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https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/files/original/8647158bce125025f304bbb7304b26b1.jpg
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Buildings
Description
An account of the resource
Houses and other structures on Cooper Street in Camden, N.J.
Place
Residence, business, or other entity.
Illustrations
Photograph by Jacob Lechner
Significance
<p>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/1d735b273d6cc487e33de75b08c156ba.jpg
e1ea6c03aa63880aefb919ad6ad8ecac
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
323 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. Its designers, Hazlehurst & Huckel of Philadelphia, are named in National Register documentation as among the architects whose work warranted designating the district based on its distinctive architecture. In 1980 a structure survey prepared by the Camden Division of Planning described the house as “one of the few examples of Queen Anne architecture of Camden to explore the richness of the style’s variety of forms and requisite asymmetricality.” The building also is notable for residents who played important roles in the development of Camden as a modern city, one of whom was a wounded veteran of the Civil War. Before its ownership by Rutgers, the house served for nearly 25 years as the rectory of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church.
Architectural style
Queen Anne with elements of Colonial Revival.
Date of construction
1886
History
<p>The house at 323 Cooper Street reflects transformations on Cooper Street by the 1880s, when architect-designed houses began to appear on the increasingly prestigious thoroughfare. Higher-style homes accompanied a change in the streetscape, which gained small front yards after the Camden City Council agreed to a resident’s proposal to move the curbs of Cooper Street toward the center for 12 feet on each site.</p>
<p>In contrast to adjacent older brick rowhouses, the stone-front 323 Cooper Street was designed by the Philadelphia firm <a href="https://www.philadelphiabuildings.org/pab/app/ar_display.cfm/22158" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Hazlehurst & Huckel</a>, who were known for residential, church, and commercial architecture. One of the partners, Edward P. Hazlehurst, had worked with one of Philadelphia’s best-known architects, Frank Furness, before starting his own firm with Samuel Huckel Jr. in 1881. The partners subsequently designed another Cooper Street house (<a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/61" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">527</a>) in similar style, and they won a competition to design the Manufacturer’s Club prominently located at Broad and Walnut Streets in Philadelphia. Later, Huckel individually won a commission to remodel Grand Central Station in New York.</p>
<p>The lot at 323 Cooper Street was available for construction in 1886 because it had long been owned by the occupants of the house next door (<a href="https://omeka.camden.rutgers.edu/items/show/84" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">321 Cooper Street</a>), chemical manufacturer Joseph De La Cour and his family. The new house at 323 was commissioned in 1886 for De La Cour’s daughter Emily and her husband, Edward F. Nivin. By that time a family with five young children, the Nivins lived in the house briefly, but by 1890 with Joseph De La Cour in failing health, they put both houses (321 and 323 Cooper Street) up for sale.</p>
<p><strong>Networks of Power for the Modern City</strong></p>
<p>The first long-term owners of 323 Cooper Street, John J. and Anna Burleigh, also filled the house with young children. They had five children by the time they moved in, and three more were born during their eight years on Cooper Street – two sons and six daughters. (One other son died at some point prior to 1900.) John Burleigh, born in 1855 in Gloucester County, was the son of Irish immigrants; Anna, formerly Anna Smith, was born in Elmer, Salem County, the same year. After they married in 1874, when they were both 19 years old, they settled in Camden.</p>
<p>When the Burleighs moved to Camden, John Burleigh was a telegraph operator, a skill he had picked up beginning at the age of 14. He gained a position as station and telegraph operator for the West Jersey Railroad Company in Elmer, Anna’s hometown. By the time they began their family life in Camden, Burleigh had advanced to chief telegraph operator for the railroad.</p>
<p>It was an auspicious time to have knack for wires, electricity, and transportation. In the 1870s and early 1880s, Burleigh played a leading role in creating the infrastructure that made Camden a modern, industrial city. For the South Jersey Telephone Company, in 1879 he oversaw the laying of a cable beneath the Delaware River to connect Camden with Philadelphia by telephone. In 1881, he became a manager and electrician for the new Electric Illuminating Company of Camden – later the Camden Heating and Lighting Company – which led the city’s transition from gas to electric lighting. All the while, he maintained his position with the railroad, advancing to train master in 1884. His business activities expanded to electric streetcar lines, installed in the 1890s in Camden and between beach communities of the Jersey Shore.</p>
<p>The Burleighs’ purchase of one of the most stylish new homes on Cooper Street in 1890 displayed affluence also achieved in another arena: real estate finance. During the 1880s Burleigh had been elected secretary of several Camden building and loan associations. Increasingly prominent as a financier, he became secretary of the Camden Board of Trade the same year the family moved to Cooper Street. Ultimately, in 1892 Burleigh gave up his position with the West Jersey Railroad because of the press of other business. He remained an officer with the Camden Heating and Lighting Company and the various building and loan associations that were enabling home ownership for the middle class. Going a step farther, in 1889, he was among 25 incorporators of the new South Jersey Finance Company, “to buy and sell almost anything; it will make a specialty of real estate operations, negotiations of mortgages and the like and it will have power to guarantee titles,” the <em>Camden County Courier</em> reported. “One of the objects of the company will be the purchase, for people without means, of homes, and permitting them to pay for the same on monthly installments until they have paid sufficient to secure a loan from one of our building associations.” Another company organized a decade later sold insurance to cover the risks of defaults on mortgages.</p>
<p>While living at 323 Cooper Street, Burleigh’s social circles included the Camden Republican Club, then located across the street at 312 Cooper. He prevailed in euchre tournaments and joined the club on a trip to Civil War sites in Virginia. The Burleighs, a rare Roman Catholic family among the Protestants on Cooper Street, also devoted time and energy to their parish, the Church of the Immaculate Conception. John Burleigh led the project to build a Catholic lyceum (lecture hall) adjacent to the church and organized a literary society for youth. Like others of their social class, the Burleighs spent extended periods during the summer at the Jersey Shore, usually Atlantic City.</p>
<p>The Burleighs stayed in Camden until 1898. By that time, with John Burleigh firmly established as a financier, the family moved to the fashionable railroad suburb of Merchantville. John Burleigh’s fortunes continued to climb when the General Electric Company absorbed the Camden Heating and Lighting Company, which he still managed, in 1899. At the Burleighs’ new home in Merchantville, the U.S. Census documented the family in 1900: John and Anna had been married 26 years, and their eight children ranged in age from 4 to 24. That year they employed four domestic servants: a butler, a cook, a housemaid, and a coachman.</p>
<p><strong>Civil War Veteran</strong></p>
<p>John Burleigh sold his house to a contemporary and associate: George Barrett, who was a lumber dealer but also a director of the Camden Lighting and Heating Company and a fellow member of the Board of Trade and the Camden Republican Club. While Burleigh engaged in putting electricity to work in utilities and transportation, Barrett provided necessary infrastructure, like telephone poles and streetcar rail ties. He also held elective offices, culminating in a term as Camden County Sheriff between 1893 and 1896. This also placed him in Burleigh’s realm of real estate through his duties of seizing and selling properties in default of mortgages or tax payments.</p>
<p>Barrett, who owned 323 Cooper Street for the next two decades, was born in England in 1846 and immigrated to the United States with his parents at the age of 10. Raised in Pennsylvania, by 1878 he was in Camden and playing a role in the city’s then-dominant industry as co-owner of a sixteen-acre sawmill operation on the Delaware River waterfront between Penn and Pearl Streets. Barrett and his wife, Sarah, also from Pennsylvania, he lived during the 1880s and 1890s at 126 Cooper Street and raised three children there. The Barretts also acquired a cottage at the Jersey Shore, in Ocean City, where George was known for his boating and hunting skills, and Sarah hosted an annual fish dinner for other Camden women at the shore. Sarah Barrett participated in the women’s auxiliary groups of her husband’s organizations and joined the Camden Woman’s Club.</p>
<p>By the time the Barretts moved to 323 Cooper Street in 1899, George Barrett was devoting his greatest energy to the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), the patriotic and fraternal organization of veterans of the Civil War. Barrett, who fought for the Union with the 126<sup>th</sup> Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment, had been among the troops in the trenches during the siege of Richmond and then occupied the city after it fell. He bore a lasting reminder of the war in the form of a limp caused by a gunshot to the knee.</p>
<p>In Camden, Barrett was a leader in the Thomas K. Lee Post No. 5 of the GAR, and the same year he moved to 232 Cooper Street he was elected Department Commander for the New Jersey Division. Barrett coordinated planning for the national GAR encampment in Philadelphia that year, and throughout his years on Cooper Street engaged in meticulous planning and issued orders for GAR encampments and for the commemorations and parades on Memorial Day, Appomattox Day marking the end of the War, and other occasions. He supplied a 102-foot-long white pine pole for the American flag that flew at the Post No. 5 headquarters at Fifth Street and Taylor Avenue. Beyond Camden, he served on inspection committees for the Soldiers’ Home in Vineland, and he traveled to national GAR encampments in other cities. In 1913, he boarded a special train with other Camden veterans to attend the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the Battle of Gettysburg.</p>
<p>When the Barretts moved to 323 Cooper Street, their household consisted of George, then 52 years old; Sarah, 48, and two of their three grown children, daughter Flora, 21, and son Frank, 19, who worked as a bookkeeper. The children left home when they married, but the Barretts remained until 1923. That year, with construction of the Delaware River Bridge soon to disrupt North Camden, they moved to Moorestown.</p>
<p><strong>Public Lives, Private Lives</strong></p>
<p>Demolitions for the approach to the new bridge across the Delaware River displaced the next residents of 323 Cooper Street from their earlier long-time residence in the 500 block of Linden Street. Francis and Katherine Weaver lived at 323 Cooper Street for the next decade, although title to the home was held by their adult daughter and son-in-law, who lived in Salem County. When they moved to Cooper Street in 1924, Francis Weaver was an established attorney, 63 years old, and his wife was 10 years younger. Their household included Weaver’s mother, Harriet, and his sister Anna, a retired teacher who had become blind. Servants attended to the needs of the older women, who both died while the Weavers lived on Cooper Street – Harriet in 1927 and Anna in 1934.</p>
<p>Francis and Katherine Weaver were both public figures. In addition to his legal practice, Francis Weaver served on the New Jersey State Board of Taxation, where he presided over appeals of tax assessments. Katherine Weaver was an active club woman, devoting greatest energy to the Daughters of the American Revolution, where she was regarded as an authority on genealogical research. Her club activities extended to groups in Haddonfield and Moorestown, while in Camden she helped with the annual charity events for Cooper Hospital and hosted events for the Women’s Auxiliary of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church.</p>
<p>At St. Paul’s, located a block from the Weaver’s Cooper Street home, Katherine Weaver became involved in social work as a fund-raiser and leader for the Church Mission of Help, part of a nationwide Episcopal organization that sought to combat juvenile delinquency and render aid to young women and girls in cities. Among its activities in Camden, the mission sought to address the needs of young unwed mothers by advising them of their rights to financial support from their babies’ fathers, helping them find employment, and providing clothing for the babies. Weaver was involved with the mission from its inception in Camden in 1928 and served as financial secretary by 1932.</p>
<p>To most outward appearances, the Weavers lived a conventional life at 323 Cooper Street, but during the 1930s they also made the news in startling ways. In 1930, their son-in-law J. William McCausland was killed in a gangland-style shooting in Salem as he carried out his duties as a paymaster for the Salem Glass Works. He was carrying $3,000 in a cash box when a car drove up and a man stepped onto the running board, aimed a revolver, and fired. McCausland fell onto the cash box, dying from the gunshot, and the robbers fled. The Weavers’ daughter, Helen, was left a widow with three children. The family made news again in 1934-35 stemming from longtime tensions within the Weavers’ marriage, centered in large part on Katherine Weaver’s frequent activities outside the home. After fighting escalated into a physical altercation, Katherine Weaver left her husband in 1934 and filed for spousal support and a divorce. The subsequent legal hearings laid bare the difficulties of the marriage, which were reported by Camden newspapers in sensational detail. Weaver lost the case, but she lived apart from her husband thereafter. Francis Weaver died at 323 Cooper Street in 1938; Katherine Weaver lived until 1962 with her daughter in Salem County.</p>
<p><strong>Episcopal Rectory</strong></p>
<p>For nearly 25 years, 323 Cooper Street next served as the rectory for nearby St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. Rev. William D. McLean, whose father was an Episcopal priest in Chicago, moved into the home by the end of 1938 with his family, including his wife, Alice (a native of Moorestown), and three children under the age of 5. They stayed until 1940, when Rev. McLean, then 33 years old, was commissioned a first lieutenant chaplain with the U.S. Army. The 1940 Census showed two other occupants of the household, a housekeeper Louisa Mitchell, 52 years old, and her husband, Joseph, 61, a watchman at the RCA radio factory.</p>
<p>For the remaining years of 323 Cooper Street’s service to St. Paul’s, from 1940 until 1962, the rectory was home to Rev. Percival C. Bailey, McLean’s successor. Bailey, a native of Michigan, came to Camden with 22 years of experience in the ministry, including pastorates in mining districts and industrial Detroit. He had traveled widely abroad and brought his new parishioners first-hand observations of the upheavals in Germany that accompanied Chancellor Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. After the United States entered World War II, Bailey served on a committee formed by local pastors to offer counseling to conscientious objectors.</p>
<p>Bailey, who was unmarried, employed housekeepers during his years at 323 Cooper Street and rented excess rooms to tenants. When recorded by the 1950 U.S. Census the household included Bailey, then 58 years old; a housekeeper, Viola Darcy, 50, and three lodgers: Paul E. Kennedy, 44, a railroad conductor; John Costello, 24, a restaurant dishwasher, and Matos Costello, a deck hand. The Costellos, who roomed together, were both born in <a href="https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/puerto-rican-migration/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Puerto Rico</a>, a reflection of the changing demographics of Camden in the decades following World War II.</p>
<p><strong>Community Health and Nutrition</strong></p>
Percival Bailey remained at 323 Cooper Street until he retired from active ministry in 1962. From that point onward, the former residence served as an office for a series of community service organizations. The Visiting Nurses Association of Camden occupied 323 Cooper Street between 1963 and 1966 after urban renewal demolitions displaced the group from a nearby Fourth Street headquarters. From the late 1960s through the late 1980s, as Rutgers University expanded its presence on Cooper Street, various nutrition services of the New Jersey Cooperative Extension Service had a home in 323 Cooper Street. By 2002, the building housed <a href="https://www.njhi.org/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">New Jersey Health Initiatives</a>, a grant-making program of the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation, and by 2022 the former residence also included the <a href="https://camden.rutgers.edu/discover-camden/leadership/office-provost" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Provost’s office</a> for Rutgers University-Camden.
Associated Individuals
For a list of known occupants of 323 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 323.
Associated architects/builders
<a href="https://www.philadelphiabuildings.org/pab/app/ar_display.cfm/22158" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Hazlehurst & Huckel</a>, Philadelphia.
Sources
<p>Camden and Philadelphia Newspapers (Newspapers.com and Genealogy Bank).<br /> Camden City Directories (Camden County Historical Society and Ancestry.com).<br /> Camden County Property Records.<br /> New Jersey State Census, 1885-1915, and U.S. Census, 1850-1950 (Ancestry.com).<br /> Prowell, George R. <em>The History of Camden County, New Jersey.</em> Philadelphia: L.J. Richards & Co., 1886.</p>
Research by
Charlene Mires, Mikaela Maria, 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
323 Cooper Street
Description
An account of the resource
Contributing structure, Cooper Street Historic District.
1880s
1890s
1900s
1910s
1920s
1930s
1940s
1950s
1960s
1970s
1980s
1990s
2000s
2010s
2020s
300 Block
323 Cooper Street
Attorneys
Bridge Impact
Camden Republican Club
Civil War
Clergy
Daughters of the American Revolution
GAR
Gloucester County
Hazlehurst & Huckel
Lumber
Merchantville
Moorestown
Nurses
Ocean City
Pennsylvania
Public Health
Public Officials
Queen Anne
Real Estate
Rutgers-Camden
Salem County
St. Paul's Episcopal Church
Telegraph
Telephone
Transportation
Utilities
Women's Clubs
World War II