Bridgeton's Many-Storied Sheppard House

‘Bridge-town’ was a high-profile Patriot village and a lively post-Revolutionary West Jersey junction In 1791, when a gentleman farmer from Back Neck named David Sheppard thought it an ideal place for an American patriarch to raise a family.

So he and his wife Phebe (Ludlam) chose a choice little homesite for their imposing, many-storied Federal-style mansion, exactly where Commerce Street crosses Cohansey “Creek,” and right up against the high bluff that looks out over the very bridge the town was named for.

The couple was still childless when Phebe died in 1799, but David, not ready to leave his elegant new homestead, married again—a young widow named Miriam Smith. And it is their son, Isaac (b.1806), who— inheriting the mansion in 1827–becomes the kickstarter of this otherwise rather feminist narrative.

It was not a propitious beginning: two of Isaac’s own wives died here in the early new century. But he dug in, deciding to invest in the burgeoning village, and set up a general store across the street, where the so-called ‘Seven Sisters’ are now. Then, in 1850, he married again.

His third wife was the charm. She was Margaretta [Little] Sheppard, and she had ideas, an education, and an eye for an opportunity. Armed with her own degree from Mount Holyoke (the early and now-famous Massachusetts women’s college), she joined with some local families to rent space above Isaac’s store for a small girls’ school. It did so well that, by 1861, together with her two sisters-in-law (Isaac’s sisters, Miriam Sheppard and Mary Sheppard Hann),* and presumably with Isaac’s blessing, she transformed their rattling old mansion into an adventurous and highminded school for girls.

And thus did a patriarchal manor where women rather conspicuously died become ‘Ivy Hall Female Seminary,’ and a kind of august super-site for multi-generational feminism!

Isaac himself died in 1863, but Margaretta pluckily carried on. By that time, the whole town was not just deep in the industrial boom of the post-Civil War, but also in the education business, with a very good City high school and a co-ed post-secondary school called the South Jersey Institute. In fact, Bridgeton was on its way to becoming an educational mecca—soon to be widely called ‘the most progressive city in the state.’

Ivy Hall was to remain the essence of Bridgeton higher education exclusively for girls through the rest of the 19th century, boarding and graduating many students who would become teachers themselves, considered not just ‘finished’’ (as the Victorians used to say) but “learned ladies”—proficient in geometry, chemistry, moral philosophy, logic, criticism, composition, Latin, and French, and fully prepared not just for motherhood but for all the complex challenges that work in the industrial age might throw at them.

Here, smart, educated women teachers encouraged them to develop their minds, expand their expectations of rights, and maybe even pass the same subversive message to others. We can deduce this in part because another Holyoke graduate, Ada Howard (who succeeded Sheppard as headmistress in 1870), was to become the first president of Wellesley College in 1884.*

Still, there was enough educational competition in Bridgeton, even for women, to make Ivy seem a mere ‘finishing school’ for rich girls. So thought Ella Reeve, who grew up nearby, and whose father, Benjamin Reeve (a staunch Presbyterian and local shopkeeper),* insisted on sending her there in the 1880s.

Ella would later become the women’s and labor rights firebrand known as ‘Mother Bloor,’ but she would later credit Miriam Sheppard herself, who’d been her Ivy history teacher, with opening her eyes to the importance of people’s history—something we are still struggling to do!

*Reeve had a ‘dry-goods’ store exactly where STEAMworks is now!

(To be continued: “Ivy Hall in the 20th century.”)