Introduction
DR. THOMAS F. CULLEN was one of the few members of the Camden County Medical Society who passed an examination before its board of censors, receiving his license June 18, 1850. He was elected a member of the society in the following December. He was the son of Captain Thomas Cullen, of the Philadelphia merchant marine, and was born in that city September 3, 1822. He received his scholastic education in Mount Holly, N.J., to which place his parents had removed.
Dr. Cullen studied medicine with Dr. Heber Chase, a surgeon of Philadelphia, and graduated at the University of Pennsylvania in 1844. His first field of practice was in Newark, Delaware, but in 1849 he removed to Camden. Here his great natural abilities and careful training brought him prominently forward, especially as a surgeon, in which branch of the profession he became so skilled and successful that for the first time in its history Camden became independent of its neighbor across the Delaware for the performance of a capital surgical operation. On June 2, 1853 he founded the Camden City Medical Society, in company with Dr. Sylvester Birdsell, Dr. Othaniel Tayor, Dr. Richard M. Cooper, Dr. Isaac S. Mulford, Dr. Lorenzo Fisler, and Dr. John V. Schenck. He was also an active member of the county and state societies, serving as president of all three at different times (the State society in 1869). While a member of the former two, no committee was complete without him. He was one of the incorporators of the Camden Dispensary and Cooper Hospital. Of the former, he was two years its president, and a director of the latter until his death. He died November 21, 1877. He left no issue.
Ben Courter Column
Camden Courier-Post —
A City of the Dead
Burial Place Where Thousands Lie Started More Than 80 Years Ago Along Blackwoodtown Pike; Tragic Death of First President of Evergreen
BY BEN COURTER
About this time of year fair Spring puts over all that expanse extending from just below Vanhook street along Blackwoodtown pike, now Black Horse, down to Ferry avenue and up to near Chase street, new raiment.
Sere spots become emerald, trees lose their bareness, shrubbery fills out and there is a rejuvenation as if to prove, after all, that thousands sleeping there, some since the middle of last century, are part of the immortal plan everywhere manifest.
In June comes the great display. Nowhere does there seem a spot where there are more roses. There is one great splash of red, from tiny, delicate tea roses, to glorious American beauties. Vagrant daisies vie with coreopsis; humble violets snuggle in hidden places; ubiquitous dandelions spangle what greensward is left. Few remaining pines or cedars put on a greener livery, oaks shake off the sered leaves of yesteryear and catkins of poplars already have given place to permanent foliage. Amidst it all are the white stones marking the places where lie many of the men and women who took part in the affairs of Camden and its suburbs. There are the humble markers of a myriad of citizens, the monuments of the more exalted, the graves of those who fell in the Civil War, the Spanish War, the World War. Evergreen Cemetery may not be a Stokes Poges, yet a Thomas Gray could write an “elegy” none the less.
A Rooty Sidewalk
Boys of another generation will tell you, beside the tombs and the quiet bordered walks, they recall that torturous path alongside the fence where the roots of the great maples used to find their way. They crept through the year through the sand and stone and successive rains left them exposed until many a bared toe of an urchin on his way to Tice’s Pond or Daubman’s Pond at Northmont was stubbed until it looked like a bit of mincemeat. And many a wayfarer stumbled over those roots, considered an abomination along the sandy road where the young bloods of another day tried out their nags. The concrete Belgian block paving now seems a straitjacket for that old road to the side of the cemetery, a fitting marker to the passing of old days.
Centreville had just about been launched when Evergreen Cemetery was incorporated, on Feb. 20, 1850, the 32 acres of ground being bought of the Isaac Cooper estate. Those early incorporators were William J. Hatch, Benjamin A. Hammell, Richard W. Howell, Joseph J. Hatch and Benjamin Browning, all men of substance back there when the Civil War was brewing. William Hatch was the first president, holding that position until his tragic death, on March 22, 1856, when he was killed by a trespasser on his land, as was a kinsman many years after. He was succeeded by Charles Sloan, then by Cooper Browning and again by Thomas A. Wilson, long one of Camden’s leading men and whose grandchildren now reside within shadow of the old burial place in Woodlynne.
In April of 1850 J. C. Sidney was instructed to build the chapel and vault, while Henry Gamble’s design for laying out the cemetery was accepted.
The first application for a grave was made by Benjamin A. Hammell, one of the incorporators and twice mayor of Camden, in 1848-49 and 1857-58. That was in May of 1850 and was for the reinterment of his daughter, who had died in 1835 at 2 years of age. Years afterward he was buried in the same plot, just northeast of the chapel. A marble slab marked the resting place of Richard Fetters, one of early Camden’s leading men, and his wife, Hope, who died Oct. 18, 1839. There, too, is the grave of John Hanna, once postmaster of Camden, who died April 7, 1862, while the great Civil War was raging.
Other Family Plots
There one may find the family plot of C. A. Bergen, once Congressman from this district, and Mayor John H. Jones, who died suddenly while in office, on Oct. 27, 1876, is buried there, as is Dr. Thomas F. Cullen, who died Nov. 21, 1877, one of the best-known surgeons in this section 60 years ago.
It was in Evergreen that Comrades of the G. A. R. used to make their most spectacular showing on Memorial Day, when the Posts hereabouts were in the heyday of their strength, when the veterans were still about like those of the World War in point of years. They went out there early in the morning, held their exercises, sounded taps and planted flags over every grave. Those ranks have become thin with the passing years and but a handful survive, all over the fourscore-year mark, but still with spirit undimmed. Spanish-American War vets used to aid as now do those of the more recent conflict, but it is certain that those who fought at Fredericksburg or Chancellorsville or Gettysburg will not be forgotten when Memorial Day dawns this year—or in years stretching into the future. That little spot about Post 37 monument ever seems more than ordinarily sacred to one who knew those vets back there, 20 or 30 years ago.
Most of the old oaks or maples or pines have disappeared. Frank Garrison, who has been superintendent for several years, is replacing those monarchs. Still, it is unlikely the cemetery will quite have that suggestion of a bit of wilderness plucked out of the primordial forest it did when the roots of the giants, like vagrant things of steel, pushed their way through the sandstone back there ever so many years ago. Old Evergreen is a city of the dead to be sure, and yet to countless families hereabouts there is something of a link permanent as eternity itself. There are locked up memories that will abide always; there, as many speed by in modern gas buggies, are dropped thoughts for those who once trod the earth, who once walked with us, who once aided the community in its uncharted destiny.