Category: New Jersey

Researching First African American Police Officers in Atlantic City

I am investigating the nature of work for African Americans in the public sector during the Jim Crow Era, specifically in healthcare, local government, and public safety.  Drawing on archival research, interviews with local experts, and oral histories with tradition-bearers and pioneers who broke barriers, this research examines the opportunities, obstacles, and challenges for Black Americans before the passage of modern Civil Rights legislation.       

Atlantic City is one place I have included in the study. There a large, vibrant Black community contributed to the growth, development, and culture of the resort. As a result, the city had more public-sector employment opportunities. But it was far from equitable as Black people struggled to break through the barriers of discrimination and segregation. This complicated history is a perspective I am working to understand as I contextualize the opportunities in the public sector as Jim Crow lost its hold over the country.    

As Black Americans held a variety of government and nonprofit positions along the Jersey Shore, this has led me to ask about the first police officers, firefighters, nurses, and doctors.  Noting those who went first is crucial to understanding the forces at work. The published literature, especially the Northside by Nelson Johnson, is of immense help in understanding the healthcare professions and firefighters.

However, law enforcement needs more research as this part of the history of policing is largely unexplored. When did the first Black officer receive his appointment? What was his life story? After he broke the color line, what struggles did he face? These are some of the questions under consideration as I research the first cohort of early pioneers in police work.

Atlantic City Police Department around 1900
Members of what is believed to be the Atlantic City Police Department pose for a photographer, probably around the turn of the twentieth century. There are two African American policemen in the image. (Source: Bob Ruffolo)
Chief Harry C. Eldridge, Atlantic City Police Department, 1906
The Atlantic City Daily Press published this photo of “Chief Harry C. Eldrige, who died on May 4, 1906. (Atlantic City Daily Press, May 5, 1906)

This line of inquiry led me to Princeton Antiques Book Service in Atlantic City. The proprietor, Bob Ruffolo, was of immense help. He has an expansive collection of 20,000 local images and a vast knowledge of the past along the Jersey Shore. In the collection, he had this photograph of police officers, which he thought was from Atlantic City around the turn-of-the-twentieth-century. Standing in the uniformed ranks are two Black police officers.

I am still working on comparing this picture with other images from the force around that time, but only a few surviving images exist.  So I will keep at this. However, in the old microfilm reels at the Atlantic City Library, I located an image of Chief Harry C. Eldridge. He passed away in 1906. There appears to be some likeness to the chief in the group photo.

Finally, the Atlantic City Free Public Library (ACFPL) identified the first Black female police officer. In 1924, Margaret “Maggie Creswell became a seasonal officer and in 1927 she became a permanent member of the force. According to the library, she was the first female officer in the city and the state. Office Creswell retired in 1964.

Finding Old New Jersey Map

An old new jersey map from 1819 -- Harriet E. Baker's Book of Penmanship & Maps
Harriet E. Baker’s 1819 Map of New Jersey (Harriet E. Baker’s Book of Penmanship & Maps produced at Mr. Dunham Schools in Windsor, Vermont on March 31, 1819. David Rumsey Map Collection)

Thanks to the World Wide Web, public digitization initiatives, and the growth of social media, researchers and curious types have almost unlimited, convenient access to an enormous array of rare historical maps. As these old cartographic renderings, many seldom used or seen, come out of storage vaults and are made available virtually, they allow a vast audience to enjoy, learn, and become more engaged with the past.

The amount of excellent material we have on-demand continues to amaze me. This is thanks to forward-looking heritage organizations and individuals who leverage these 21st-century tools to share materials that wouldn’t be widely seen or used. 

There are many substantial, searchable collections online, the holding institutions providing free open access to the public. In line with this, I consulted the David Rumsey Map Collection for some New Jersey Maps, as I am doing fieldwork there. 

Old New Jersey Map in Book of Penmanship

While searching for detailed New Jersey county maps, I found several helpful items. But one attractive 1819 illustration of the Garden State caught my attention. It came from Harriet E. Baker’s Book of Penmanship & Maps, produced at Mr. Dunham’s School in Windsor, Vermont, on March 31, 1819. Harriet’s book contains some exquisite illustrations, including this old New Jersey Map.

After pausing to examine it, I located several more helpful old New Jersey Maps on the David Rumsey Map Collection site. The curator of rare materials started digitizing his 150,000 maps in 1996 — now, over 116,000 items are online. The curators add new material regularly.  

More Old New Jersey Maps

As for those New Jersey County maps, here is one example. It is the Smith & Wistar 1849 map of Salem and Gloucester counties, available on the Library of Congress website. Users may download high-quality scans of this detailed map.

An old New Jersey Map, the 1849 Salem & Gloucester counties map.
A Map of the counties of Salem and Gloucester, New Jersey, by Smith & Wistar, Philadelphia (1849) (Library of Congress)

For more high-quality maps, here’s a link to a section of my webpage that I use as a resource finder. This page provides links to digital repositories which have richly organized, mostly free information. 

Salem County Cold Case

Salem County Cold Case, an 1874 murder
An article about a Salem County Cold Case, a murder in 1874, published in the Salem County Historical Society Newsletter.

While studying the array of officials who made up New Jersey’s 19th-century criminal justice system, I often pore over aging coroner’s reports, trial transcripts, and police blotters. While doing that in South Jersey, I came across an unsettling Salem County Cold Case, the murder of Abigail Dilks in 1874.

From the beginning, the mystifying case stumped 19th-century lawmen and prosecutors. They swept the fields and marsh for evidence and interrogated the “usual types,” but the investigators failed to find a motive. Also, no one provided even the slightest information that might lead to a credible suspect, so the killer escaped.

The questions that stumped law enforcement lingered for decades, but those faded as one generation gave way to another. Still, the coroner’s verdict remains in the aging book of inquests at the Salem County Clerk’s Office. Abigail Dilks died at the hands of an unknown person in a lonely area of Lower Penns Neck near Harrisonville nearly 150 years ago.

Since true crime stories and unsolved mysteries are popular these days, I wrote a piece about this horrendous murder for the summer 2022 edition of the quarterly newsletter of the Salem County Historical Society. The case had mostly been lost in the recorded histories and written records of Salem County.

The arrow on this 1876 map for Lower Penns Neck Township shows the location of the murder. (Source: Atlas of Salem & Gloucester Counties, New Jersey by Everts & Stewart, 1876, from the West Jersey History Project West Jersey History Project –  Maps from the Everts and Stewart Combination Atlas Map of Salem and Gloucester Counties – 1876 )

Remembering Japanese Internment

As today marks the 80th anniversary of the Feb. 19, 1942, presidential order authorizing the internment of Americans with Japanese ancestry, I recalled an April day in 2016 in Bridgeton, NJ. On that Wednesday as spring got underway, I spent a delightful morning talking with 92-year-old Frank Hitoshi Ono.

Talking with Frank H. Ono and Japanese Internment
Mr. Ono greeted me as I arrived at his home on a Wednesday in April 2016 (Photo: Dixon)

At the time I was doing some fieldwork related to developing a program for the Seabrook Educational and Cultural Center in Cumberland County, NJ. The Center presents the stories of relocated Japanese Americans, wartime refugees, and migrant laborers to the “largest vegetable factory on earth.” As part of the research, I met with a number of people including Mr. Ono.

When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, Mr. Ono, 18, was living in San Pedro, CA, where his family had a tuna fishing business. Worried that people of Japanese ancestry would act as spies, the United States Government ordered about 120,000 people, mostly U.S. citizens, placed in internment camps.

This forced relocation included the Ono family, the teenage college student ending up at Camp Manzanar, CA. As the war dragged on, a large-scale commercial agricultural enterprise in South Jersey, Seabrook Farms, needed employees due to the wartime labor shortage. Consequently, about 2,500 residents of the relocation centers were permitted to come to the fields of Cumberland County to help harvest crops and support processing operations. Mr. Ono’s family was in that group.

18-year-old Frank Ono at the Manzanar Relocation Center. He was working as a mailman at the camp. (Source: Ono)

After the war, Mr. Ono got a job with a radio sales and service company in Bridgeton and within a couple of years, he established his own business in Millville, the Arrow Radio & TV Sales & Service Company. As television came in and tubes gave way to transistors and other things he kept up with the times. He operated the business for about 40 years, eventually selling it when he retired in 1985.

He had many talents and hobbies, but in retirement, he focused on educating people about this period of history, and he was deeply involved with the Seabrook Educational and Cultural Center.

I thoroughly enjoyed that spring morning six years ago and still recall his rich, vivid stories. I was fortunate to have met Mr. Ono, and have the opportunity to directly learn about a different time and place in our nation’s past. It’s an experience I will never forget so as my newsfeed alerted me to the 80th anniversary of Japanese Internment the conversation from some years earlier was still fresh in my mind. As Mr. Ono remarked, this is a story that more people need to know, and I was thankful that he shared the accounts and his photos with me.

Frank Hitoshi Ono, 97, of Bridgetown passed away on Sunday, September 5, 2021.

For More on Seabook Village and Japanese Internment See

A photo album of the visit with Mr. Ono on Facebook

For the history of Seabrook Village see this article on the Densho Encyclopedia.