A Camden museum director is concerned that South Jersey’s role in America’s War of Independence will go unrecognized during the celebration of the nation’s 250th birthday.
“Philadelphia and North Jersey always overlook South Jersey’s Revolutionary War history,” said Jack O’Byrne, who heads the Camden County Historical Society as well as the Camden Shipyard and Maritime Museum.
O’Byrne said his concern about South Jersey being ignored arose after the Philadelphia Funder Collaborative for the Semiquincentennial solicited applications for grants.
An Aug. 16 post on the Pew Charitable Trusts website was headlined “$9 Million Fund Will Help Philadelphia-Area Nonprofits Commemorate America’s 250th Birthday,” but the grants were limited to nonprofits in Philly and its four Pennsylvania collar counties.
The geographic requirement was clearly spelled out on the funder collaborative’s website, although it nevertheless also stated that the guiding principles for grant-making were to help “Philadelphia-area nonprofits” and celebrate “the diversity of the city and the region.”
“We’re clearly part of greater Philadelphia, we’re a legitimate nonprofit, and we’re in a Black and brown city,” O’Byrne said. “And we’ve got plenty of Revolutionary War history.”
Difficult, but necessary, boundaries
According to O’Byrne and other historians, South Jersey was the site of dozens and dozens of skirmishes and at least two major battles. “Casimir Pulaski had his horse shot out from under him right over there,” O’Byrne said, standing at the site of the proposed American Revolution Museum of Southern New Jersey.
The museum will transform the vacant and fire-damaged Benjamin Cooper House in North Camden into a heritage tourism hub, he said. And it will showcase not only war heroes such as Brig. Gen. Pulaski, but also the Black and Native American soldiers who fought and died at the Battle of Red Bank (also known as the Battle of Fort Mercer) in Gloucester County, of which Camden County was then a part.
About $2.8 million of the museum’s $4 million construction cost has been raised so far.
“I need to raise about $1 million from foundation and private-sector sources, and greater Philadelphia and New Jersey entities are more likely to give than national ones,” he said.
“I was hoping to raise between $350,000 and $500,000 from Philadelphia foundations. But we’re casting a wide net.”
Christopher Levenick is a program director at the Connelly Foundation, which is administering the Philadelphia Funder Collaborative. Besides Connelly and Pew, the other funders in the collaborative are the William Penn Foundation and the Neubauer Family Foundation.
“We of course appreciate southern New Jersey’s wealth of historic sites, civic organizations, and cultural institutions,” Levenick said in a letter to O’Byrne.
“However, the Funder Collaborative focused … on the counties of southeastern Pennsylvania, where the vast majority of our collective grantmaking takes place. Drawing geographic boundaries is difficult, but it is necessary,” he wrote.
“Indeed, we have already received nearly 80 requests totaling more than $50 million, far outstripping the resources we have at our disposal.”
Lindsay Doyle, who is handling public relations for Philadelphia250, said by email: “While Camden is just a stone’s throw away, we’re dedicating our efforts to supporting Philadelphia-based initiatives.”
A deeper historical narrative
O’Byrne and other historians in Camden, Burlington, and Gloucester Counties said concerns about South Jersey being overlooked during the semiquincentennial aren’t parochial, but rather about telling a more detailed, diverse, and nuanced story of the early years of the Revolutionary War — before, during, and after the occupation of Philadelphia.
“New Jersey African American soldiers in the Revolutionary War included Oliver Cromwell, a free Black man from Burlington County who helped row George Washington across the Delaware,” said Linda Shockley, president of the Lawnside Historical Society, which operates the Peter Mott House.
“That wasn’t taught when we were in school,” she said. “But we [Black people] were there. We were part of the Revolutionary War from the beginning.”
At the Battle of Red Bank on Oct. 22, 1777, an outnumbered force of patriots — including two integrated regiments from Rhode Island — defeated the British and Hessians, said Jen Janofsky, a Rowan University professor of history.
Janofsky also oversees the battlefield site, which is located on a bluff in the Borough of National Park, Gloucester County, which overlooks the Delaware River. The victory of the Continental Army over the “premier fighting force” of Hessian soldiers “demonstrated that the British were vulnerable,” she said.
“The larger story we’ve been trying to tell was not the story that traditional, white-produced histories told about Red Bank for most of the last 250 years,” said Janofsky.
A contemporaneous account in a Black newspaper describes an 1840s visit by Sunday school students at Philadelphia’s historic Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church to the battlefield site, describing it as “the place where our patriots fought.”
And after the state of New Jersey commissioned a monument for the battlefield, “prominent members of New Jersey’s Black community wrote to Gov. Edward Casper Stokes, advocating for recognition” of the Black soldiers who fought and died there, but got no response, Janofsky said.
A pivotal role?
O’Byrne and other historians in South Jersey said there’s good reason why the Garden State is often referred to as the Crossroads of the American Revolution.
The proposed museum in North Camden stands at Cooper’s Point, which was the closest New Jersey landing for ferries from Philadelphia during the war. The Hessians landed there on their way to Red Bank and “limped back here” after their resounding defeat, said O’Byrne.
During the British evacuation of Philadelphia in June 1778, 15,000 Hessian and British soldiers landed at Cooper’s Point en route to New York, he said.
“The British occupied Haddonfield on four occasions between October 1777 and June 1778,” said Doug Rauschenberger, a past president of the Haddonfield Historical Society.
“Haddonfield was in the crosshairs of all that was going on.”
Skirmishes, active militias, and other resistance by local residents either distracted or slowed movements of British forces during at least two events that may have affected the course of the war: the Battle of Trenton in December 1776, and the British evacuation of Philadelphia in June 1778, said Jeffrey Macechak, education coordinator for the Burlington County Historical Society.
The Battle of Iron Works Hill in Mount Holly on Dec. 23, 1776, helped set the stage for Gen. George Washington’s post-Delaware River crossing victory at Trenton. And during the long march by British forces evacuating Philadelphia through New Jersey and toward New York, resistance in Burlington County towns including Moorestown, Mount Laurel, and Evesham was significant, said Macechak.
The view from Trenton
“We also feel that New Jersey doesn’t get its due, and the remarkable stories of New Jersey are often overlooked in larger histories of the American Revolution,” Lawrence Schmidt, director of development for Crossroads of the American Revolution, said when told about O’Byrne’s concerns.
“N.J. is on the list of places, for many, many reasons, where history has not received the support it needs and deserves,” said Sara Cureton, executive director of the New Jersey Historical Commission, which is the public partner with Crossroads in RevolutionNJ, which is promoting New Jersey’s role.
Although New Jersey has allocated $25 million for capital improvements at state-owned historic sites, “that’s a drop in the bucket,” Cureton said.
RevolutionNJ seeks to raise private funds to support commemoration activities, and the partnership also is encouraging counties and municipalities to get organized around the nation’s anniversary in 2026.
“One of our major goals,” Schmidt said, “is to promote New Jersey as a must-see destination for people who want to know more about the American Revolution.”
