This web site was featured in the New Jersey Star-Ledger on Friday, January 4th. The column, Jersey Blogs, was a Q&A with staff writer Kelly Heyboer conducted in early December.
Any exposure for this arcane subject is welcome, and the article certainly gained a nice bit of readership. If you’ve discovered this site from reading the article, glad to have you here. Poke around, ask questions.
The whole interview can be read at Heyboer’s blog.
John Wesley Betelle was born, lived and died in Delaware. Spending most of his life as a clerk for the B&O Railroad in Wilmington, I suspect he traveled very little, if he left the state at all.
1921 was a big year for his son James. Between Guilbert’s death in 1916 and a stint in the US Army through 1918, his business had suffered greatly. But in 1919 he began cultivating work again, the biggest being a contract to design over 100 rural schoolhouses for Delaware. By 1920, he was designing schools in the New Jersey suburbs, including towns like South Orange, East Orange and Summit.
So it was that on March 23, 1921, James treated his father to a “pleasure cruise thru the West Indies, stopping at Cuba, Panama, Venezuela, Trinidad and Martinique” aboard the SS Megantic. It wasn’t James’ first ocean voyage—he had been to Europe a number of times already—but for the senior Betelle, it was likely a once-in-a-lifetime adventure, perhaps as a 75th birthday gift. With the architecture firm gaining success, Betelle could well afford it.
That I have this information is due to a number of recent releases of millions of ship manifests and passport records at Ancestry.com. It was in these records that I discovered not only this (and other) ocean voyages of Betelle, but also two new photographs. One is of the 42 year-old architect, and on his own passport form, that of his father, 75. Clearly the bald gene didn’t skip a generation in this family.
In my entry regarding the Franklin Murphy house, I ruminated that it was the only known residential structure designed by Guilbert & Betelle. As it turns out, I was wrong.
I’ve recently had the privilege of corresponding with members of the Guilbert family, who have shown a keen interest in my research. Given the circumstances of Ernest’s early death, they didn’t really know much about him, so I was happy to share what little I had discovered.
Fortunately, discovery is a two-way street: the Guilberts had a number of items dating back to Ernest’s day, and were gracious enough to send them to me for study.
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It was inevitable I would begin writing externally about this web site’s titular subject. To that end, I’ve had a small article published in Matters, a community magazine based in Maplewood, New Jersey. Titled New Jersey Gothic: James Betelle and the Schools of South Orange and Maplewood, it appears, appropriately enough, in the August “Back to School” edition.
The article is a brief overview of Betelle’s career and the schools he designed for the towns. There’s no information that isn’t already at this website, but I think it’s a good introduction to the subject.
→ No CommentsTags:magazine·Maplewood·South Orange
I finally visited Ernest Guilbert’s gravesite. I had made an attempt a while ago, but the office was closed. Evergreen Cemetery in Hillside, NJ, is over 150 acres, so I wasn’t about to look the hard way.
I went directly to the office, a charming little Mansard Victorian building near the main gate. The clerk was quickly able to find the record book entry for Guilbert. We discovered that his lot had three plots; his, his wife Anna, and a third, still empty and available to any Guilbert descendant. Guilbert died December 1, 1916, and according to the cemetery records, the cause was “Anemia”, and was buried on the 4th.
The clerk noted that near the lot was a tall monument, which would help locate it. I walked to the area on the map she circled, and spent about ten minutes looking for it. I couldn’t find it. I tromped back and forth where I thought it should be countless times, and was starting to get frustrated. And then I saw it, in a completely different location than I thought it should be, by about 50 feet.
The monument the clerk noted was actually Guilbert’s. It’s a tall stone, and faces the path where it’s clearly visible. A few feet from the monument are two headstones bearing Ernest and Anna’s names (hers with Bunn, as she had remarried.) The inscription reads:
And is he dead,
whose glorious mind
Lifts ours on high?
To live in hearts
we leave behind
Is not to die.
The stanza is from the poem Hallowed Ground by Thomas Campbell, written sometime in the early 1800s. According to the AIA Biography, James Betelle selected the passage. Given the size of the monument and his large, front-page obituary, it’s clear Guilbert was very well regarded–and missed–when he died.
