The shore before Camden
The land along this part of the Delaware was inhabited long before European settlement. The Lenape lived and traveled along the river, which served as a route and a source of food. Their history is covered in the article on the Lenape homeland. European settlement on the east bank began in the later seventeenth century, and the shore became a place to cross the river rather than a town in its own right.
Ferries, from the 1600s
The oldest function of the Camden waterfront was as a ferry landing. Ferries ran across the Delaware to Philadelphia from the late 1600s, and the Cooper family, who held land on the New Jersey side, were closely tied to this crossing. The ferries carried people, goods and livestock between the colonial port and the farms of what is now South Jersey. More detail on this early trade is in the article on river ferries, and on the family in the one on the Cooper family.
When Camden was incorporated as a city in 1828, the ferry landings were already its commercial center. Steam-powered ferries became common in the nineteenth century, and they remained important for commuting and trade until bridges took over most of the traffic in the twentieth.
Railroads and the shore
In the 1830s and after, railroads arrived and put the river’s edge to new use. Camden became a terminus for lines heading to New York and later to the Jersey Shore, with passengers continuing to Philadelphia by ferry. This made the waterfront a transfer point with rail yards, depots and ferry houses side by side. The article on railroad links takes up the subject in more depth.
Shipbuilding and port work
By the late nineteenth century the shore also had shipyards and wharves. The largest was the New York Shipbuilding Corporation, founded in 1899, which built many large vessels, including naval ships and, in the twentieth century, aircraft carriers. During the two World Wars the yard’s output was part of the national war effort, as described in the pieces on shipbuilding yards and on wartime production. The yard closed in 1967.
Other shore activities included coal and freight handling and the broader operations of port facilities, which supported local jobs. The lower Delaware as a whole was a major shipping corridor, a subject treated in the article on ports and shipping.
Factories near the river
The flat land near the river and the rail lines drew manufacturers. Food processing, including canning, was among the best known, and the Victor Talking Machine Company, founded in Camden in 1901, made the city a center of the recorded sound industry. The wider story is in the articles on industrial Camden, food manufacturing and talking machines. Working people lived in nearby neighborhoods, many of them immigrants, as the article on immigrant workers explains, and daily life centered on shifts, whistles and nearby streets, described in the piece on factory work.
Bridges and the end of the ferry era
The Delaware River Bridge, later named the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, opened in 1926 and was among the longest suspension bridges of its time. The Walt Whitman Bridge to the south opened in 1957. As automobile traffic shifted to the bridges, the ferries lost most of their purpose. Walt Whitman, who lived in Camden from 1873 until his death in 1892, had used the ferries often, and his writing about them is covered in the article on ferry poems.
The 1960s: a turning point
Two changes in the 1960s mark the close of the old working shore. The New York Shipbuilding yard closed in 1967, and the PATCO Speedline opened in 1969, linking Camden to Philadelphia and the suburbs by rail rather than ferry. Throughout the postwar period many industries moved away or shut down, as set out in the article on deindustrialization. What followed on the shore is told separately in the account of waterfront revitalization.
Tracing this history yourself
Maps, directories and photographs are good places to start. City directories list businesses by year, and historic atlases show the layout of wharves and rail lines. The broader article on local history research outlines a method, and the one on industrial contamination explains why former industrial land may still carry traces of its past.