" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">419 Cooper</a>) since 1912 while renting out the other houses. By 1938, however, she had gone to live with a daughter in Merchantville and put 419 Cooper Street and 424 Lawrence Street up for sale (the adjacent <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/38" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">421 Cooper</a> and <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/95" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">426 Lawrence</a> houses were sold earlier, during the 1920s). Coinciding with the Great Depression, the offer of the two houses, by then close to 90 years old, failed to find a buyer despite steady reductions in the asking price. After several appearances in legal notices for taxes and sheriff’s sales, Paulson turned the property over to the First Camden National Bank and Trust Company in 1940.</p>
<p>Under new owners in the 1940s and 1950s, 424 Lawrence Street remained a rental property with tenants who included employees of RCA (which acquired the Victor Talking Machine Company in 1929). By 1969, the house and others in the 400 block became subjects of interest for their historical value. One of Camden’s active preservationists, Edward Teitelman, purchased 424 Lawrence Street and its neighbor, 426 Lawrence, in 1969. Teitelman, a psychologist by profession, saved other properties on Cooper Street and nearby during this period, including the distinctive <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/79" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">305 Cooper Street</a> designed by Philadelphia architect Wilson Eyre (later the Rutgers-Camden Writers House). Teitelman’s tenants on Lawrence Street included students from Rutgers-Camden, who were believed to be responsible for marijuana plants found growing behind 424 Lawrence Street in 1972. The students also became targets for crime, including a 1973 incident of armed robbery at 424 Lawrence Street that netted stereo equipment and more than $3,000 in cash. After two more transfers of ownership during the 1990s and early 2000s, Rutgers University purchased 424 Lawrence Street in 2005. The building later housed the Rutgers Cooperative Extension Food Pantry.</p>
Associated Individuals
For a list of known residents of 424 Lawrence Street, link to the <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1oOkUYd5Qa7w5M0Ga0vWhq9evz980wMElF8jhPuw3GHM/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Lawrence Street Database</a>. For earlier residents of the block (prior to house numbering), see <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1cI-_IVB-ei-no50oQzzTn36wz6gTgtHiIXCxq8_s9Rw/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Lawrence Street by Block, 1854-1860</a>.
Sources
Camden and Philadelphia City Directories.<br /> Camden and Philadelphia Newspapers.<br /> Camden County Deeds.<br /> Sanborn Insurance Maps, 1885-1950.<br /> U.S. and New Jersey Census, 1870-1950.<br /><br /><strong>Note on sources</strong>: When documented for the National Register of Historic Places, the Lawrence Street rowhouses were thought to have been occupied by servants for the homeowners on Cooper Street. This research updates and corrects the record.
Research by
Charlene Mires and Kaya Durkee; Kevin Johnson (research about Mary Gibson).
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
424 Lawrence Street
Description
An account of the resource
Nineteenth-century working-class rental property, Cooper Street Historic District.
1840s
1850s
1860s
1870s
1880s
1890s
1900s
1910s
1920s
1930s
1940s
1950s
1960s
1970s
1980s
1990s
2000s
424 Lawrence Street
Barbers
Cabinet Makers
Canada
Carpenters
Childhood
Children
Clerks
Coachmen
Crime
Death
Dressmakers
Drivers
Extended Family
Germany
Hemmorhage
Historic Preservation
Holland
Investment
Ireland
Laborers
Lawrence Street
Machinists
Merchants
Philadelphia
Rutgers-Camden
Sawyers
Shoemakers
Tailors
Victor Talking Machine Company
Widows
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https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/files/original/8647158bce125025f304bbb7304b26b1.jpg
91e6ee1c16471d13f15396b3a09fe1f6
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>321 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 Italianate rowhouse supports the district’s designation for architectural merit and offers a valuable contrast to the adjacent <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/83" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">323 Cooper Street</a> built in Queen Anne style 20 years later. The house also reflects the historic district's statement of significance that Cooper Street demonstrates "change from residential and professional to commercial." The 321 Cooper Street building began as a family home then turned to professional and commercial uses in the twentieth century. The residents of 321 Cooper Street connect this address with varieties of pharmacy and medical practice in the nineteenth century and demonstrate Camden’s role in forging connections between Philadelphia and the nearby countryside. As an office building for Rutgers-Camden, in the twenty-first century 321 Cooper Street houses the <a href="https://cure.camden.rutgers.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Center for Urban Research and Education (CURE)</a>.</p>
Architectural style
Italianate
Date of construction
1867
History
<p>The building at 321 Cooper Street is a survivor of a pair of Italianate rowhouses built in 1867 for two prominent Camden business and civic leaders, Joseph De La Cour (321) and Benjamin Archer (next door, <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/85" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">319</a>). An advancement in style from the nearby Greek Revival rowhouses of the 1850s, 321 Cooper Street and its neighbor inspired the <em>West Jersey Press </em>in 1867 to invoke a vision of home life from the song popular during the Civil War era, “Home Sweet Home.” Noting the superior workmanship and the latest 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, De La Cour and Archer installed iron fences on white marble foundations between the street and the side yards of their adjoining homes.</p>
<p><strong>Pharmacy and Public Service</strong></p>
<p>Joseph C. De La Cour had been the proprietor of a drug and chemical store in Camden for thirty years by the time he and his family moved to Cooper Street from their quarters near the store (Third and Arch Streets). De La Cour, whose father was French, was born in New York in 1813 but spent most of his boyhood in in Philadelphia. He went to work there as a cabinet maker, but he studied pharmacy and chemistry at night. In 1836, he bought his Camden drug store. He and his wife, Elizabeth, lived adjacent to the store in a household that grew to include two children and often other extended family members and employees.</p>
<p>The De La Cour pharmacy expanded into a manufacturing business. The same year the De La Cours moved to Cooper Street, the druggist bought a brick building at Front and Arch Streets for an enlarged laboratory. As manufacturing chemists and pharmacists, De La Cour and his son (also named Joseph, also a pharmacist) produced and sold compounds and supplies for other drug stores. Their products included extracts, ointments, syrups, and powders of various kinds, and they became especially well known for a non-irritating adhesive plaster. The company also gained a contract to provide surgical equipment to the United States government.</p>
<p>Joseph and Elizabeth De La Cour also devoted energy to civic and charitable activities. Joseph served as a city alderman and for many years was a member and treasurer of the Camden Board of Education. During the 1860s, the couple joined their neighbors in founding the <a href="http://www.dvrbs.com/camden/CamdenNJ-Home-Friendless-Children.htm" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Camden Home for Friendless Children</a> to provide shelter and aid to poor children. Elizabeth De La Cour joined the women of home’s Board of Managers, who raised funds and oversaw the facility as it grew to serve as many as forty children, including those who lost fathers in the Civil War. While altruistic, the home also reflected prevailing attitudes toward the poor by seeking to bind out children to homes where they could learn useful trades.</p>
<p>At 321 Cooper Street, the 1870 Census recorded a multi-generational De La Cour household that included Joseph C. De La Cour, then 57 years old; Elizabeth, 50; their daughter Emily, 27; and their recently married son Joseph Loriot De La Cour, 32, with his wife, Mary, and 1-year-old son, Joseph Carl De La Cour. (Joseph L. De La Cour was a veteran of the Civil War, having enlisted in 1861 with a Zouave unit that deployed to Virginia and guarded railroads near Alexandria for three months; while there, they were visited by President Abraham Lincoln.) Also in the De La Cour household in 1870 were the elder Joseph’s mother, Mary Peall, 76 years old, and two Black domestic servants: Rachael Green, 42, and Tinsey Weeks, 17.</p>
<p>During the 1870s, the father and son pharmacists were among the founders of the New Jersey Pharmaceutical Society, which sought to advance the science of pharmacy and establish professional standards through state regulations. After forming in 1874, the group achieved a state law governing the practice of pharmacy, including a requirement that drug stores be managed by registered pharmacists. Joseph L. De La Cour served as vice president and president of the society during these productive years.</p>
<p>The composition of the De La Cour household evolved in the 1870s, first with the death of Mary Peall in 1874, at the age of 80. Around the same time, Joseph L. and his family moved to their own home on Sixth Street, but meanwhile Emily De La Cour married and brought a new son-in-law to 321 Cooper Street. With her husband Edward F. Nivin, a Philadelphia tin dealer, Emily bore two daughters, who were 3 and 2 years old by the time the 1880 Census documented the extended family. The household continued to employ two domestic servants, but in 1880 they were white, Irish immigrants: Mary McCort, 40, and Elizabeth Murphy, 25.</p>
<p>The De La Cour family lost an anchor in 1883 when Elizabeth De Le Cour died at age of 64, two days before Christmas, from an illness that was not publicly identified. The Board of Managers of the Camden Home for Friendless Children published a tribute in the Camden <em>Morning Post, </em>calling her “ever ready with her time, strength and means, to help on the good work.” Elizabeth De Le Cour also held title to the family home, which upon her death became the property of her daughter, Emily Nivin.</p>
<p>While Joseph C. De La Cour continued to head the household at 321 Cooper Street, it was increasingly a home full of Nivins, who had two more children by 1885. In 1887, De La Cour marked his fiftieth year in business while still at this address, but soon thereafter he moved in with his son on Sixth Street. When he died in 1891 at the age of 79, he was described admiringly as “one of the oldest and best-known citizens of Camden.” The Nivins built a new house in the adjoining side lot to the De La Cour home, at 323 Cooper Street, but lived there only briefly. The De La Cours’ era on Cooper Street ended in 1890, when both houses were put up for sale.</p>
<p><strong>Eclectic Medicine</strong></p>
<p>During the early 1890s, 321 Cooper Street changed hand several times, in part due to court actions related to debts of new owners. While the title transferred from one owner to the next, for about two years, in 1892 and 1893, the house gained a high-profile new use as the “medical parlor” of James Parker Finlaw. A familiar face in Camden from the portrait that appeared in his constant advertising in the local newspapers, Finlaw offered remedies for “chronic diseases of all kinds in both sexes.” In the ads, he published testimonials to his success treating everything from throat and lung diseases to hemorrhoids to “female complaints of all kinds.” He had been in the business for twenty years by the time he came to Cooper Street.</p>
<p>Finlaw was a practitioner of “eclectic medicine,” a nineteenth-century method of healing that stressed plant-based remedies and avoided chemical compounds, over-drugging, and invasive surgery. Finlaw, born on a Salem County farm in 1847, came to this field following service in the Civil War. While still a teenager, in 1863 he had enlisted in the <a href="https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/search-battle-units-detail.htm?battleUnitCode=UNJ0002RC" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Second Cavalry Regiment of New Jersey</a>, which skirmished, fought, and foraged for two years in the middle and deep South. After the war, he apparently remained in the midsection of the country; he married a woman from Ohio, and by 1876 they settled in Hutchinson, Kansas.</p>
<p>In Kansas, Finlaw apparently discovered eclectic medicine. He attended Kansas Eclectic College in 1879 and then returned East to attend and graduate from the <a href="https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e0-cc42-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Eclectic Medical College of the City of New York</a>. The year after he graduated, in 1885, he was back in South Jersey with a home and office on Broadway in Camden. He was a rare eclectic practitioner among the many mainstream doctors who came to Camden from the medical schools of Jefferson College and the University of Pennsylvania. Conventional medicine frowned upon the alternative practices of eclectics, but Finlaw appealed to patients with his copious advertising. A characteristic headline offered “Dr. Finlaw’s Dyspepsia and Liver Cure, Which Will Remove All Obstruction to the Comforts of Healthy Womanhood.” The ads identified him as “J.P. Finlaw, M.D.” and offered assurances that he had graduated from a “regular medical school.” Among the many published testimonials, a signed statement from the city editor of the <em>Camden Democrat</em> declared that Finlaw was not “a quack.” The editor went on to “cheerfully recommend Dr. Finlaw’s medicines, the dyspepsia and liver cure especially.”</p>
<p>While in Camden, Finlaw rented offices at several locations, tending to favor places where he could advertise proximity to Cooper Hospital, the bastion of the local medical establishment. He also expanded the reach of his practice by publishing treatises and incorporating as the Finlaw Medicine Company. Shortly before moving to Cooper Street, he took an extended trip through the West, and upon his return advertised the advantages of his clinical study “of the morbid changes which take place in the human system under different climatic influences.”</p>
<p>By moving to 321 Cooper Street, Finlaw claimed another location of medical respectability in a neighborhood populated by some of the city’s most eminent physicians. Along with the medical parlor, Finlaw’s household included his wife, Elizabeth (Lizzie), and three children who ranged in age from 10 to 14 at the time they arrived on Cooper Street in 1892. They moved again in 1893, when they bought a house on south Sixth Street, thereby regaining the opportunity to advertise a location near Cooper Hospital. They remained in Camden until at least 1900, but in later life Finlaw returned to Kansas. When he died there in 1933, he was still remembered in Camden as a “patent medicine doctor” who “had a large following who believed implicitly in his remedies.”</p>
<p><strong>Philadelphia Merchant</strong></p>
<p>Following the brief interlude of the medical parlor, 321 Cooper Street had more conventional occupants. A produce merchant who worked in Philadelphia, Richard Augustus Brice, bought the property in 1893, and it remained the Brice family home for the next 24 years. Brice, who was born in Maryland, gave up farming in the late 1870s and moved to Philadelphia to engage in the business of acquiring farm produce and reselling it in the city. Chickens, eggs, potatoes, peaches, and more arrived in Philadelphia from the farms of Delaware and Maryland for resale by Brice and his partner, Joseph E. Hendrickson, another former Maryland farmer. By 1893, the year he moved to Cooper Street, Brice had his own produce establishment near Front and Callowhill Streets in Philadelphia.</p>
<p>The Brice household at 321 Cooper Street was headed by Brice and his second wife, Margaretta (Rice) Brice. When they married in Philadelphia in 1876, Brice was a recent widower with two young daughters. They lived briefly in Philadelphia, where Margaretta oversaw renting rooms in their Vine Street home to boarders, but relocated to Camden by 1880. They had five additional children, three of whom were still young enough to be at home and attending school in 1893. The 1900 Census recorded the household at 321 Cooper Street as Richard Augustus (he was called by his middle name), then 55 years old; Margaretta, 44, and three of their children ranging in age from 9 to 16. The family employed domestic servants, at least periodically. One, Mary Alston, lived with the family in 1902, and the 1905 New Jersey Census documented the presence of a 14-year-old Black “house girl,” May Fisher. In addition to the employment of servants, the family’s achievement of affluence was marked by their purchase of a cottage in Ocean City, New Jersey, in 1900.</p>
<p>On Cooper Street, Brice was a rare Democrat among the many Republicans who then controlled local politics and frequented the Camden Republican Club, then at 312 Cooper Street across from Brice’s house. Brice ran unsuccessfully as a Democrat from Camden City Council in 1889, and in the 1890s he supported the “Committee of One Hundred” reform movement. In addition to fielding candidates for office, the Committee of One Hundred spurred a wide-ranging investigation of city-awarded contracts. The effort turned up little malfeasance, but its targets for scrutiny included the Camden Heating and Lighting Company led by Brice’s neighbor at <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/83" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">323 Cooper Street</a>, John Burleigh.</p>
<p>From time to time, the Brices’ older children returned to the household. Their oldest son, Charles Augustus Brice, triggered sensational headlines in local newspapers in 1896 when he penned a suicide note after a quarrel with his father and a girlfriend. In 1904 and 1905, the same son’s then-wife sued for divorce, and the subsequent court hearings again filled news columns with the private and business affairs of the Brice family. Charles Brice was back at home with his parents and other adult siblings from 1905 until 1910.</p>
<p>Richard Augustus Brice experienced failing eyesight in his later years and relied on his sons to carry on the produce business, renamed R.A. Brice & Son. He died in 1910, but Margaretta Brice remained at 321 Cooper Street until 1917. She then moved to the family’s shore home in Ocean City and lived there until her death in 1933.</p>
<p><strong>Commercial Cooper Street</strong></p>
<p>After the departure of the Brice family, 321 Cooper Street served as home and office for two Camden dentists: John Owens, who rented the property in 1920, and Milton J. Waas, who owned the house from sometime after the Brices left until 1926. This ended the era of 321 Cooper Street as a single-family home as construction of the Delaware River Bridge (later renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge) brought change to Cooper Street. Expecting a business boom for Camden after the bridge opened in 1926, local boosters and real estate interests sought to transform Cooper Street into a more commercial corridor of office and apartment buildings.</p>
<p>In 1926, 321 Cooper Street conveyed to Julia M. Carey, a 26-year-old daughter of Irish immigrants who was staking out a career in real estate sales after working as a stenographer and notary. On behalf of the Bell-Oliver Corporation, she sold three Cooper Street houses—321, <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/38" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">421</a>, and 521—to investors and stayed on to manage and remodel them. In the case of 321, the investor group retained her name as “The Carey Company.” The Camden <em>Courier-Post</em> reported on the work of the "energetic realty lady" on September 11, 1926. Effectively block-busting a residential street into commercial uses, Carey renovated 321 Cooper Street into an apartment house, gave 421 a <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/38" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Mission-revival makeover</a> to create an office building, and converted 521 into offices for lawyers.</p>
<p>The next occupants of 321 Cooper Street demonstrated the effects of Carey’s efforts. One of the apartments became the Be-Del Beauty Shop, which opened in the building in 1927 and offered “permanent waves and all other ranches of beauty culture work” in a “newly and modernly equipped—beautifully and comfortably appointed” salon. The apartment tenants reflected the spectrum of working-class life in Camden. In 1930, they included Julia Carey and her sister, Anna, and a railroad clerk whose wife was an officer worker in the RCA radio factory. By 1940, there were two employees of the radio factory, a shipper for a printing company, a railroad clerk, an advertising copywriter for a department store, a housekeeper, and a secretary in a public school. By 1950, the range of occupations was similar, but each apartment had at least one child under the age of 5 – evidence of the post-World War II baby boom. A tenant in the late 1950s, Betty Lichtman, operated a reading group for children.</p>
<p>Despite the increase in population density, the apartment venture was not profitable enough to outweigh the debts for renovation. The building began to appear in notices for sheriff’s sales as early as 1929 and again in 1932 as the Great Depression bore down on Camden. Additional changes in ownership occurred until 1954, when the house was put up for auction, advertised as six apartments and six baths, located near the Walt Whitman Hotel and one block from Campbell Soup and RCA. “Excellent professional location,” the auctioneer promised. “Always 100% occupied. Long waiting list. Two apartments on each floor, private entrance, separate gas and electric meters, fire escape, all new copper piping, large yard through to Lawrence Street, detached two-car garage building.”</p>
<p><strong>Vintage Living</strong></p>
<p>By 1980, when the City of Camden surveyed and documented the ownership of historic structures on Cooper Street, the 321 Cooper Street apartment house had been donated to Rutgers University. A new campus for Rutgers-Camden had grown in the blocks between Cooper Street and the Benjamin Franklin Bridge during the 1960s and 1970s. While the campus replaced blocks of similar rowhouses through urban renewal demolition, 321 and other former residences on Cooper Street had been spared because of their perceived commercial value. The appeal and potential of Cooper Street buildings increased with the advent of federal tax credits for historic preservation projects and later in connection with a new federal courthouse annex completed at Fourth and Cooper Streets in 1994.</p>
<p>In 1991, Rutgers entered into a partnership with a redevelopment firm, Vintage Living, to rehabilitate both 321 and <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/69" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">411</a> Cooper Street into modernized offices. The buildings’ locations across the street from the site for the new federal courthouse then under construction positioned the buildings well for legal offices, the project managers believed. Renovations proceeded, but by 1998, back taxes owed on the properties forced a sheriff’s sale and led to the title transferring entirely to Rutgers. Thereafter a building of Rutgers-Camden, 321 Cooper Street at first housed offices for the <a href="https://www.leapacademycharter.org/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">LEAP Academy</a> University School and the <a href="https://clc.camden.rutgers.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Community Leadership Center</a>. It later became home to the <a href="https://cure.camden.rutgers.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Center for Urban Research and Education (CURE)</a>.</p>
Associated Individuals
For a list of all known occupants of 321 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 321.
Sources
<p>Bynum, W.F., and Roy Porter, eds. <em>Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine.</em> London: Taylor & Francis Group, 1993.<br />Camden, Philadelphia, and Chestertown, Maryland, Newspapers (Newspapers.com and Genealogy Bank).<br /> Camden City Directories (Camden County Historical Society and Ancestry.com).<br /> Camden County Property Records.<br />Dorwart, Jeffrey M. and Philip English Mackey. <em>Camden County, New Jersey, 1616-1976: A Narrative History. </em>Camden County, N.J.: Camden County Cultural & Heritage Commission, 1976.<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.</p>
Research by
Charlene Mires, Lucy Davis, and Joseph Bozzuto.
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
321 Cooper Street
Description
An account of the resource
Contributing structure, Cooper Street Historic District.
1860s
1870s
1880s
1890s
1900s
1910s
1920s
1930s
1940s
1950s
1960s
1970s
1980s
1990s
2000s
2010s
300 Block
321 Cooper Street
Apartments
Camden Home for Friendless Children
Civil War
Committee of One Hundred
Democratic Party
Dentists
Doctors
Druggists
Extended Family
Italianate
Maryland
Merchants
Ocean City
Philadelphia
Produce
Real Estate
Redevelopment
Renovations
Rutgers-Camden
Veterans
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https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/files/original/b371944a6a69dc0e6345a7e81c94c62e.jpg
9ca6b9724bb3a108ca1e7b5c6f1db82c
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Buildings
Description
An account of the resource
Houses and other structures on Cooper Street in Camden, N.J.
Place
Residence, business, or other entity.
Illustrations
Photograph by Jacob Lechner
Significance
325 Cooper Street is a contributing structure of the Cooper Street Historic District, which is listed on the New Jersey and National Register of Historic Places. The west end of a row of three houses built in the early 1850s, it supports the district’s significance as a collection of residences representing the nineteenth-century history of Camden. Its past residents include Camden’s second female physician, Lettie Ward. Since 2016, offices in this building have included the <a href="https://march.rutgers.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities</a> (MARCH) at Rutgers-Camden.
Architectural style
Greek Revival
Date of construction
c. 1852-1854
History
<p>As Cooper family heirs sold their land for development in the 1850s, they used two adjoining lots at 325 and <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/81" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">327</a> Cooper Street to set an aesthetic for the future. The deeds for both properties, executed in 1852, specified that “three story brick buildings only shall be erected upon Cooper Street.” This ruled out wood-frame structures and assured houses of a size and scale that would only be affordable to similarly substantial owners. The lot later numbered 325 became the west end of a row of three similar residences at the northwest corner of Fourth and Cooper Streets. The house, built between 1852 and 1854, was rented out by its first owners, who lived in Burlington County.</p>
<p><strong>From Countryside to City</strong></p>
<p>The first known tenants of 325 Cooper Street were members of the large and prominent Browning family, whose ancestors immigrated to the region from Holland in the early eighteenth century. Maurice Browning, who rented 325 Cooper Street beginning in 1854, grew up among a dozen siblings on his father Abraham’s farm in Stockton Township, about three and a half miles from Camden. The elder Browning, in addition to farming, also played a role in the city’s growth by establishing the Market Street Ferry, which passed to his heirs (including his son Maurice) when he died in 1836.</p>
<p>Maurice Browning, born in 1811, left the farm and pursued a career in pharmacy, working first in a drug store in Mount Holly, then studying pharmacy in Philadelphia, and then opening a drug store on Market Street in Camden. By the time he rented the house on Cooper Street, he had expanded his business activities to manufacturing and banking. With other family members, in 1840 he established the Aroma Mills, which extracted and sold dyes from woods. In 1855, around the time he moved to Cooper Street, Browning became a director of the newly formed Farmers’ and Mechanics Bank (later the First National Bank of Camden).</p>
<p>The Browning family at 325 Cooper Street in 1860 was headed by Maurice, then in his 40s, and his wife Anna, in her 30s, the daughter of a Philadelphia merchant who also owned a farm near Haddonfield. Married since 1840, their years on Cooper Street began in sadness in 1854 with the death of their oldest daughter, Ellen, who was 14 years old. The cause of her death was not publicly reported, but in the custom of the time her funeral was held at home prior to burial in Colestown Cemetery. The Brownings had earlier lost another child, a son named Maurice after his father, who died in 1850 when less than 2 years of age. These losses left the Brownings a family of five. When documented by the 1860 Census, the children were a son, Abraham, 15 years old, and two daughters, Josephine, 6, and Alice, 3. Another son, Lehman, was born the next year, in 1861. The Brownings employed two domestic servants, both Irish immigrants: Rebecca Caffrey, 36 years old, and Catherine McMullen, 17.</p>
<p>During the family’s years on Cooper Street, Maurice Browning joined in the enthusiasm for the new Republican Party, founded in 1854. At a mass meeting in Camden in 1856, Browning was among the local party supporters who turned out to voice support for the Republican platform and its national candidates, John C. Fremont for president and William L. Dayton for vice president. In 1862, Browning was among the original members of the Union League of Philadelphia, founded to support the Union cause during the Civil War.</p>
<p><strong>Camden, Philadelphia, and the World</strong></p>
<p>The Browning family left 325 Cooper Street by 1863, the year before the property’s original owners sold the home to Charles A. Sparks, a partner in a Philadelphia wholesale grocery and imports business. With his wife, Amelia, and their four children, Sparks lived at 325 Cooper Street during a decade, from 1864 to 1874, that proved pivotal in his career. Like other merchants with Camden and Philadelphia ties, his interests widened to investments that aided Camden’s growth and the region’s reach outward in the nation and the world.</p>
<p>Charles Sparks had family roots in <a href="https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/locations/salem-county-new-jersey/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Salem County</a>, New Jersey, but his father (a mariner), mother, and a brother had moved to Camden by 1850. Sparks began his adult working life across the river in Philadelphia as a clerk in the wholesale grocery, importing, and exporting business of Edward C. Knight, a Camden County native, and soon became a partner in the E.C. Knight Co. While remaining with the firm, Sparks chose to live in Camden after his 1852 marriage to Amelia Ross, who was born in England, the daughter of a merchant who became an extensive landholder in Stockton and Pennsauken Townships. They moved to Cooper Street from their earlier home near Third and Market Streets. By the time of the 1870 Census their household at 325 Cooper Street included four children, a son and three daughters ranging in age from 5 to 13; Charles by this time was 43 years old, and Amelia was 40. They employed at least one domestic servant, Sarah McHale, likely an Irish immigrant.</p>
<p>Charles Sparks' association with the E.C. Knight Co. placed him in an extensive network of trade between Philadelphia, the Pacific, and the Caribbean. Around the time that Sparks went to work for Knight, the firm expanded its trade from importing coffee from the West Indies to seagoing trade with California. As he became a partner in the company, Knight initiated imports of molasses and sugar from Cuba. At first acting as an agent for other refineries in Philadelphia, by 1870 the E.C. Knight Co. established its own refinery complex in the Southwark section of the city, with Charles Sparks in charge. Edward Knight also invested in railroads and steamship lines; in 1874, Sparks joined him as an incorporator of the <a href="http://cnhillsborough.blogspot.com/2021/03/delaware-and-bound-brook-railroad.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Delaware River & Bound Brook Railroad Company</a>, a 27-mile line reaching northward from Trenton that posed a challenge to the Camden & Amboy Railroad’s dominance of rail connections with New York.</p>
<p>Sparks' success in business returned benefits in Camden. At home at 325 Cooper Street, he initiated interior and exterior renovations. The <em>West Jersey Press </em>observed in 1869 that Sparks “has made a decided and tasteful alteration, both internally and externally, in his dwelling. He has replaced the ordinary window glass with French plate, in walnut sash, giving the front a pleasing effect.” The house in 2022 retains an impressive nineteenth-century hallstand, marble fireplace, and ornately framed parlor mirror that may attest to these improvements. Sparks also invested time and funds in Camden institutions, for example serving on the board of the Farmers’ and Mechanics’ Bank (later the First National Bank of Camden) with the previous occupant of 325 Cooper Street, Maurice Browning. He served on the building committee for the First Presbyterian Church, supported the Republican Party, and became known for a fine pair of horses that he drove in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park and while on vacation in Atlantic City.</p>
<p>The role of Amelia Sparks in these activities, or others independent of her husband, did not leave traces in the public record. She did, however, nurture a lasting connection with Camden. The Sparks family moved to Philadelphia in 1874 but kept 325 Cooper Street as a rental property. Many years later, after the death of Charles Sparks in 1904, Amelia Sparks returned to the house on Cooper Street. Then in her 70s, she spent another decade in her earlier home with one of her daughters, a niece, and servants to take care of the housework.</p>
<p><strong>Rental Property</strong></p>
<p>The Sparks family’s removal to Philadelphia in 1874 opened a period of three decades of varied tenancy at 325 Cooper Street. For most of the 1880s, the tenants were members of the Browning family who had lived at the same address two decades before—in this later era, George G. Browning, the brother of Maurice Browning and his partner in the dye industry. His household included Mary White, his mother-in-law but also mother of Dr. J. Orlando White, who lived two doors away at <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/80" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">329 Cooper Street</a>.</p>
<p>After this return of the Brownings, the house was offered for rent or sale periodically through the economic downturn of the 1890s until it became a boarding house in 1897. For a short period until 1901, the boarding house was run by Catherine Fisler, who lived in the home with her husband, Leonard, a Philadelphia produce dealer and Civil War veteran who fought for the Union with the Pennsylvania Third Cavalry. Their household included a grown son, his wife, and a grandchild, in addition to as many as eight boarders. When recorded in the Census of 1900, the boarders reflected the coalescing population of the growing industrial city—all were born in New Jersey or Pennsylvania, but their parents had birthplaces that included Delaware, Virginia, England, and Germany. The boarders held jobs ranging from unskilled laborer to railroad conductor to white-collar professions.</p>
<p>The last renter before Amelia Sparks returned to Cooper Street was Alfred G. McCausland, a railroad superintendent who rented the house for two years before purchasing another at 521 Cooper Street. Formerly a longtime resident of Wilmington, Delaware, McCausland and his family arrived in Camden by 1903 when the Reading Railroad transferred him from the Wilmington and Northern Railroad to the Atlantic City line. In his late 40s at the time of the move, McCausland’s household on Cooper Street included his second wife, Elizabeth (Lizzie), and two grown children from his first marriage. His son Frank also worked in railroading as a brakeman.</p>
<p><strong>Business and Professional Women</strong></p>
<p>The house at 325 Cooper Street remained in the ownership of the Sparks family until 1924, passing from Amelia Sparks to her daughter Emma and then to a niece, also named in Amelia Sparks. They remained in the home after the death of the elder Amelia in 1915 but also rented to other tenants—in 1920, a widowed designer of ladies’ gowns, Blanche Morse, and her family of four children, three of whom were adults working and adding to the household income. A daughter worked as a clerk in a department store, a son was a bank clerk, and another son a secretary for a leather company.</p>
<p>By the 1920s, Cooper Street was experiencing a transition to commercial uses caused indirectly by the construction of the Delaware River Bridge (later renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge), which opened in 1926. Expecting an economic boom in Camden, boosters and real estate interests sought to remake Cooper Street into a commercial corridor. With many former residences converting into apartments and offices, it was therefore newsworthy when 325 Cooper Street sold in 1924 to an undisclosed buyer, “to remain as a residence,” the Camden <em>Morning Post</em> reported.</p>
<p>In fact, the residence became both a home and an office for its notable new owner, Dr. Lettie Ward. She was a longtime physician by the time she purchased 325 Cooper Street, but when she became a doctor in the 1890s she was only the second woman to practice medicine in the city. A Camden native, born in 1859, Ward initially followed a more common career path for unmarried, college-educated women and became a schoolteacher and principal. She was inspired, though, by Camden’s first female physician, <a href="https://njwomenshistory.org/discover/biographies/sophia-presley/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Sophia Presley</a>, who also had begun her career in teaching. In 1894, Ward resigned her position as principal of the Jesse Starr School and enrolled in the <a href="https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/womans-medical-college-of-pennsylvania/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania</a>. Graduating in 1898, she returned to Camden to practice.</p>
<p>Ward purchased 325 Cooper Street in 1924 after being displaced from her previous longtime home and office three blocks away, on Cooper Street near Sixth, because it stood in the path for extending a street to connect with the new Delaware River Bridge. In her new home, she had her office on the first floor, and in addition to providing health care she hosted executive board meetings of the Camden County Business and Professional Woman’s Club. For her fourteen years at this address, Ward lived upstairs from her office in a household with other unmarried women of her generation. When recorded by the 1930 Census, Ward was 70 years old and shared the living quarters with three other women, one of them her cousin Alice Hibbs, 60 years old. The other two, described in the Census as lodgers, were lifelong companions and recently retired principals of Camden schools: Laura J. Harrop, 64, and Lillie T. Osler, 63. After Ward retired and moved in 1938, Harrop and Osler also left to live with other family members and remained together for the rest of their long lives, each of them reaching 101 years of age. They were buried side-by-side in the Haddonfield Baptist Cemetery.</p>
<p><strong>Rooms and Apartments</strong></p>
<p>After Lettie Ward’s period of ownership, 325 Cooper Street followed a trajectory more typical of older rowhouses in North Camden, increasingly deteriorating yet becoming more densely populated with roomers and apartment dwellers. By 1940, a family of six rented the house and in turn let rooms to six additional lodgers. An ad offering an apartment in 1943 promised “refined surroundings,” but by 1949 a landlord was ordered by the city to install a shower and a toilet to bring the building up to code. In the 1950s, the house was marketed as a potential office location at a “reduced price” and later marketed for sale as a rooming and apartment house.</p>
<p>Tenants at 325 Cooper Street beginning in the 1940s reflected the changing demographics of Camden, especially the growing presence of <a href="https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/puerto-rican-migration/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Puerto Rican residents</a>. The Campbell Soup Company had recruited Puerto Rican workers to Camden during the Second World War, at first housing them near the soup factory on the waterfront. As workers stayed, created lives and families, and started businesses and institutions, they became increasingly dominant in the population of North Camden. Tenants with Spanish surnames were common at 325 Cooper Street; three born in Puerto Rico were documented in the 1950 Census: Vincent Porrata, 37, a kitchen helper in a hotel; and Arthur Cruz, 29, and Ralph Maldonado, 24, both laborers for a metal specialty company.</p>
<p>Sometime prior to 1980, 325 Cooper Street became the property of Edward Teitelman, a psychiatrist by profession but also a historic preservation activist. Teitelman purchased and maintained several of Cooper Street’s most notable houses remaining from the nineteenth century, including two others in the same block, <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/78" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">303</a> and <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/79" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">305</a>. He lived in 305 Cooper Street, the distinctive Queen Anne Revival residence designed by Philadelphia architect Wilson Eyre. By the late 1980s, however, 325 Cooper Street was appearing in legal notices for overdue back taxes.</p>
<p>Rutgers University acquired 325 Cooper Street from trustees for Edward and Mildred Teitelman in 2001, and renovations created offices for the New Jersey Small Business Development Center of Rutgers-Camden. The building later served as home to the Rutgers-Camden Institute for Effective Education, offices for civic engagement activities, and beginning in 2016 as co-working space for the <a href="https://march.rutgers.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities</a> (MARCH). Among other activities, MARCH initiated the “Learning from Cooper Street” project to recover and raise awareness of the Cooper Street Historic District and adjoining blocks occupied by Rutgers-Camden.</p>
Associated Individuals
<p>For a list of all known occupants of 325 Cooper Street, link to the <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15gz3_mGk3FcNl0TPaOZAq6B1CHvOpqRcY7a99xkp_l4/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Cooper Street Residents Database</a> and scroll down to 325.</p>
Sources
Camden and Philadelphia Newspapers (Newspapers.com and Genealogy Bank).<br /> Camden City Directories (Camden County Historical Society and Ancestry.com).<br /> Camden County Property Records.<br /> New Jersey State Census, 1885-1915, and U.S. Census, 1850-1950 (Ancestry.com).<br /> Prowell, George R. <em>The History of Camden County, New Jersey.</em> Philadelphia: L.J. Richards & Co., 1886.<br /><br /><strong>Note on sources:</strong> A structure survey prepared by the Camden Division of Planning in 1980 identified 325 Cooper Street as the "George Bockius House." Further research in property deeds has established that George Bockius lived instead in the similar house at 329 Cooper Street.
Research by
Charlene Mires and Lucy Davis
Posted by
Charlene Mires
Send corrections to cmires@camden.rutgers.edu
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
325 Cooper Street
Description
An account of the resource
Contributing structure, Cooper Street Historic District.
1850s
1860s
1870s
1880s
1890s
1900s
1910s
1920s
1930s
1940s
1950s
1960s
1970s
1980s
1990s
2000s
2010s
300 Block
325 Cooper Street
Apartments
Boarding House
Burlington County
Civil War
Doctors
Dyes
Greek Revival
Grocers
Merchants
Philadelphia
Puerto Ricans
Railroad Executives
Republican Party
Rooming House
Rutgers-Camden
Salem County
Sugar
Teachers
-
https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/files/original/b022416f7bbf463ad7ec4c451d792200.jpg
c8eea70d5d3626d66c7d065816dc4947
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Buildings
Description
An account of the resource
Houses and other structures on Cooper Street in Camden, N.J.
Place
Residence, business, or other entity.
Illustrations
Photograph by Jacob Lechner
Significance
<p>327 Cooper Street is a contributing structure of the Cooper Street Historic District, which is listed on the New Jersey and National Register of Historic Places. The middle of a row of three houses built in the early 1850s, it supports the district’s significance as a collection of residences representing the nineteenth-century history of Camden. Its past residents include a Civil War soldier who became an officer of the U.S. Colored Troops, a prominent physician, and a journalist who became a United States Congressman. Since 2018, this building combined with the adjacent 329 Cooper Street has housed the <a href="https://childhood.camden.rutgers.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Rutgers-Camden Department of Childhood Studies</a>.</p>
Architectural style
Georgian Revival, obscured by renovations.
Date of construction
c. 1852-55
History
<p>As Cooper family heirs sold their land for development in the 1850s, they used two adjoining lots at 327 and 325 Cooper Street to set an aesthetic for the future. The deeds for both properties, executed in 1852, specified that “three story brick buildings only shall be erected upon Cooper Street.” This ruled out wood-frame structures and assured houses of a size and scale that would only be affordable to similarly substantial owners. The lot later numbered 327 became the middle house of a row of three similar residences at the northwest corner of Fourth and Cooper Streets. The house, built between 1852 and 1855, was rented out by its first owners, who lived in Burlington County.</p>
<p><strong>Civil War Family</strong></p>
<p>The earliest tenants of 327 Cooper Street who can be documented are the Trimble family, who moved to this address by 1858. The Trimbles lived in Philadelphia before moving to Camden, but they had roots that extended to Chester County, Pennsylvania, and Baltimore, where family members went into the shipping and mercantile business. The head of the household on Cooper Street, Joseph Trimble, descended from those Baltimore merchants. He joined his father and grandfather’s business, and he and his wife Sarah, who married in 1840, started their family in Baltimore. By 1847, however, they moved to Philadelphia, and by 1852 they were in Camden.</p>
<p>The Trimbles filled their rented home at 327 Cooper Street with as many as 13 residents. The 1860 Census recorded Joseph, 45 years old, as an importer of soda ash (sodium carbonate), a chemical that would have been useful to South Jersey’s glassmaking industry. Sarah, 43 years old, by this time had borne ten children, seven of whom lived with the family, ranging in age from 2 to 18. Joseph’s brother James and his wife, Jane, both age 40, also lived at 327 Cooper Street, and the extended family employed two domestic servants: a Black woman, Asha Bocha, age 60, who was born in Maryland, and a white woman, Mary Murphy, an Irish immigrant 45 years old.</p>
<p>While the Trimbles lived at 327 Cooper Street, the Civil War rocked Camden and the family. Joseph Trimble, an early adherent of the Republican Party, plunged immediately into home front support for the Union. He joined the Camden Relief Society to collect and distribute funds to support the families of men who enlisted as soldiers; in 1862 he served as its president and hosted at least one meeting at his home. Trimble also served as a lieutenant in Camden’s regiment of the Home Guard, formed to defend New Jersey from aggression. Sarah Trimble, meanwhile, became a leader of the Ladies’ Soldiers Aid Society, which collected old clothing to be remade into bandages and other items for sick and wounded soldiers. She invited donations to be sent to her home. Joseph Trimble’s brother James did commissary work for the Union army.</p>
<p>The Trimble family also had a son of military age, their oldest, Armon, who was 19 years old when southern forces attacked the federal <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/fort-sumter-the-civil-war-begins-1018791/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Fort Sumter</a> in South Carolina. Armon soon enlisted for three months’ service as a private with the New Jersey <a href="https://civilwarintheeast.com/us-regiments-batteries/new-jersey/3rd-new-jersey-militia/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Third Infantry Militia</a>, which deployed to Washington and guarded trains carrying provisions to Union troops. He re-enlisted in 1862 as a second lieutenant with the <a href="https://history.army.mil/museums/fieldMuseums/fortHood_3dCav/history.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Third Cavalry of the U.S. Army</a>, a regiment then fighting Confederates as well as Native Americans in New Mexico. Armon joined the unit there, but it soon moved east to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and from there to St. Louis and Memphis, where he received notice in February 1863 that his services were no longer needed. Apparently not content to be idle during wartime, Armon next joined the Thirty-Third Regiment, Pennsylvania Infantry Militia, for emergency service during Robert E. Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania, serving from June 26 to August 4, 1863, a period that spanned the Battle of Gettysburg.</p>
<p>In his final act of Civil War service, Armon Trimble applied to become one of the white officers being placed in command of U.S. Colored Troops (USCT). After appearing before a board of examiners in Washington, at 22 years of age he gained appointment as a first lieutenant of the <a href="https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/search-battle-units-detail.htm?battleUnitCode=UUS0028RI00C" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Twenty-Eighth Infantry Regiment USCT</a>. His unit suffered heavy losses in the campaign at Petersburg, Virginia, and was among the Union forces to enter Richmond after the city fell. The regiment took charge of prisoners in Richmond, and thereafter redeployed to Texas, where Trimble and the rest of his troops mustered out in 1865.</p>
<p>While Armon Trimble was away in service, the rest of the Trimble family moved back to Philadelphia. It had made such a mark in Camden that a testimonial dinner held at the West Jersey Hotel in 1863 saluted Joseph Trimble as “a public man and a politician in the cause of justice, right, and humanity.”</p>
<p><strong>The Lure of Science</strong></p>
<p>After the departure of the Trimbles, 327 Cooper Street ceased to be a rental property. In 1864, the earlier owners from Burlington County sold the house to Sarah S. Moody, the daughter of a Philadelphia tailor who had been married for ten years to Edward F. Moody, a bank clerk and cashier. Sarah Moody’s family had local roots that extended to the American Revolution, when a direct ancestor fought at the Battle of Red Bank; her husband’s were similarly deep but in Boston, Massachusetts, where he was born. Edward Moody and his father, Paul, relocated to Philadelphia by the late 1840s. While Edward Moody held a series of clerk and cashier positions with Philadelphia banks, he and his father moved to Camden. They lived in the 200 block of Federal Street, close to the most direct ferry crossing to Philadelphia, when Edward and Sarah married in 1854.</p>
<p>By the time they bought the Cooper Street house, the Moodys had one son, 5-year-old Edward Jr., and another, Nicholas, was born after the move. Edward’s banking career progressed to his election as cashier of the New Republic Bank in Philadelphia in 1869 and of the Fourth National Bank of Philadelphia in 1871. The luxuries of the Moody household included a gold watch and a piano, and by 1870 the family employed a domestic servant, a Black woman who was born in Delaware, Louisa Wiggins, who was 20 years old. That year the Census recorded Edward as 39 years old, a bank agent; Sarah Moody, 35 years old, keeping house; and the boys Edward Jr., 11, and Nicholas, 3.</p>
<p>Edward Moody was also known locally as “Professor Moody” for his vocational devotion to science. He had been attending meetings at Philadelphia’s <a href="https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/franklin-institute/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Franklin Institute</a> since at least 1862, and he frequented the amateur scientific societies that formed in Camden in the late nineteenth century. This may account for his brief service as chief engineer of the Camden Water Works during 1872-73. But he was better known for his lectures and demonstrations of experiments in settings that included the Franklin Institute, the Wagner Free Institute of Science, and the Camden Microscopical Society. Promoting one of his talks on chemistry in 1874, the <em>New Republic</em> newspaper in Camden commented, “what has rendered his discourses so entertaining are his experiments, which are not only invariably successful, but so clearly and distinctly explained that even those who have a very limited knowledge of the science can understand and appreciate them.”</p>
<p>In 1873, after his stint with the Water Works, Edward Moody went to work for the newly founded Camden Safe Deposit Company. He remained with the company for the rest of his career, but in 1883 the Moodys sold their Cooper Street house and moved to Philadelphia. They continued to maintain ties in both cities, however, and returned to Camden in the 1890s.</p>
<p><strong>City of Medicine</strong></p>
<p>The growth of Camden in the decades after the Civil War drew increasing numbers of physicians to the city, among them the owner of 327 Cooper Street for the next 13 years, Dr. Alexander M. Mecray. His path to Camden followed a common pattern of an aspiring physician from a rural county who trained at a Philadelphia medical school and then found Camden to be a promising setting to begin practice. The opening of the new Cooper Hospital in 1887 encouraged the trend.</p>
<p>Alexander Mecray was born in 1839 in Cape May County, New Jersey, where his father was a river pilot and proprietor of the Delaware House hotel. The younger Mecray’s path to medical practice took him first to study in Camden with his brother-in-law, Dr. Alexander Marcy, and from there to the University of Pennsylvania medical school. During the Civil War, he worked as a medic at Satterlee Hospital in Philadelphia. After his service concluded, he married a woman with similar family ties to the region’s maritime activity, Lydia Etris, the daughter of a Philadelphia ship joiner.</p>
<p>Alexander and Lydia Mecray moved to Camden when he started his practice by purchasing a drug store at Fourth and Pine Streets in 1865. He became active in the Camden city and county medical societies and served on the board of managers for the Camden Dispensary, which provided medical services to the indigent. She bore three children and engaged in charitable activities, including raising funds for the dispensary and for the Women’s Park Association for Children. Mecrays were, therefore, well established in their professional, civic, and family life by the time they moved to Cooper Street in 1883.</p>
<p>Cooper Street was becoming an increasingly prestigious address during the 1880s, spurred by a more attractive streetscape accomplished by moving curbs on both sides of the street 12 feet toward the center. This created space for small front lawns and gardens for the length of the thoroughfare, which benefitted the older rowhouses built in the 1850s as well as the newer, architect-designed homes that began to appear in the 1880s. Among the Mecrays’ neighbors on Cooper Street were longtime associates in the medical community, J. Orlando and Elizabeth White, who lived in the house next door (329 Cooper) and Henry Genet and Helen Taylor, who had been their neighbors on Market Street and a few years later built a new home at 305 Cooper.</p>
<p>The Mecray household when they moved into 327 Cooper Street included Alexander, then 43 years old; Lydia, 35; a 17-year-old son, James, and two daughters, 13-year-old Julia, and 4-year-old Anna. When documented in the 1880 Census at their previous home on Market Street, the Mecrays employed a Black woman as a domestic servant: Emma Savage, who was 25 years old, illiterate, and born in Virginia. Her presence reflects the increasing population of African Americans moving to Camden and Philadelphia in the decades following the Civil War. There is no record of whether she worked for the family after they moved to Cooper Street, but the Mecrays continued to employ domestic servants throughout the years in their new home. They had others in their household as well: for a time, a widow and two daughters who may have been relatives; a German roomer who advertised private lessons in German, classics, and mechanical drawing; and Alexander Mecray’s father, James.</p>
<p>When Cooper Hospital opened in 1887, Alexander Mecray was among the first physicians appointed to its staff. The Mecray family continued to live at 325 Cooper Street through the 1890s, but they also acquired a farm in Maple Shade, Burlington County. In 1899 they put 327 Cooper Street up for sale and moved to the country.</p>
<p><strong>Publishing and Politics</strong></p>
<p>The next transfer of 327 Cooper Street made it the eventual home of a United States Congressman. Francis (Frank) F. Patterson Jr., 32 years old in 1900, was firmly entrenched in Camden circles of newspaper publishing and Republican politics. The son of a newspaperman, he had been around journalism since he was a boy in Woodbury doing odd jobs for printers and selling papers. After his father bought the Camden <em>Courier</em>, he became a typesetter at the age of 15 and city editor at 18. Moving in and out of jobs as a reporter and editor in Camden, Philadelphia, and Baltimore during his 20s, he found his way into politics as a protégé of Camden’s Republican power broker, David Baird. He edited the paper that Baird and other Republican organization leaders bought in 1894, the <em>Camden Evening Telegram</em>, and gained a share of ownership. In 1899 he joined with his brother Theodore and two other partners to merge the <em>Telegram </em>with another Camden paper, the <em>Post,</em> to create the <em>Post-Telegram</em>—which they sold to a syndicate headed by Baird.</p>
<p>By the time Patterson, his wife Isabel, and two-year-old son (also named Frank) moved into 327 Cooper Street, the newspaperman had taken his first explicit step into politics by serving one term in the New Jersey Assembly. Next, in 1900, his loyalty to the Republican Party was rewarded by an uncontested nomination to serve as Camden County Clerk, a position he held for the next two decades while he and Isabel raised their family on Cooper Street. Three additional children were born at home by 1910. That year, the U.S. Census recorded the household as Frank Jr., age 41; Isabel, age 37; and the children Frank 3d, age 12; Robert, 9; Isabel, 6; and Mary, 5. The Pattersons also employed domestic servants, in 1910 two Black women, both 29 years old: Addie Trader, who was born in Maryland, and Laura Anderson, born in Delaware. In addition to the servants, the Pattersons’ affluence gave them the ability to send their children to private Quaker schools (the boys to Penn Charter in Philadelphia).</p>
<p>While serving as County Clerk, Patterson remained publisher of the <em>Post-Telegram</em> and in 1911 served a one-year term as president of the Camden Republican Club across the street from his house, at 312 Cooper Street. His influence widened to banking circles as he became president of the Pyne Point Building and Loan Association and the West Jersey Trust Company. Isabel Patterson joined other Camden women in raising funds for charitable causes such as hospitals and the Red Cross. The era of the First World War touched the Patterson family as Frank Jr. served on the local draft board and his oldest son enlisted in the Army. Frank 3d served in the Quartermaster Corps in Newark during 1917-18, but he encountered his greatest risk during the global <a href="https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/influenza-spanish-flu-pandemic-1918-19/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">influenza pandemic</a> that reached Camden in 1918. The first of the Patterson family to contract the illness was his mother, Isabel, then Frank 3d also contracted the disease while home on leave. Both survived.</p>
<p>Patterson’s next reward as a Republican loyalist came in 1920, when he was elected to the <a href="https://bioguide.congress.gov/search/bio/P000114" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">United States Congress</a> from the First District following the death of the incumbent, his North Camden neighbor William J. Browning. Although dividing his time between Camden and Washington, Patterson remained deeply engaged in local matters, for example urging that the envisioned location for the new Delaware River Bridge be shifted northward so that it would not cut through the lumberyard of his longtime political patron, David Baird. His habits of attention to local politics soon played a role in his political demise. He easily gained re-election to Congress in 1922, but by 1924 he had a challenger who called attention to his minimal impact on the national stage. He lost his seat in Congress in 1926 to that challenger, Charles A. Wolverton, a former prosecutor and state assemblyman who ultimately served sixteen terms representing the First District.</p>
<p>By the time Patterson’s tenure of Congress ended, the Pattersons also departed the house at 327 Cooper Street. Like other many affluent Camden residents during the 1920s, in 1925 they moved to Merchantville, thus ending the era of 327 Cooper Street as a single-family home.</p>
<p><strong>Rooming House</strong></p>
<p>Cooper Street during the 1920s experienced transition brought on indirectly by construction of the Delaware River Bridge. Anticipating an economic boom for Camden, boosters and real estate interests sought to redevelop Cooper Street as a commercial corridor, akin to New York’s Fifth Avenue. Many nineteenth-century rowhouses underwent conversions into offices or apartments, while others slipped into a period as rental properties. This was the case of 327 Cooper Street, which for more than two decades provided financial support for a rooming house operator, Lillian Hertlein (often Anglicized as Hertline).</p>
<p>Hertlein, a single woman in her late 30s, had been living across the street in an apartment at 408 Cooper Street when she saw the opportunity to rent the former Patterson home. She paid $85 a month rent, placed ads in the newspapers, and by 1930 had filled the house with lodgers and one person who also paid for meals in addition to a room. The residents recorded in the 1930 Census reflected an array of working-class employment in Camden: factory workers, construction contractors, and a store manager. Two were employed at the enormous RCA-Victor complex at the foot of Cooper Street, one as an assembler of “talking machines” and the other as an electrician for radios. The mix was similar by 1940, although her roomers then included a family of three, including a seven-month-old infant. By 1940, Hertlein owned the home.</p>
<p>At some point in the 1940s, a man who came to live in Hertlein’s rooming house also became her husband. John F. Britt was a veteran of the First World War who had served with the 110<sup>th</sup> Machine Gun Battalion in France, earning a Purple Heart medal. When he filled out his draft registration card for World War II in 1943, he listed 327 Cooper Street as his address and Hertlein as a friend who would serve as his emergency contact.</p>
<p>Britt and Hertlein were married by 1947, when the Camden <em>Courier-Post</em> noted that “Mr. and Mrs. John F. Britt, of 327 Cooper Street…are at their summer home at Beach Haven Crest.” Like the earlier owner of their house, the new couple shared an interest in Republican politics, and both served as members of the local Republican Party committee. They became leaders in the local chapter of the Military Order of the Purple Heart and its auxiliary, and they formed a club to collect and repair toys to give to children in county shelters at Christmastime. John Britt worked as a machinist for the Scott Paper Company, a job he held for twenty-eight years.</p>
<p>The Britts lived on the first floor of 327 Cooper Street and rented out apartments on the second and third floors. They owned the building until at least 1954, and in their later years lived close by near Fourth and Market Streets. Reflecting the changing character of Cooper Street, an ad offering 327 for sale in 1953 described it as an “income property” with eight apartments. For sale again in 1958, it was described as vacant and “available for conversion to offices.”</p>
<p><strong>Puerto Rican Neighborhood</strong></p>
<p>When a new landlord advertised apartments at 327 Cooper Street in 1959, the ad promised renovated, three-room units and called attention to their location in a “Puerto Rican neighborhood.” The tenants with Spanish surnames who lived at this address in the late 1950s and early 1960s represented the Puerto Rican presence in North Camden that had been growing since the Second World War. During the war, the Campbell Soup Company had recruited workers from the island to keep its factory in operation. Housed at first near the plant on the Delaware River waterfront, the new Puerto Rican residents of Camden subsequently found apartments in nearby neighborhoods, started businesses and community institutions, and raised families. The ad for apartments at 327 Cooper Street documents one landlord’s recognition of the likely tenants for a building on Cooper Street in 1959.</p>
<p>The owners of 327 Cooper Street during this period were Saul and Frances Artis, a dentist and his wife who also bought the adjoining rowhouse at the northwest corner of Fourth and Cooper Streets (<a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/80" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">329</a>). Saul Artis was among many other professionals during the 1950s and 1960s who made their living in Camden but chose not to live there – a common pattern in the decades following World War II. Saul, a graduate of Camden High School and the University of Pennsylvania Dental School, had served in the Army Dental Corps in the Panama Canal Zone. Following the war, he established his dental practice in Camden, but after marrying Frances they and their three children lived in Haddon Township.</p>
<p>The Artis's Cooper Street buildings served as Saul’s office as well as rental apartments. While other buildings in North Camden suffered from the neglect of absentee landlords, the Artises participated in the Cooper Street Association, which carried out beautification and maintenance projects. In 1960, they remodeled the house adjacent to 327 Cooper Street, 329, into modernized offices and apartments.</p>
<p>While the Artises invested and remodeled, in the nearby blocks to the north Rutgers University carried out an urban renewal plan that replaced the adjacent rowhouse neighborhood to the north with a campus of new buildings. Appreciating the growth of the university in their backyard, by 1981 the Artises donated their buildings to Rutgers; 327 Cooper Street served as a home for the Rutgers-Camden Department of Social Work, the campus’s first Hispanic Affairs Office, and the Bursar’s office. Since 2018 the building, joined with <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/80" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">329 Cooper Street</a> and named the Artis Building after the donors, has housed the <a href="https://childhood.camden.rutgers.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Rutgers-Camden Department of Childhood Studies</a>.</p>
Associated Individuals
For a list of known occupants of 327 Cooper Street, visit the <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15gz3_mGk3FcNl0TPaOZAq6B1CHvOpqRcY7a99xkp_l4/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Cooper Street Residents Database</a> and scroll down to 327.
Sources
Camden and Philadelphia Newspapers (Newspapers.com and Genealogy Bank).<br /> Camden City Directories (Camden County Historical Society and Ancestry.com).<br /> Camden County Property Records.<br /> New Jersey State Census, 1885-1915, and U.S. Census, 1850-1950 (Ancestry.com).<br /> Prowell, George R. <em>The History of Camden County, New Jersey.</em> Philadelphia: L.J. Richards & Co., 1886.
Research by
Charlene Mires and Lucy Davis
Posted by
Charlene Mires
Send corrections to cmires@camden.rutgers.edu
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
327 Cooper Street
Description
An account of the resource
Contributing structure, Cooper Street Historic District.
1850s
1860s
1870s
1880s
1890s
1900s
1910s
1920s
1930s
1940s
1950s
1960s
1970s
1980s
1990s
2000s
2010s
African Americans
Apartments
Banking
Burlington County
Camden Dispensary
Cape May
Civil War
Cooper Hospital
Dentists
Doctors
Influenza
Journalism
Maple Shade
Merchants
Merchantville
Philadelphia
Politics
Puerto Ricans
Republican Party
Rooming House
Rutgers-Camden
Science
Servants
Veterans
Water Works
Woodbury
World War I
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https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/files/original/a7748f4e180322c93e0d7ef8da804d93.jpg
20688c94d6ee93db78852f4d7ecf6457
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>407 Cooper Street is a contributing structure of the Cooper Street Historic District, listed on the New Jersey and National Registers of Historic Places, and notable as the home of a nineteenth-century descendant of the Cooper family. The district's nomination for the National Register identifies significance in part for the presence of Camden’s “most intact examples of nineteenth-century houses” and their embodiment of “the street’s change from residential and professional to commercial.” The house at 407 Cooper Street embodies this change through its history as a single-family home that transitioned to medical offices and apartments during the 1920s as affluent families moved to suburban towns during the construction period for the Delaware River Bridge (later renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge). In 2000, Rutgers University acquired the building, which became home to the <a href="https://sociology.camden.rutgers.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminal Justice</a>.</p>
Architectural style
Greek Revival
Date of construction
1871
History
<p>Among the many building lots that heirs of the Cooper family sold on the north side of Cooper Street during the 1840s and 1850s, they retained one: the lot at 407, which remained undeveloped until construction of a three-story brick rowhouse in 1871. By that date, the lot had continued to pass through the family to William B. Cooper, who leased the house to another tenant for several years before retiring from farming in Stockton Township and moving into Camden in 1876 when he was 62 years old.</p>
<p><strong>The Cooper Family and Legacies of Slavery </strong></p>
<p>Descended from the first European landholders of the area that became Camden, William B. Cooper was born in 1814 in a house built by his grandparents in Delaware Township (later known as Stockton and still later developed into the Cramer Hill section of Camden). In the tradition of his Quaker family, he attended the <a href="https://newtonmeetingcamden.org/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Newton Friends</a> School and later the <a href="https://www.westtown.edu/our-purpose/history" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Westtown Boarding School</a> in Chester County, Pennsylvania. He returned to New Jersey and joined his father and brother Benjamin in farming the Cooper land.</p>
<p>According to an <a href="https://archive.org/details/historyofcamdenc00prow/mode/2up" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">1886 history of Camden County</a>, the two brothers and their father were “in the days of slavery … devoted friend[s] of the refugee slaves, and would do anything to comfort and protect them.” <a href="https://www.cchsnj.org/camden-slave-markers" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Research by the Camden County Historical Society</a> has identified the Camden area as “Station A” on the Underground Railroad in New Jersey, and the Coopers’ Stockton Township property afforded an especially conducive location on the Delaware River opposite Petty Island. In earlier years, however, the extended Cooper family had benefitted from enslaved labor and the slave trade. The Historical Society’s research documented sales of enslaved people at Camden ferry landings, including the Cooper Point ferry that William B. Cooper’s father leased to a Philadelphia operator. Two such transactions took place while the lease was in effect (1762-64) and one after it ended. During the late eighteenth century, another member of the family, Marmaduke Cooper, is known to have held fourteen slaves on another plantation (where his home, <a href="http://historiccamdencounty.com/ccnews58.shtml" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Pomona Hall</a>, became a museum).</p>
<p>Those Cooper connections with slavery took place before William B. Cooper was born, but his life nevertheless entwined with the hierarchies of race that prevailed in the nineteenth century. In Stockton Township and at 407 Cooper Street, his household had both white and Black residents. At the head of the household were William and his wife, Phoebe, a descendant of another Quaker settler family, the Emlens; living with them was William’s older sister, Elizabeth. For the work of the household, they employed Black domestic servants, most consistently a woman in her 50s, Mary Ann Christmas, who moved with them from the farm to the city.</p>
<p>Apart from the Coopers, Christmas headed her own household in Stockton Township, documented in the 1880 Census as including four children, among them a 9-year-old daughter already in domestic service with the Cooper family and a 12-year-old son working as a waiter in a hotel. An 11-year-old son was attending school; an 8-year-old daughter was not. The household also included a nephew, Joseph Dean, who at 23 years old could not read or write; he worked as a coachman for the Coopers and joined his aunt at the new house at 407 Cooper Street. Although separated from her own household, while in the Coopers’ employ Christmas amassed wages enough to purchase property in 1883. The lot and single-story frame house, in the vicinity of Twenty-Ninth Street and Mitchell Streets in Cramer Hill, remained the family home for at least two decades.</p>
<p>In their elder years in Camden, the three Coopers of 407 Cooper Street became known for their support of charitable causes. All three played roles in managing and supporting the West Jersey Orphanage for Colored Children, which had been founded in 1874. Although an altruistic endeavor, the institution existed within its benefactors’ beliefs about the welfare and potential of Black children. The orphanage provided education and health care, but it also sought to “bind out” children over the age of 12 to enable them to learn trades or other employment.</p>
<p>The Cooper household diminished in the 1880s with the deaths of Elizabeth in 1883, Phoebe in 1887, and finally William in 1888 at the age of 75. His bequests reflected the range of and character of his civic interests: Cooper Hospital received the largest bequest, $50,000, followed by $15,000 given to the <a href="https://www.nps.gov/places/friends-asylum.htm" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Friends’ Asylum for the Relief of Persons Deprived of the Use of Their Reason</a>, located in the Frankford section of Philadelphia. The West Jersey Orphanage received $2,000, as did the City Dispensary and the Home for Friendless Children. To the servants of his household, he left $6,000.</p>
<p><strong>Fruit Merchant</strong></p>
<p>The next occupants of 407 Cooper Street, from 1888 until 1897, linked the home with merchant activity in Philadelphia and the pursuit of exotic fruits for the growing cities on both sides of the Delaware River. Eugene B. Redfield, who was in the produce business with his father at the <a href="https://hiddencityphila.org/2019/11/appetite-for-distribution-the-life-times-of-phillys-wholesale-food-center/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Dock Street Market</a> in Philadelphia, was about 30 years old when he purchased 407 Cooper Street as a home for himself and his wife, Lydia. They employed Black servants, including Martha Woolford and Thomas Jefferson.</p>
<p>Redfield & Son brought fruit and vegetables into Philadelphia from warmer climates in the South and West, then repacked and sold them to the nearby region. The founder of the firm, Eugene’s father Bradley, had started life in Connecticut but took up farming in Delaware in the late 1860s and then launched his produce business in Philadelphia in 1871. Like many of Dock Street’s commission merchants, he commuted to work from a home in Camden.</p>
<p>Eugene Redfield, the oldest of five siblings, moved to 407 Cooper Street around the time that he embarked on a new extension of the family business: Florida oranges. During the 1890s, the commercial orange industry was in its infancy, and Redfield found opportunity in Polk County near Tampa. He invested in land and developed a grove that over twenty years’ time developed to more than 2,000 trees, primarily oranges but also grapefruit, lemons, limes, and other novelties for northern tastes. Together with Lydia, he established a winter home in a colonial-style mansion and returned to Camden only during the summers.</p>
<p>The Redfields sold 407 Cooper Street and left Camden by the end of the nineteenth century. While continuing to winter in Florida, Eugene and Lydia divided their summer months between Atlantic City and a residence in West Philadelphia. In 1911, when Eugene Redfield died at his Polk County estate, Lydia took over the citrus grove and made Florida her permanent home.</p>
<p><strong>Boarding House, Club House</strong></p>
<p>After the Redfields departed, 407 Cooper Street changed hands several times in the first years of the twentieth century. As a rental property, from 1899 to 1902 it was a boarding house whose occupants included Samuel Hufty, the city comptroller of Camden and a veteran of the Civil War, and a physician, Paul Mecray, who soon married and moved into the house next door (<a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/76" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">405 Cooper Street</a>). For a brief few months in 1903, the building became the club house for a fledging Union League organized by former Mayor Cooper B. Hatch. Conceived as a rival to the Camden Republican Club across the street at 312 Cooper Street, the Union League launched with fanfare in July 1903 with a lawn party for four hundred people and music by Josephus Jennings’ Third Regiment Band. The enthusiasm was not matched with sufficient funds to support the club, however, and it folded by November.</p>
<p><strong>Bridges to Bridgeton</strong></p>
<p>The next long-term owners of 407 Cooper Street owned the home from 1905 into the 1940s, through Cooper Street’s transition to a primarily commercial thoroughfare. The Ewell family, with deep roots in <a href="https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/locations/cumberland-county-new-jersey/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Cumberland County</a>, located in Camden for the benefit of the medical career of Dr. Alfred Elwell, who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania medical school in 1899. The doctor’s father, Jacob, bought the home in 1905 and immediately signed the deed over to his son.</p>
<p>With the purchase of the home, Jacob Elwell, began to divide his time between Camden and <a href="https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/bridgeton-new-jersey/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Bridgeton</a>, the commercial center of rural Cumberland County, about 40 miles south of Camden. He was 62 years old and a Civil War veteran whose unit fought at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. His trade was harness-making, which he had learned as a teenage apprentice and built into a prominent harness, leather, and saddle store in Bridgeton. When automobiles began to supplant horses early in the twentieth century, he saw the future and in 1911 added an auto garage to his store.</p>
<p>The Elwell household on Cooper Street at first consisted of two generations, Jacob Elwell and his wife Harriet, together with their doctor son and their adult daughter, Alice. In 1910 they employed a Black married couple, William and Cora Wright, as domestic servants. The Wrights, who had been married three years, had both migrated north from Virginia. They were, thus, harbingers of the larger wave of <a href="https://goinnorth.org/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Black migration</a> that came to northern industrial cities during the First World War.</p>
<p>The Elwell family experienced generational transitions while living at 407 Cooper Street. Jacob and Harriet celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary with a party back in Bridgeton in 1914. The next year, Dr. Alfred Elwell married a woman from Bridgeton, Helen Whitaker, and by 1920 their family on Cooper Street expanded to include two children. Alice Elwell also married and left the home in 1916. That year, the death of Harriet Elwell led her husband, Jacob, to move back to Bridgeton to live with another of their sons. He also died there, in 1922.</p>
<p>By the 1920s, Cooper Street was undergoing its own transitions related to the construction of the Delaware River Bridge (later named the Benjamin Franklin Bridge), which opened in 1926. Expecting a commercial boom for Camden, real estate interests promoted conversions of Cooper Street properties from family homes into office buildings and apartments. The Elwells were a bit ahead of the trend, as they started advertising an apartment for rent in 1918. In 1922 they joined other prominent neighbors in relocating to Merchantville, although they retained ownership of 407 Cooper Street and Alfred Elwell maintained his practice there. They rented offices to other physicians and apartments to long-term tenants such as Helen and Martha Lummis, sisters and school teachers. The Elwells themselves returned to live in one of their apartments from 1935 through 1941, when the doctor died from a heart attack that he experienced while driving in Ocean City. By that time his son, Alfred Jr., had completed medical school and was starting an internship at Cooper Hospital.</p>
<p><strong>Offices and Apartments</strong></p>
<p>The house at 407 Cooper Street remained a place of medical offices, dental offices, and apartments from the 1940s through the 1970s, owned for much of that time by Helen Elwell’s second husband, dentist John S. Owens. For a time during the early 1960s, it served as the Camden Free Dental Clinic. In its physical appearance and occupancy, the building continued to reflect the changing nature of Cooper Street. By 1980, its first floor had a front façade of polished stone that spanned the original house and an addition on the east side that housed an additional doctor’s office. “A rather ugly modernized first floor does little to enhance this structure,” noted historic structure surveyors from the Camden Division of Planning. Apartment tenants by the 1980s included individuals with Spanish surnames, likely a reflection of the <a href="https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/puerto-rican-migration/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">increasing Puerto Rican population</a> of North Camden.</p>
Because of their perceived value as business locations, houses on Cooper Street were spared from the 1962-64 urban renewal project that created a campus for Rutgers University in the blocks between Cooper Street and the Benjamin Franklin Bridge. Rutgers, which had acquired the house next door at <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/76" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">405 Cooper Street</a> by the 1970s, also purchased 407 Cooper Street in 2000. A renovation project in 2004 united the two buildings into one facility with office spaces, seminar rooms, and a student computer lab. The combined properties, turning their backs to Cooper Street by providing access through a shared back porch, became home to the <a href="https://sociology.camden.rutgers.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Rutgers-Camden Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminal Justice</a>.
Associated Individuals
For a list of known occupants of 407 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 407.
Associated architects/builders
Joseph B. Cooper, builder (also the builder of nearby 406 Penn Street, which survives on the Rutgers-Camden campus).
Sources
<p>Newspapers of Camden, Bridgeton, Philadelphia, and Tampa, Florida (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, U.S. Census, 1850-1950 (Ancestry.com).<br /> Heatherington, M.F. <em>History of Polk County, Florida. </em>St. Augustine, Fla.: The Record Company, 1928.<br /> Historical Data Systems, comp. U.S., American Civil War Regiments, 1861-1866 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 1999.<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
407 Cooper Street
Description
An account of the resource
Contributing structure, Cooper Street Historic District.
1870s
1880s
1890s
1900s
1910s
1920s
1930s
1940s
1950s
1960s
1970s
1980s
1990s
2000s
400 Block
407 Cooper Street
African Americans
Apartments
Bequests
Boarding House
Bridge Impact
Bridgeton
Children
Civil War
Club
Cooper Family
Death
Dentists
Doctors
Extended Family
Farmers
Florida
Merchants
Merchantville
Philadelphia
Produce
Puerto Ricans
Quakers
Rutgers-Camden
Servants
Stockton Township
Teachers
Veterans
West Jersey Orphanage
-
https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/files/original/f4ceb49d9e5087e413a05b747f5aabbb.jpg
b16086fc6653c8ef9da6fd36eac400f4
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
405 Cooper Street is a contributing structure of the Cooper Street Historic District, listed on the New Jersey and National Registers of Historic Places. The district's nomination for the National Register identifies significance in part for the presence of Camden’s “most intact examples of nineteenth-century houses” and their embodiment of “the street’s change from residential and professional to commercial.” The house at 405 Cooper Street embodies this change through its history as a single-family home that transitioned to medical offices and apartments during the 1920s as affluent families moved to suburban towns during the construction period for the Delaware River Bridge (later renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge). By the 1970s, Rutgers University acquired the building, which later became home to the <a href="https://sociology.camden.rutgers.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminal Justice</a>.
Architectural style
Italianate with some Greek Revival elements.
Date of construction
1868
History
As a new house rose at 405 Cooper Street in 1868, the <em>West Jersey Press </em>proclaimed it to be a sign that Camden improvements were keeping up with larger cities and matching the best in the country. The house, the newspaper reported, “is one of the handsomest residences in Camden. Planned with rare judgment, and built in the latest style of architecture, of excellent material, with large halls, ample parlor, sitting, dining rooms, and sleeping apartments supplied in every part with water, heat, and light.” Indeed, it was “the beau ideal of all that is neat, airy, and convenient.”
<p>The lot at 405 had remained undeveloped during the 1840s and 1850s as much of the rest of the block filled with rowhouses. The property had been subdivided from lands held by the Cooper family and changed hands three times, first conveyed from Esther Cooper to a Philadelphia clerk, Joseph Wayne (1848) and next to a Philadelphia deputy marshal, Samuel Halzell (1851), but there is no evidence that Wayne or Halzell relocated to Camden. Meanwhile, the grandest house on the block rose on two adjacent lots (<a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/74">401-03</a>) in 1850. Its owner, lumber merchant George W. Carpenter, acquired the lot next door in 1854.</p>
<p>The house built in 1868 was intended to be the home of George W. Carpenter’s son Charles, a coal dealer who commissioned its construction while living across the street at 408 Cooper Street. Before he could move in, however, he died at the age of 34 from causes not publicly disclosed. His completed house was sold to his younger brother, George W. Carpenter Jr. In the deed, their father mandated that the cornice on the new house be raised to be even with his residence next door. This may explain the taller, heavier, more ornamental cornice that contrasts with other houses on the block built earlier. The restriction also could have forestalled the addition of a French-style <a href="https://www.oldhouseonline.com/house-tours/the-mania-for-mansard-roofs/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">mansard roof</a>, which was becoming the fashion for newly built houses in Camden.</p>
<p><strong>Philadelphia Merchant</strong></p>
<p>The year before he bought the house at 405 Cooper Street, George W. Carpenter Jr. had entered into a business partnership in Philadelphia, Hall & Carpenter, which sold metals and hardware. The business filled a <a href="https://libwww.freelibrary.org/digital/item/43288" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">five-story building at 709 Market Street</a>, on Philadelphia’s dominant commercial corridor. In an age of cast-iron buildings and tin ceilings, Hall & Carpenter sold metals from Europe and the United States: “Tin-plate, pig tin, pig, lead, and antimony … Iron, cast and wrought, in whatever size desired, square and rolled; steel, of every grade; galvanized brass and copper, that will effectually resist the corrodings of time; and copper in sheets.” Like many of his neighbors, Carpenter commuted to his business on the <a href="https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/ferries/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">ferries</a> that crossed the Delaware River between Camden and Philadelphia.</p>
<p>With his business and home established, Carpenter married in 1870. His new wife, Sara (Sallie) Reinboth, was at most 18 years old at the time of the ceremony at Camden’s First Presbyterian Church and may have been as young as 15. Their household in the 1870 Census consisted of the couple and one domestic servant, 20-year-old Irish immigrant Maria Early. By 1880, the family grew to include two daughters, age 4 and 7, and one son, age 2.</p>
<p>The Carpenter family’s presence at 405 Cooper Street ended with George Carpenter Jr.’s untimely death from a lung hemorrhage in 1883, but his heirs retained the house as a rental property for the rest of the nineteenth century. They rented first to a physician, James Armstrong, and next to a young widow, Ella Hackett, who operated 405 Cooper Street as a boarding house from 1886 to 1888. In addition to providing a home for her daughter and a niece, Hackett advertised “elegantly furnished rooms” for “first-class parties,” attracting boarders who included a violin teacher and an employee of the Philadelphia Petroleum Exchange.</p>
<p><strong>Dentist and Doctors</strong></p>
<p>During the 1890s, the tenants at 405 Cooper Street reflected the increasing presence of medical professionals in the neighborhood following the opening of Cooper Hospital in 1885. A dentist, Elmer Bower, rented the house for his family and practice upon graduating from the University of Pennsylvania dental school in 1888. They stayed as long as the Carpenters owned the property – more than decade – and over the next thirty years lived in two other houses in the same block (<a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/48" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">417</a> and <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/40" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">419</a> Cooper Street). While at 405 Cooper Street, they shared the home at one point in 1895 with one of Camden’s first female physicians, <a href="http://njwomenshistory.org/discover/biographies/sophia-presley/">Sophia Presley</a>. She lived at various addresses on Cooper, Penn, and Linden Streets after graduating from the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1879. By 1895, she had broken a barrier by becoming the first female member of the Camden County Medical Society and was serving as its secretary.</p>
<p>The presence of medical professionals continued with the next long-term owner of 405 Cooper Street, Jane Boyer Mecray, who held title to the home she shared with her husband, physician Paul Mecray. They moved into the house as soon as they married in 1900 and in the next decade had two children, a daughter and a son. Domestic servants, usually Irish or other European immigrants, helped with the housework and freed Jane Mecray to participate in groups such as the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. The family vacationed in Cape May, where Dr. Mecray was born, and at other points at the Jersey Shore.</p>
<p>Transitions came to the Mecray family, and Camden, during the 1920s. Some changes were marks of achievement: their daughter, Helen, went away to Vassar College, and Paul Mecray advanced to chief of staff of Cooper Hospital. Other changes resulted from the nearby construction of the Delaware River Bridge (later renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge), which was completed in 1926. Jane Mecray’s mother, Alabama Boyer, came to live with the family on Cooper Street because her longtime home in the 500 block of Linden Street stood in the path of construction for the new bridge plaza. With expectations that the bridge would create a new era of business prosperity for Camden, one house after another in the 400 block of Cooper Street transitioned into office or apartment uses. The Mecray family joined this trend by relocating to a home in suburban Moorestown but keeping 405 Cooper Street as a rental property.</p>
<p><strong>Offices and Apartments</strong></p>
<p>From the 1920s through the 1950s, Paul Mecray maintained his medical office at 405 Cooper Street while renting offices to other doctors and apartments to public school teachers. His son, Paul Jr., occupied both an apartment and office in the building after following in his father’s footsteps into the medical profession. The younger Mecray served in the Medical Corps in India during World War II and returned to direct emergency medical services for the chief of Civilian Defense for Camden.</p>
<p>Because of their perceived value as business locations, houses on Cooper Street were spared from the urban renewal project that created a campus for Rutgers University in the blocks between Cooper Street and the Benjamin Franklin Bridge. By the early 1970s, Rutgers acquired 405 Cooper Street and renovated it to create space for academic and administrative offices. A more extensive renovation occurred in 2004 when the university combined 405 and adjacent 407 Cooper Street into one facility with office spaces, seminar rooms, and a student computer lab. The combined properties, turning their backs to Cooper Street by providing access through a shared back porch, became home to the <a href="https://sociology.camden.rutgers.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Rutgers-Camden Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminal Justice</a>.</p>
Associated Individuals
For a list of known occupants of 405 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 405.
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 />New Jersey State Census, 1885-1915, U.S. Census, 1870-1950 (Ancestry.com).<br />Building contracts, Camden County Historical Society.</p>
Research by
Charlene Mires
Posted by
Charlene Mires
Send corrections to cmires@camden.rutgers.edu
Associated architects/builders
Harden & Brother, master carpenters.
Curlis & Cole, brick layers.
William Allen, plasterer.
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
405 Cooper Street
Description
An account of the resource
Contributing structure, Cooper Street Historic District.
1860s
18702
1880s
1890s
1900s
1910s
1920s
1930s
1940s
1950s
1960s
1970s
1980s
1990s
2000s
400 Block
405 Cooper Street
Apartments
Boarding House
Death
Dentists
Doctors
Italianate
Merchants
Moorestown
Philadelphia
Renovations
Rutgers-Camden
Servants
-
https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/files/original/09cd35ef0f9280cb684e371c56c009e2.jpg
275f0ce37413d87ba9bd2a455e661118
https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/files/original/a831a01502a6088c87ab18727d45bd01.jpg
3fe2b67ee7bfa6870aa8e9d830ad511f
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Buildings
Description
An account of the resource
Houses and other structures on Cooper Street in Camden, N.J.
Place
Residence, business, or other entity.
Significance
417 Cooper Street is a contributing structure of the Cooper Street Historic District, listed on the New Jersey and National Registers of Historic Places. Together with others in the row 415-21 Cooper Street, 417 represents a significant transition in the evolution of Camden during the 1840s and 1850s as homes were built for the first time on land formerly owned by the Cooper family on the north side of the street. The building is are among the nineteenth-century structures that support the nomination of the Cooper Street Historic District for the National Register: "The buildings within the district include Camden's best remaining examples of Federal houses and its most intact examples of nineteenth-century houses as well as important office and bank buildings of more recent vintage. These buildings demonstrate the street's change from residential and professional to commercial." This transition is illustrated by 417 Cooper Street, where residents over time also reflect histories of public health, public safety, the experiences of widows as boarding house operators, and connections between Camden and Philadelphia. Rutgers purchased the building in 2010.
Architectural style
Greek Revival
Date of construction
1853
History
In March 1853 the Philadelphia <em>Public Ledger</em> observed, "Mr. Atwood has nearly finished two exquisitely, ornamentally and conveniently arranged dwelling houses on Cooper Street. They are fine additions to the improvements of that part of the city." With this brief note, the newspaper documented the construction of 417 and <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/45" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">415</a> Cooper Street. "Mr. Atwood" was Jesse Atwood, a Philadelphia-based artist whose wife, Hannah, had purchased property on the north side of Cooper Street from the Cooper family in 1845 and 1846. The frontage of the property accommodated three houses, initially a wood-frame house at <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/70" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">413</a> Cooper Street followed by the two brick houses erected in 1853. The Atwoods also developed four smaller dwellings on the back of the property, facing Lawrence Street. <br /><br />For most of the century following their construction, the houses at 417 and 415 Cooper Street were jointly owned with one or both treated as investment properties rented out to others. <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/54" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Hannah Atwood</a> derived a steady rental income as her husband pursued his career as an itinerant artist, and she bequeathed the houses to her granddaughter for the same purpose in 1883. The family sold the houses to others, but they remained rental properties.<br /><br /> It is possible that the Atwoods lived in either 413, 415, or 417 Cooper Street between 1853 and 1860, as they appear in city directories at "Cooper above Fourth." Starting in 1860, the house at 417 was rented to others, first to a bookkeeper, William Farr, his wife Adelaide, and their three young children. The household also included a domestic servant, Rachael Askins, identified in the 1860 Census as "mulatto."<br /><br />Little is known about the next tenant, a dealer in boots and shoes named James J. Morrison, but in 1868 a public sale of contents of the home provided a glimpse of the Victorian-era ambiance at this address. As advertised in the <em>Philadelphia Inquirer</em>, the sale revealed a home with rosewood and brocatelle drawing-room furniture made in Philadelphia, velvet carpets, a marble-topped center table, and a fireplace with a French-plate mantel and pier mirror. Music filled the home from a seven-octave pianoforte made by the Philadelphia firm Schomacker & Co., which had been founded by a Viennese craftsman. The contents of 417 Cooper Street included dining room and chamber furniture, beds and bedding, china, glassware, and kitchen utensils. The furnishings provide a glimpse of domestic life on Cooper Street in the second half of the nineteenth century.<br /><br /><strong>Philadelphia Connections</strong><br /><br />By 1870 and continuing until at least 1874, 417 Cooper Street became home for the extended family of William Jenks, a produce dealer on the Philadelphia waterfront. In addition to his Irish-born wife, Kate, the household included Kate's sister Mary Cassidy, a music teacher; and her widowed mother, Catharine Cassidy. The household also included Henry Cooper, a bricklayer, who might have been a boarder. Domestic servants--Maggie Harrison in 1870 and Mary Mullene in 1873--worked and lived in the home. Another family with Philadelphia ties followed in the early 1880s: Robert E. Thompson, a Philadelphia insurance agent with his wife, Sarah, their adult son Charles (a clerk), and Sara's sister. They moved to this address from up the street, at <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/52" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">425 Cooper</a>, and stayed at least four years, from 1881 to 1885.<br /><br /><strong>Personal Losses, Property Losses</strong><br /><br />In the late 1880s, 417 Cooper Street became an owner-occupied home when Willard Hinchman, a fish merchant on the Philadelphia waterfront, purchased the house at this address as well as the house next door, 415 Cooper. While the Hinchman family lived in 417 Cooper, 415 continued to be a boarding house operated by a relative who had long lived at the address, Margaret Browning. The Hinchmans had other family connections in Camden as well, especially through Hinchman's wife, M. Ella Hinchman, one of six children of prominent local businessman John Stockham. He had made a fortune during the Civil War by importing Carolina pine from the South and then selling it to the U.S. government. By the 1880s, Stockham had retired to a Maryland farm, but he previously lived at 215 Cooper Street.<br /><br />The Hinchmans' early years at 417 Cooper were years of loss. First, John Stockham died in 1887 at the age of 70, and his funeral took place at the Hinchman home. Just three years later, the Hinchmans' infant son named for his grandfather, John Stockham Hinchman, also died at just eight months of age. His funeral, too, took place at 417 Cooper Street. Shortly thereafter, they rented out 417 Cooper to others; in 1896 both 417 and 415 Cooper Street went to sheriff's sale. The Hinchmans left New Jersey to farm on Stockham family land in Maryland, although they returned by 1905 to a rented home in Haddonfield.<br /><br /><strong>Health</strong> <strong>Professionals</strong><br /><br />At the turn of the twentieth century, 417 Cooper Street was an investment property that belonged to the new owner-occupant of the house next door at 415, <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/46" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Joshua B. Franklin</a>. The owner of a livery stable near the Camden waterfront, Franklin had become well-known as he rented horses and carriages to the city's social and political elites. This may have helped him attract tenants for 417 Cooper. He also improved the properties with wood front porches (added in 1913 but later removed).<br /><br />Cooper Street's evolution into a location for medical offices became evident at 417 Cooper Street with the tenants of the early twentieth century. For more than a decade, between 1908 and 1919, Franklin rented to the extended family of Dr. Elmer Bower, a dentist who previously had both home and office at two other Cooper Street addresses (<a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/76" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">405</a> and <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/40" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">419</a>). When Bower arrived in Camden in the 1880s, he had been fresh out of dental school at the University of Pennsylvania. Now, at 417 Cooper Street, he continued his practice from age 46 until retirement and shared the home with his wife, Catherine; his newly married son, Chester, and Chester's wife, Mary; and an adult daughter, Sarah. Dr. Bower was active in the Camden Republican Club, then at 312 Cooper Street, and his accomplishments as a fisherman occasionally made the Camden papers. When Bower retired in 1919 for health reasons, he moved briefly to another address in Camden and then returned to his birthplace, Berks County, Pennsylvania. <br /><br />The Bower family's successor at 417 Cooper Street also was culminating a long career in health care, particularly public health and the treatment of infectious disease. <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/51" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Dr. Henry Hill Davis</a>, 70 years old when he rented 417 Cooper, lived at this address with his wife, Harriett, for about five years while serving as medical inspector for Camden's public schools. He had been appointed to the position at the turn of the century--the first post of its kind in New Jersey and only the second in the nation, after New York City. Davis instituted annual physical examinations for Camden pupils and required vaccinations before any child could be admitted to school. While continuing in this work, he was among the leaders in founding a new Camden Municipal Hospital for Contagious Diseases, which opened in 1916, and he served for twenty years as president of the Camden Board of Health. Over his long career, he led Camden's responses to smallpox oubreaks and the influenza epidemic of 1918-19. When he retired from his Camden schools position in 1925, the city honored him not only with a pension but also by giving his name to a new public school--still operating in 2020 as the <a href="http://camdencitydavis.ss12.sharpschool.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Dr. Henry H. Davis Family School</a> in East Camden. A street near the former site of the Municipal Hospital <a href="http://www.dvrbs.com/camden-streets/CamdenNJ-Streets-DavisStreet.htm" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">also bears his name</a>.<br /><br /><strong>A Widow's Boarding House</strong><br /><br />Emma Jarvis experienced two deep losses in the mid-1920s: the death by suicide of her brother, John Knott, who lived on Point Street, and the death of her husband, Edgar, who operated an auto repair shop in North Camden. Perhaps it was the automotive business connected her with 417 Cooper Street, whose owner next door also sold and serviced automobiles as they gained in popularity during the 1920s. By 1927, perhaps a year or two earlier, Emma Jarvis moved from her earlier home in the 700 block of Lawrence Street to operate a boarding house at 417 Cooper.<br /><br />Unusual documentation of Jarvis's new address appeared in the <em>Camden Courier-Post</em> of January 28, 1929: a <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/49" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">testimonial advertisement</a> featuring her photograph. name, and address, with the headline "Woman Cries Aloud with Joy When Rheumatic Pain Goes." The advertisement purported to describe Jarvis's excruciating pain and the miraculous cure afforded by a powder called Nurito, available nearby at Weiser's Pharmacy, Fifth and Market Streets. This was, however, one of many such advertisements that appeared across the country to tout the Chicago-manufactured product. The ads soon attracted the attention of the Federal Trade Commission, which found the powder to be akin to aspirin and ordered the ads to be discontinued. <br /><br />For her more sustained venture, the boarding house, Jarvis rented 417 Cooper Street for $60 a month from the owner next door, <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/46" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Joshua Franklin</a>. The 1930 U.S. Census found her at this address at age 59 with two of her four adult children (David, 35, an auto repairman, and Marion, 26, a book keeper) and six boarders. The boarders included a cook, a laundry manager, a saleswoman and a salesman, and a newspaper reporter. Many of the home's occupants shared the experience of being children of immigrants to the United States. Jarvis had been born in Pennsylvania to a father who immigrated from Germany (her mother had been born in Delaware). Jarvis's late husband had been born England. Among her boarders in 1930, one had parents born in Germany and another had parents born in Ireland. Two others demonstrated the fluidity of movement within the country; one had been born in New York and another, while born in New Jersey, had a father born in Montana.<br /><br />Jarvis operated the boarding house until at least 1931 (when she was listed in the last Camden city directory published during the 1930s) and likely longer, as advertisements offering furnished rooms or apartments at 417 Cooper Street continued to appear in Camden newspapers until 1938. In the late 1930s, she moved to Haddonfield to live with her daughter, Marion, who was employed there as a book keeper.<br /><br /><strong>Physician's Office, Retirement Home</strong><br /><br />By 1939, 417 Cooper Street had a new owner and transitioned to a common pattern of use for Cooper Street houses during the remaining decades of the twentieth century. The new owner, Dr. Edmund Hessert, lived in Collingswood (and later Rancocas) while maintaining his office on the first floor of the building he had purchased in Camden. He rented out the two floors above as apartments.<br /><br />The building remained in part a family home, however, because the most long-term occupants of the second-floor apartment were Hessert's in-laws, Thomas J. and Anna Murphy, both in their 70s, together with one and sometimes two of their adult sons. Thomas J. Murphy was retired from the Camden police force; his son Thomas P. Murphy had followed him onto the force and also retired in 1943. The other son living at 417 Cooper periodically, John, served in Europe during World War II and then returned to his office job with RCA (in Camden, later in Cherry Hill).<br /><br /> Maintaining a home for the Murphys seems to have been a factor in Hessert's continued ownership of 417 Cooper Street through the 1950s. A year after the death of Anna Murphy in 1958, at the age of 86, the building was advertised "for quick sale." The listing promised the buyer professional offices on the first floor and two apartments, completely modernized, including Venetian blinds and carpeting.<br /><br /><strong>Professional Services and Apartments</strong><br /><br />In the second half of the twentieth century, 417 Cooper Street transitioned to an office building for insurance and legal services, with rental apartments above. <a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/43" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Richard C. Hardenbergh</a> operated his insurance agency at this address beginning in 1961, and in 1963 he bought the building. Although living in Haddon Township, he remained active in Camden civic activities, for example collecting registration forms for the Spring Queen competition held in Johnson Park in 1961. His business grew to twelve employees in Camden, with an additional office in Willingboro by 1966. During Hardenbergh's ownership, the tenants in the building included a training school for data processing equipment operators.<br /><br />A lawyer, Barry Weinberg, owned 417 Cooper in the 1970s and 1980s, when office tenants also included an accounting firm. Thereafter the building passed through a sequence of absentee and corporate owners and often appeared in notices for sheriff's sales to satisfy back taxes. In 2002, a Rutgers-Camden graduate, Elizabeth Ashley, bought the building and rehabilitated it into apartments for students while also opening a restaurant in the house next door (215). After one more change of ownership, to a Philadelphia entity Park Properties Unlimited, Rutgers University purchased the building in 2010 for $367,000.
Associated Individuals
For a list of individuals and businesses associated with this address, visit the <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15gz3_mGk3FcNl0TPaOZAq6B1CHvOpqRcY7a99xkp_l4/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Cooper Street Database</a> and scroll down to 417.
Illustrations
1. 417 Cooper Street in 2019. (Photograph by Jacob Lechner)
2. 400 block of Cooper Street, early twentieth century prior to 1913, with arrow indicating 417. (Camden County Historical Society)
Sources
Camden City Directories (Ancestry.com).<br /> Camden County Property Records.<br /> Camden and Philadelphia Newspapers (Newspapers.com and Geneaology Bank).<br />National Register for Historic Places, Cooper Street Historic District Nomination, U.S. Department of Interior.<br /> New Jersey Office of Cultural and Environmental Services Structures Surveys (1985) and Office of Environmental Protection, Historic Preservation Office, Property Reports (2007).<br /> U.S. Census, 1850-1950; New Jersey State Census, 1885-1915.<br /><br /><strong>Note on sources:</strong> Historic structures surveys identify this house as constructed c. 1846, consistent with the deed for purchase for the land. This research updates and corrects the date of construction for the home.
Research by
Charlene Mires
Posted by
Charlene Mires
Send corrections to cmires@camden.rutgers.edu
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
417 Cooper Street
Description
An account of the resource
Contributing structure, Cooper Street Historic District.
1840s
1850s
1860s
1870s
1880s
1900s
1910s
1920s
1930s
1940s
1950s
1960s
1970s
1980s
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2000s
2010s
400 Block
417 Cooper Street
Accountants
Aging
Apartments
Boarding House
Boarding House Operator
Childhood
Collingswood
Death
Dentists
Doctors
Domestic Life
England
Germany
Haddon Township
Haddonfield
Insurance
Interiors
Investment
Ireland
Merchants
Montana
New York
Philadelphia
Police
Rancocas
RCA
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Toms River
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World War II