About Us

About Camden History

This site is heavily based on the life's work of Phil Cohen. Phil spent more than 20 years writing dvrbs.com, documenting the largest historical archive on Camden, NJ — a truly impressive feat. Please be aware that camdenhistory.com is not affiliated with Phil or dvrbs.com, though we host a modernized archive at dvrbs.camdenhistory.com. When dvrbs.com went offline in early 2024, we preserved the archive to ensure that Phil's work remains accessible. What you'll find here builds on that foundation, combined with our own research, original contributions, and new technology.

The goal is simple: share the history of an amazing city — its people, places, and events — with anyone who wants to explore it, for generations to come. Browsing is free and always will be.

It is worth noting that some articles presented and transcribed on this site use language that we find unacceptable by today's standards. While we are sensitive to matters of culture, ethnicity, and inclusive language, we are not going to hide or edit old articles because they are now considered offensive. History is history. Celebrating our historical successes is equally as important as recognizing where we can improve. If we suppress history, we cannot learn from it. This is not a political statement — camdenhistory.com is non-political and without bias. The goal is simply to preserve and showcase Camden's history. Articles are shown and transcribed in their original form, as written in their time.

Technology

CamdenHistory.com is powered by CamdenCMS, a purpose-built content management system developed specifically for this site. It is designed around the needs of a historical archive: structured content types for people, streets, businesses, and events; full-text search; rich metadata for search engines; and a mobile-friendly reading experience.

We use Tesseract OCR to transcribe newspaper articles and other historical documents, making them searchable and readable alongside the original images. Transcriptions are best-effort — the volume is significant, and errors do occur. If you spot one, comments are the best way to flag it.

PDFs on the site — including City Directories — are also fully searchable, covering decades of Camden phone and business directories that would otherwise be difficult to research.

Aren't you just stealing Phil's work from his site?

This site combines sources — much of it is the work that Phil did. Other sources are local historians, and still others are new contributions not seen anywhere else, including material from my family's long history in Camden. Regarding the question, I'll let Phil answer in his own words:

No man owns history, therefore you should feel free to use anything in this web site for any purpose you see fit. The only important thing is that knowledge be preserved, made accessible, and passed down to future generations. This site is not for profit and proud of it, for to claim title to and profit from the actions of those long gone seems to, at best, bogus, and at worst, immoral. If left to the greedy, there would be no public domain — Constitution and the Bible would be the property of an individual, institution, or corporation.

— Phil Cohen, www.dvrbs.com