The Historic Slave House & Grounds, Parkside

Discover the History Of Camden Slave House

Experience the rich history of the Parkside Slave House & Grounds. Here, you will learn about our shared past and the culture that shaped it. Join us as we preserve and celebrate this vital part of our heritage.

The Historical Importance of Parkside Slave House

Pomona Hall, often discussed in relation to Camden’s slaveholding past, is one of the most significant surviving colonial structures connected to African American history in Camden, New Jersey. Located at Park Boulevard and Euclid Avenue, the house was originally built in 1726 and expanded in 1788 by members of the Cooper family, one of the founding families of Camden. Although Pomona Hall is sometimes remembered primarily as an elegant colonial mansion, its history also reflects the labor, confinement, and forced service of enslaved Africans and African-descended people in eighteenth-century West Jersey. The site was part of a large agricultural estate, and its interpretation today must include both the wealth of the Cooper family and the Black lives that made that wealth possible.

The history of Pomona Hall is connected to the broader system of slavery in colonial New Jersey and the Delaware Valley. Scholarly research has shown that slavery in the North was not marginal or harmless; it was embedded in agriculture, domestic labor, ferry commerce, port activity, and regional trade. Camden’s location across the Delaware River from Philadelphia made it especially important because ferries and river landings served as commercial spaces where people, goods, and enslaved Africans moved between New Jersey and Pennsylvania. During the eighteenth century, Cooper-family ferry sites became points where enslaved Africans were advertised, displayed, and sold. This places Camden within the larger Atlantic world of slavery rather than outside of it.

African Americans who can be traced to Pomona Hall are known through surviving primary documents, manumission records, local archival research, and public-history work. The Camden County Historical Society’s “Say My Name: Enslaved Africans of Pomona Hall” exhibit identifies seventeen enslaved individuals held in bondage at Pomona Hall between 1726 and 1795. These individuals were men, women, and children whose lives were tied to the Cooper household and plantation economy. Their stories reveal that slavery in Camden was not abstract; it involved identifiable people whose labor supported farming, household maintenance, food production, transportation, and the daily operations of a wealthy colonial estate.

The African Americans connected to Pomona Hall also help explain the transition from slavery to freedom in early Camden County. New Jersey did not abolish slavery quickly; instead, it passed a gradual abolition law in 1804, making it the last northern state to do so. Even after gradual abolition, Black freedom remained restricted by racism, labor exploitation, family separation, and the threat of removal or sale. Research on post-Revolutionary New Jersey shows that enslaved people and free Black communities navigated a complicated world in which legal freedom did not immediately produce social equality. The Pomona Hall story therefore belongs not only to the history of slavery, but also to the longer history of African American survival, family formation, and community-building in Camden.

Today, Pomona Hall is important because it forces Camden’s public history to confront both preservation and memory. The house is not simply an architectural landmark; it is a site where African American history, slavery, Quaker slaveholding, local commerce, and gradual emancipation intersect. By tracing the African Americans connected to Pomona Hall, historians and community members restore names, labor, and dignity to people who were often reduced to property in written records. Remembering Pomona Hall as part of Camden’s slaveholding past helps challenge the false idea that slavery was only a Southern institution and reminds readers that African American history in Camden began long before industrialization, migration, and the modern civil rights era.

Peer-reviewed / scholarly sources used

• Bezis-Selfa, J. (1997). Slavery and the disciplining of free labor in the colonial Mid-Atlantic iron industry. Pennsylvania History.
• Gigantino, J. J., II. (2015). The Ragged Road to Abolition: Slavery and Freedom in New Jersey, 1775–1865. University of Pennsylvania Press.
• Hack, T. (2012). Janus-Faced: The Post-Revolutionary Career of Slavery in East and West Jersey, 1784–1804. New Jersey History.
• Wax, D. D. (1983). Africans on the Delaware: The Pennsylvania Slave Trade, 1759–1765. Pennsylvania History, 50(1), 38–49.

Pomona Hall Timeline: From Enslavement to Public Memory