The 1734 Tavern That Waited 292 Years to Tell Its Story

Stand on the Camden waterfront today and you will hear the hum of traffic on the bridge, the low rumble of a river that has carried this region’s cargo for three centuries. Now do something harder: imagine it in 1734, when the building that still stands nearby was raised as Benjamin Cooper’s tavern, a place where ferrymen, farmers and travelers crossing to Philadelphia stopped to rest, argue, and pass along the news of the day.

That building has outlived nearly everything around it. And this summer, after a two-year, $4 million restoration, it finally opened its doors as the American Revolution Museum of Southern New Jersey — a home, at long last, for the stories our corner of the state has been carrying quietly for generations.

Older than the country it honors

I want to sit with the age of this place, because it is easy to say “1734” and let the number slide past you. When those timbers were set, George Washington was a toddler. The Declaration of Independence was still forty-two years away. The tavern predates the nation it now commemorates by more than a human lifetime. It watched the Revolution arrive at its own front step — South Jersey was not a bystander to that war but a crossroads of it, its rivers and ferries and taverns woven directly into the movement of armies and ideas. The museum opened to the public on June 27, and the grand opening drew Camden City Mayor Victor Carstarphen, New Jersey Assemblyman William Moen, U.S. Representative Donald Norcross, and members of the Camden County Board of Commissioners. What struck me was the funding behind it — money from all three levels of government, city, state and federal, pooled to save one old building.

The Revolution happened here too

The timing is no accident. This restoration arrives inside the broader national commemoration of America’s 250th anniversary. Most of that attention flows to Boston and Philadelphia and Yorktown. What the American Revolution Museum of Southern New Jersey insists — gently, from a tavern most drivers have sped past a thousand times — is that the Revolution happened here too, among ordinary South Jersey people whose names never made the textbooks. If you want to feel that this week, a traveling exhibit titled “Revolutionary Lives: Living the American Experiment” has been on display at Camden City Council Chambers, a companion to the museum’s larger mission: to move the Revolution out of the abstract and into the lives of the people who actually lived it.

History does not always announce itself. Sometimes it just stands quietly on a waterfront for 292 years, waiting for us to notice.Henry Whitaker

This summer, in Camden, we finally did.

Based on reporting from The Sun Papers, the Camden County Historical Society, and Camden County.