James Oscar Betelle was born April 1, 1879 in Wilmington, Delaware, to John Wesley and Annie Barton Betelle. John worked as a clerk for the B&O railroad, among other concerns. He was a noted local artist, known for his nautical paintings and model boat building.

Little is known about Betelle’s early years, but he certainly showed an aptitude for drawing and engineering. in 1897 He secured a two-year training program in drafting at the prestigious Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art in Philadelphia. He superior skills were noted by a professor, and upon graduation in 1899 gained a $2 per week entry job with the Philadelphia architectural firm of Cope & Stewardson.

Cope & Stewardson was at the forefront of the increasingly popular Collegiate Gothic style of on American campuses. At the time of his employ, they had recently completed Princeton’s Blair Hall, one of the first Collegiate Gothic structures in the US. Within ten years, Betelle’s own firm would bring the style to dozens of leafy suburbs in the Northeast.

In 1905 Betelle made the first of many trips to Europe, where he would study and drink in the continent’s bounty of architectural splendors. Upon his return, he relocated to New York becoming a full draftsman at the office of John Russell Pope. It was there he met the Chicago architect Ernest F. Guilbert, head of Pope’s drafting room. In 1910 the gentlemen decided to partner up and open their own firm in Newark, New Jersey, where Guilbert was already working as that city’s official school architect.

Guilbert died suddenly in 1916, leaving the firm to Betelle’s stewardship. The following year Betelle served in World War I as a captain in the Army Sanitation Corps, which essentially shuttered the business until his return a year later.

Business picked up immediately, as the dawning new decade of the 1920s brought a huge demand for schools in the suburban towns swelling with young families. For the next decade, Guilbert & Betelle would have an incredible run of work, designing hundreds of schools throughout New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Delaware. Newark itself would receive a number of civic structures and banks from the firm.

Aside from his architectural duties, Betelle was very active in Newark civic causes. He was president of the Chamber of Commerce for 1926 and 1927, served on the North Jersey Transit Commission and and other civic groups. He was elected president of the New Jersey Society of Architects and New Jersey Chapter, American Institute of Architects, in 1920. In 1932 he was chosen regional director of the Middle Atlantic Division of the institute, of which he was a fellow.

In 1932, at the age of 53, Betelle married Marie Louise Vonamor Cohan, a somewhat mysterious woman 20 years his junior. The two met as residents of Newark’s Robert Treat Hotel (designed by Guilbert & Betelle in 1916). The couple married in New York City, and moved into a stately new Colonial home in Short Hills, New Jersey purchased as a gift for his bride.

If Marie was simply a gold digger, the timing couldn’t have been worse. The Great Depression, which first hit with force three years earlier, was taking its toll on the firm. New architectural projects were drying up as older ones were finished, and the firm began scraping for smaller and smaller jobs, mostly the odd addition or modification to existing structures. Betelle worked less and less on a daily basis, and what articles he did write were more acidic in tone. A typical article was titled pleadingly, We Must Build Schools.

In 1949, the Betelles had an ugly, public divorce. Marie claimed he had stolen family jewels, Betelle in turn accused her of “emotional abuse”. One story holds that she threatened to kill him with a kitchen knife.

Betelle took up residence in a Manhattan hotel, and resumed his European travels. His final voyage would be the spring of 1954. He died, poor and alone, in Florence, Italy. A small funeral was attended by a few close friends, and he was eventually forgotten in a paupers grave.

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Ernest Foss Guilbert was born in Chicago, July 23, 1869. He received his early schooling in Minneapolis, to which city his parents moved during his boyhood. When twenty-one years old, Mr. Guilbert went to Boston and became for a time associated with H.H. Richardson, who was then designing Trinity Church. Returning to Chicago in 1891, Mr. Guilbert worked with Henry Ives Cobb on several of the World’s Fair buildings.

Soon after going to New York in 1899 Mr. Guilbert took charge of Cass Gilbert’s office, during which time he directed the preparation of the drawings for such buildings as the Union Club, United States Customs House in New York, and the Essex County Court House and the American Fire Life Insurance building in this city, where he would met Betelle. Later, Mr. Guilbert became manager of the office of John Russell Pope, Betelle following him along.

In 1908, Guilbert left Pope to become the head of the Newark Board of Education construction department. Guilbert would design a number of handsome schools for the city, in styles ranging from Gothic, to Jacobean, to Italianate, a flexibility which would serve the firm well in the future. The explosive growth in demand for schools was too much for one man, so in 1910 Guilbert called on Betelle, now head draftsman at at Pope, to join him in partnership as Guilbert & Betelle.

Mr. Guilbert was the advisory architect in the building of Temple B’nai Jeshrun in High Street, one of the most elaborate edifices of its sort in the state. Together with Professor Hamlin and H. Van Buren Magonigle, he also judged the plans in the competition for the temple. The building committee was so pleased with Mr. Guilbert’s work that the members later gave him a silver service.

Guilbert on February 3rd, 1916 at his home.