Significance

Built in 1869, this distinctive home is a survivor from the neighborhood that developed in the area of the Rutgers-Camden campus in the decades after the Civil War. It was the longtime home of advertising innovator F.W. Ayer and his family. It became the birthplace of the Rutgers-Camden campus in 1946, when it was purchased for two predecessor institutions, the South Jersey Law School and College of South Jersey.

History

Penn Street developed in the 1860s and 1870s as members of the Cooper family divided and sold inherited farmland. A transfer of land among Cooper family members led to construction of 406 Penn Street by builder Joseph B. Cooper in 1869.

Distinctive Home

The seller, Esther Cooper (or her representative), ensured that this house would differ from the rowhouses then dominating nearby Cooper Street by specifying a setback of ten feet from Penn Street. As a freestanding stone home, built in the Second French Empire style, 406 Penn Street made a statement about the Cooper family’s aspirations for North Camden. Some nearby houses followed the precedent in limited ways, with stone facades, for example. But in the long run, 406 Penn Street stood apart from its neighbors as a mansion unlike any other house in the neighborhood. 

While living in the house he built, Joseph B. Cooper headed a household consisting of his wife, Elizabeth K. Cooper, their infant daughter Rebecca, and three domestic servants. The employees had ended up in Camden as part of the African American migration out of the South following the Civil War: coachman Charles Williams, 36 years old and classified “mulatto” (mixed race) by census-takers, was born in Georgia; 15-year-old Black servant Elizabeth Jubilee was born in Virginia. Both were old enough to have been born before the end of slavery in their home states. Another Black servant, 18-year-old Elizabeth Mattin, was born in New Jersey. Neither Williams nor Mattin could read or write.

With servants employed to perform household labor, the Coopers devoted time and funding to charities and social welfare organizations. Joseph B. Cooper was among the directors of Cooper Hospital, and his bequests when he died in 1889 included funds for the hospital as well as for the West Jersey Orphanage, the Frankford Insane Asylum in Philadelphia, and the Friends’ Boarding School in Chester County, Pennsylvania. Some of these gifts reflected the interests of his wife, who before her death had envisioned establishing a home in Camden for indigent widows and elder single women.

The Ayer Family

In 1877 Joseph B. Cooper sold his mid-block mansion to neighbors who had been living in a less grand home nearby at Fifth and Penn Streets. Francis Wayland (F.W.) Ayer, 29 years old, owned a successful advertising agency in Philadelphia that he had founded with his father. Leaving his earlier family home after the deaths of both of his parents, Ayer moved to 406 Penn Street with his wife of two years, Rhandena Gilman Ayer, and their baby daughter, Anna. By 1880 their family grew to include a second daughter, Alice, and they employed at least one domestic servant.

As the Ayer daughter grew to adulthood, the family became mainstays of the North Baptist Church (which stood on the site of the current Fine Arts Building of Rutgers-Camden). F.W. led the Sunday School. He also held positions as president of the Central Camden Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), the Camden and Suburban Railway Company, and the Camden Horse Railway. After their daughters were grown, Rhandena Ayer served on the board of managers for the Camden Home for Friendless Children.

Advertising Innovator

F.W. Ayer and his father, Nathan W. (N.W) Ayer, had been schoolteachers before getting into advertising in 1869, but their company quickly became Philadelphia’s largest seller of ad space in newspapers. As the head of N.W. Ayer & Son after his father’s death in 1873, F.W. Ayer introduced the revolutionary “open contract” system. This transformed the industry by positioning advertising agencies as the representatives for businesses seeking to place ads and offering transparency about fees and commissions. The new system helped to propel modernization of advertising-dependent newspapers and magazines in the late nineteenth century.

N.W. Ayer grew to be the largest agency in the United States as it produced memorable campaigns for such companies as Nabisco (“Uneeda Biscuit”), the Morton Salt Company (“when it rains it pours”), DeBeers (“a diamond is forever”), Cadillac, and AT&T. The company’s significance in American advertising history is attested by the placement of its records in the archives of the Smithsonian Institution. In Philadelphia, the former N.W. Ayer headquarters building on Washington Square is a monument to F.W. Ayer, who died in 1923. The company remained in operation until 2002.

Anna Ayer Fry

The Ayers’ older daughter, Anna, lived at 406 Penn Street for most of her life. Her husband, Wilfred Fry, succeeded her father as the head of the N.W. Ayer agency, and they raised three children in the Penn Street home. With two or three domestic servants usually employed to perform household labor, Anna frequently hosted the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, was an active churchwoman at North Baptist, and served as president of the Camden YWCA. Among many charitable activities, she donated funds for a playground in the 400 block of Cooper Street adjacent to the Centenary Methodist Episcopal Church. She also presided over Meridale Dairies, which was affiliated with the family’s cattle farm and summer home in upstate New York.

Birthplace of a Campus

The Ayers’ longtime presence came to an end in the 1946, when the heirs of Anna Ayer Fry sold the mansion to a buyer who was well-known to the family through the Camden YMCA and other civic activities: Arthur E. Armitage, the co-founder and president of the South Jersey Law School and College of South Jersey. After two decades at various locations nearby on Market, Federal, and Cooper Streets, Camden’s home-grown institutions of higher education had a new home, and a campus began to come to life. The former Ayer residence now serves as the Admissions Office for Rutgers-Camden.