Something fishy: Shad, gambling and the Duke of Gloucester

Researching New Jersey history, I'm often fascinated to find the stories of individuals who, while massively influential in their time, have faded back into obscurity. Maybe they're still talked of regionally, their stories well known in local history, but no longer with the same degree of reverence or scorn as in their day.

One I discovered recently is said to have created what the New York Times of his time described as "New Jersey's darkest disgrace, the most cancerous growth on all her territory. Here every vice is licensed and all that is worst in man or woman is catered to by a horde of men who have lost all that is born in them of decency and of honor and chastity, of all the attributes that make man higher than the beast."

Who was this man, once so reviled but now anonymous? Billy Thompson, or, to his 19th century contemporaries, the Duke of Gloucester. Long time readers might remember him as the politically connected entrepreneur who sold his Gloucester City mansion and property to the U.S. Government for a new Philadelphia immigration station.

Billy Thompson, from a 1893 profile
in the New York Times.

Thompson immigrated to New York at the age of 13 during the depths of the Irish Famine, seeking to forge his own version of the American dream. After a short stint in Boston, he returned to New York and then moved southwest to Philadelphia. A job in the billiards room of the city's Continental Hotel soon evolved into restaurant management and bartending, allowing him to build hospitality and people skills that would serve him well throughout his life. Apparently, it's also where he gained a sharp political sense from the well-connected men who frequented the bars.

Across the Delaware, Gloucester City was already a well-known resort, judged in some eyes as a poor man's Atlantic City. Envisioning the location's greater potential, Thompson leased the Buena Vista Hotel in 1870, developing it into one of the city's most popular inns among politicians and other celebrities. When the owners refused to renew his lease two years later, he simply bought an adjacent plot of land and built his own hotel.

One could say that Thompson's success was fishy from the start. The Delaware being an abundant fishery, the Buena Vista was well known for its planked shad dinners. Again seeing an opportunity, Thompson leased the city's shad farms and bought up about three and a half miles of the coastline along the river. And when the Philadelphia ferry companies refused to extend their hours to accommodate the growing numbers of customers frequenting the Thompson Hotel and restaurant, the entrepreneur bought his own ferries. His 24 hour service proved so popular that it the older company went bankrupt, enabling Thompson to buy controlling interest in it, too. To address the visitors coming by land, he also built his own railroad. Gloucester City was soon filled with pool halls, drinking establishments and "bawdy" houses, sounding a bit like a 19th century Las Vegas.

Not surprisingly, Thompson's growing wealth and success, combined with shrewd people skills, translated to political might. Serving for many years as a city councilman and county freeholder, the Duke of Gloucester became was the most powerful Democrat in New Jersey. Though he was elected to only two terms in the state assembly, he was said to control the legislature from his Gloucester City base.

The most blatant of Thompson's self-serving legislative ventures was the legalization of open gambling, first and foremost to benefit a racetrack on his Gloucester City property. In a classic New Jersey political coincidence, the speaker of the assembly was to be the starter at the track, which likely would have helped Thompson override the governor's veto had most of the Trenton legislators not already been in the Duke's pocket.

By 1890, with the law bent to his will, Thompson used his track to rake in money in just about every way possible. People rode his trains and ferries to Gloucester to stay in his hotel, many of them Philadelphians who flocked across the river to escape their city's restrictive Sunday blue laws. They ate at his restaurant and placed wagers at his track with bookies who paid him sizable daily tributes to take bets. He created a massive local economy in which he was the largest beneficiary by far, and his customers could see it in the form of "Thompson's Castle," the riverfront mansion he built for himself, his wife and 10 children.

The impact of his success didn't go unnoticed, particularly by the strong temperance forces monitoring the excesses of vice and sin on riverbanks. In its scathing assessment of Thompson's excesses, the Times quoted a man who'd been found guilty of stealing from his employer to finance his visits to Gloucester City: "The money for the stolen goods, all I could earn and $60,000 of my wife's money have all gone to pay for Billy Thompson's castle on the Delaware!" Within five years, sentiment changed in Trenton and gambling was, once again, outlawed in New Jersey.

Undeterred, Thompson announced a new, more wholesome attraction for pleasure seekers. He purchased a 900 acre tract of land on Fancy Hill in present day Westville, just down river from Gloucester City, and promised to build a temperance park where churches and religious societies could enjoy all manners of outdoor activities. As in his previous ventures, he arranged for boats to bring Philadelphians to the park and built a rail line from Camden.

Washington Park, as it was called, held just about every kind of wholesome amusement available at the time. In addition to one of the largest Ferris wheels in the country, several carousels and a four-story tall slide/flume ride were there to ride, and several ball fields were available for athletes to play on. Picnic groves and restaurants satisfied hungry park-goers, and at night, fireworks and a light show entertained those who hadn't yet had enough. Tens of thousands of children flocked to the park on designated days when they could enter at no charge.

The park burned to the ground in a 1909 fire, but Thompson rebuilt it, no doubt feeling that he'd finally having found a socially acceptable way to get people to part with their money. By then, though, he'd lost a good bit of his political power along with his wealth and, to some degree, his health. Well into his 70s, he died in Belfast, Ireland, on a 1911 trip back to his birthplace. Escorted to his final resting place by what's said to be one of the city's longest funeral processions ever, Thompson was buried in Gloucester City's Old St. Mary Cemetery.

Finding Billy Thompson today is a bit of a challenge for researchers. Local historians know his name and story -- a good part of Gloucester City's history centers on his works -- but locating information about him anywhere else takes time and patience. For all of his influence, I was surprised to see he didn't even warrant an entry in the Encyclopedia of New Jersey. It all gets you thinking: the names and machinations of all of our influential contemporaries, so powerful now, could and probably will eventually be lost to time, only to be unearthed by curious New Jerseyans of the future.

Ashes to ashes...  We all end up the same, high and mighty or obscure and humble.

Eloping? Give Gloucester City a try.

Add another one to the roster of people coming to New Jersey to do things that society - or their families - frowned on.

You'll remember that Alexander Hamilton and his son both crossed the Hudson to defend their respective honor due to New York's strict enforcement of 19th century dueling laws. Both ultimately met their demise at Weehawken by their opponents' fire.

Now comes the news that another early American notable crossed the river, this time the Delaware, to avoid public disapproval. This instance, however, was for a much happier occasion.

On November 4, 1773, a 21 year old upholsterer's apprentice named Elizabeth Griscom took the ferry from Philadelphia to Gloucester City with a fellow trainee, John Ross. Hugg's Tavern was their destination, and they were crossing the Delaware to marry, defying the wishes of Elizabeth's parents. Her family were strict Quakers and strongly disapproved of John because he was Anglican, but it's said that young Betsy had a mind of her own and a liveliness that wouldn't be doused by the opinions of others.

It makes sense, in a way, that the couple would have traveled to New Jersey to get married. Though Betsy herself was born in Philadelphia, she had roots east of the Delaware, as her great grandfather emigrated to West Jersey from England in the 1680s. In any case, they returned to Philadelphia after the ceremony, and Betsy may have been expelled from the Quakers as a result of her elopement. The Rosses seem to have managed, however; they started their own upholstering business along with their new life together.

Unfortunately the marriage was to be a short one. In the war for independence, John joined the local militia and died in a gunpowder explosion in 1776. Betsy carried on her own work for the patriot cause, providing sewing services for the Continental Army.

Of course, the legend goes that Betsy's most notable contribution to the cause for independence was the creation of the American flag. Allegedly, George Washington himself asked her to sew the Stars and Stripes, though Bordentown's own Francis Hopkinson is credited by others for having determined the design. The flag seems to have been born of many parents, evolving over the years in which the Revolution took place.

In any case, all that remains of Hugg's Tavern is a small stone monument made from remnants of the old building. It was torn down in the late 1920s to make room for a playground and pool within what's now Proprietor's Park.

A surprise meeting in Gloucester City

I visited the Gloucester City waterfront specifically to check out the old immigration station, but as it turned out, the adjacent park had its own surprises, including a stone marker sectioned off with a substantial metal chain.

Was someone notable buried here? Had this been the site of a historic landing, or of someone's death? I checked out the plaque to find the following:

Since April 1688

The Proprietors of the Gloucester Tenth

have met annually on this spot

to elect members to represent them

in the Council of 

the General Proprietors of 

the Western Division of New Jersey

I'd stumbled upon the most treasured of all Hidden New Jersey treasures: a footnote to a historical footnote.

Who are these Proprietors and what responsibility do they have within West Jersey? The answer is rooted in the late 1600s, when much if not all of the land of the Jersey colonies (East and West) was granted to English and Scottish individuals who likely never set foot in the new world. Known as proprietors, they hired local representatives to ensure their land here was managed appropriately. Thus, the General Board of Proprietors of the Western Division of New Jersey was created in 1688, consisting of representatives of the proprietors themselves. It's arguably the oldest continuously operating corporation in the country, having taken the crown by the four-years-older East Jersey Board of Proprietors when that group disbanded in 1998. Each Board met in their respective Surveyor General’s Office (West in Burlington City, East in Perth Amboy) to discuss landholding matters and determine ownership of any land created within their jurisdictions (by buildup of silt, etc.).

As you can guess, the whole shebang became a bit of an anachronism over time, given that virtually all the land in the state is deeded to someone by now. In fact, well over 100 years ago, newspapers including The New York Times were writing about the ongoing meetings as a curiosity of the past. The former East Jersey seems to have done just fine over the past 15 years without the Proprietors to settle land disputes, but the West Jersey Proprietors continue to meet at the small Surveyor General's office on West Broad Street in Burlington City.

Why, then, is there a meeting place in Gloucester? In the late 17th century, the 21 mile distance to Burlington was deemed to be too far for the area's proprietors to travel for an election. Now it's just a matter of keeping up a 325-year old tradition, maybe mixed with a desire to avoid rush-hour traffic on Route 130. Admittedly, there's not much going on with the proprietors these days -- the job is largely symbolic -- so the Gloucester bunch are basically getting together to vote on who would have to make the schlep if, indeed, there were any business to be done in Burlington. There's not much prestige to being a proprietor, except, I guess, among history enthusiasts, but the ones in Gloucester at least have a park named for them.

Gloucester City: Philadelphia's historic immigrant port of entry

Ask just about anyone where America's "Golden Door" of immigration stood in the late 19th and early 20th century, and they'll bring up Ellis Island. Most Americans, however, don't realize that there were several other, smaller immigration facilities at ports and border crossings around the country. Among them was the port of Philadelphia station at Gloucester City, New Jersey.

The former Gloucester City Immigration Station
is now home to a port-related business.

Standing rather plainly at the city's port, the three-story, white block building lacks the grandeur of its cousin near the Statue of Liberty. In fact, if you didn't know its history, you'd have no idea that it was anything more than a very sturdily-built office building. When I visited to get a lay of the land, I had to do a quick check on the smartphone to compare an old historic photo against the building before me. No plaques or notations give the casual passer-by any indication that within this structure, new arrivals were welcomed into the United States while others were detained before their inevitable deportation.

How did the Philadelphia immigration station end up in New Jersey? It seems to be the confluence of two classic issues: insufficient funding and a well-connected property owner. Immigration officials had long inspected ship passengers at a waterfront facility owned by the Pennsylvania Railroad, expanding the building as the number of incoming vessels and immigrants grew. The city constructed a municipal inspection station at another pier as other shipping lines increased their immigrant transports.

Around the same time, federal officials were looking for ways to relieve overcrowding at Ellis Island, which was regularly seeing thousands more immigrants a day than it was designed to handle. By opening larger facilities at Philadelphia and elsewhere around the country, officials hoped to shunt some of the traffic away from New York. Only problem was, the $250,000 that Congress allocated to open a new facility at Philadelphia was insufficient to buy any of the valuable port property on that side of the Delaware.

In a stroke of dubious luck, an ideal spot was located just on the other side of the river, in (you guessed it) Gloucester City. Politically-connected, headline-grabbing entrepreneur Billy Thompson just happened to own five acres of riverfront property he was willing to sell to the government for $100,000. The self-styled "Duke of Gloucester" was even willing to throw in his own home, an extravagant Victorian mansion which was repurposed as an administration building. The federal government erected the white building to handle the day-to-day tasks of processing new arrivals: inspection, detention, hearings and deportation.

Like its counterpart at Ellis Island, the building was hailed at its 1912 opening as state of the art, with outstanding sanitary conditions and dining facilities that surpassed those in many of the nation's hotels. Detained immigrants, it seemed, would be highly satisfied with their accommodations. On the other hand, no appropriation was made for the construction of a Public Health Service hospital like the one at Ellis; one has to believe that a small infirmary was housed within one of the buildings, with more serious cases sent to local hospitals.

To some degree, the immigration department's plan was a success: at one point, Gloucester City became the second busiest immigration station in the country. However, its prominence was short lived. The start of hostilities in Europe and the onset of World War II dramatically changed the purpose of the nation's immigration stations, and Gloucester's was no exception. Enemy aliens were sent there en route to internment camps in other parts of the country. Others, including crew members of ships bearing German or Italian flags, were held at the station for the duration.

The immigration station closed at the end of the war, and Thompson's old house was torn down in favor of buildings for a new Coast Guard training facility. By 1986, the Coast Guard had moved to newer digs in Philadelphia, leaving the Gloucester City property to stand vacant. Ironically, as Ellis Island was being restored and celebrated, its cousin on the Delaware was being left to rot.

The building's fate improved slightly when the city bought the property for $1 in 1991, as one of the port's larger tenants made the old immigration station its new offices. Nonetheless, plans were soon in the works to demolish the building in favor of a port revitalization program. Alarmed by the possibility of losing a vital landmark, local historians successfully petitioned the state to add the Coast Guard and Immigration Station to the New Jersey Register of Historic Places

It appears that the designation might have actually worked. The rededicated "Freedom Pier" is now home to the schooner North Wind, and if the "Summer 2012" banner I saw is to come true eventually, there will be a restaurant there, too. With any luck, the planned revitalization will get people curious about the history of that big white building and the people who once traversed through it.