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Cornelia Redington Carter (1846-1934) was a Philadelphia philanthropist who actively managed her deceased husband’s industrial site in Redington, Northampton (PA) County and founded and funded one of the two Junior Republic sites that operated in Pennsylvania from the 1890s until the 1920s. After closing the Carter Junior Republic in 1924, Cornelia Carter endowed the Carter Professorship of Education at the University of Pennsylvania.

Early Life and Marriage
Cornelia Miranda Redington was born on August 7, 1846, in Arlington, (Bennington County) Vermont. Her parents were Joseph Alexander Redington (1818-1894) and Chloe Lewis Redington (1821-1905). She was a descendant of a colonial family with roots back to 17th century Massachusetts; her paternal grandfather, John Redington, was a captain in the Revolutionary War. Her father, Joseph Redington, owned a fleet of iron ore boats on the Great Lakes. Cornelia married William Thornton Carter (1827-1893) in 1868.

William T. Carter immigrated to Pennsylvania from Cornwall, England in 1850 with his father, William V. Carter and half-brother Thomas. The younger Carters went to work for their uncles, John and Richard Carter, who owned anthracite coal mines in Tamaqua, Pennsylvania. The American Carters were also partners with Asa Packer in a mining and shipping company that produced and leased coal cars. By 1861, the father-and-son William Carters purchased the Coleraine Collieries near Beaver Meadows, Pennsylvania. As anthracite coal was the most in-demand fuel in the nation at that time, William T. Carter bought out his father’s interest in 1868, as well as more mines and amassed a considerable fortune. Looking for other investments, Carter purchased 65 acres of land along the route of the Lehigh Valley Railroad in Northampton County from Asa Packer, as well as nearby limestone outcroppings and other adjacent properties that contained iron ore mines.

Coleraine Iron Company and the village of Redington
In 1869, Carter built a 60 x 17-foot blast furnace for smelting his iron ore with his limestone and anthracite coal, and added a second furnace in 1871, as well as a foundry and machine shops. Though this was the beginning of the end of the Lehigh Valley’s anthracite iron dominance in the American iron industry, Carter’s Coleraine Iron Company was successful for another twenty years.

Carter built a company town on the site to house his workers and provide for their needs. He named the village Redington in honor of Cornelia. Thirty-four double houses, a school, a chapel, and a company store were built and by 1870 Redington also had a post office. A hotel, a Lehigh Valley Railroad station, and a Methodist church quickly followed, as well as several privately-owned houses, including one in which William and Cornelia occasionally stayed in when they visited the iron works and her brother Walter Redington, who was the plant superintendent.

At its height, the Coleraine Iron Company had 275 employees, many of whom commuted via the Lehigh Valley Railroad, and supported a community of more than 400 people. Carter greatly expanded the Coleraine Collieries, and invested in trolley lines, the Tamaqua Bank, the Hudson River train bridge at Poughkeepsie, and United Gas Improvement Company. When he died on February 9, 1892, his estate was estimated to be worth as much as three million dollars.

Control of Coleraine Iron and Redington
William Carter had specified in his will that all his businesses and properties should be sold at his death and trust funds set up for Cornelia and their three children. He did this to relieve Cornelia of the stress of continuing to run his businesses. However, Cornelia intended to take over management of her husband’s business concerns.

Shortly after Carter’s death, Mrs. Carter correctly assessed the declining state of the local merchant pig iron industry and the threat of the financial panic of 1893, and shut down the Coleraine iron furnaces. The foundry, machine shops, and the Lehigh Valley rail car repair shops were retained, as were the company houses, all of which continued to provide considerable revenue into the early decades of the 20th century.

In 1898, Mrs. Carter circumvented the requirement in Carter’s will for selling his properties by setting up a “straw” purchase of them with a family friend, who then promptly resold them to her. With access to the financial power of Carter’s business empire, Mrs. Carter, advised and aided by her brother Walter, leased the facilities and quarries to new customers; she also apparently sold the Coleraine Collieries at some point, likely in 1898, but possibly earlier.

In 1900, a mining and minerals refiner named Henry Adams, who was married to Mrs. Carter’s sister Helen leased the former Coleraine facility and retooled it into the Redington Works Division of his Adams Crucible Steel Company. In 1910, another brother-in-law, Henry Haller Mitchell, ran the re-named Redington Steel and made custom alloy steel tool castings.

Carter’s limestone quarry was leased to General Crushed Stone, but by 1915, it was the only successful operation remaining at Redington. Less profitable, but more notable, was the lease of the western-most Redington quarry by Bethlehem Iron in 1888. This large quarry became the testing and proving grounds for the weapons, munitions, and armor plate that the firm, and later Bethlehem Steel, produced for the U.S. and other nations’ military and naval forces.

In 1916, Mrs. Carter and Bethlehem Steel reached an agreement for the Steel company to lease the entire Redington site for construction of a munitions plant. (Bethlehem Steel was the U.S.’s largest munitions, naval and field guns, and armor plate manufacturer during World War I.). After the Armistice, Bethlehem Steel briefly used the property for making parts for ships to be assembled in the company’s shipyards. Finally, early in the 1920s, the Steel company bought out all Mrs. Carter’s holdings in Redington except for a 24-acre parcel associated with the stone quarry, which she owned until her death.

The Carter Junior Republic
Redington provided Mrs. Carter with the financial security and base to support her chief focus: the positive reform movement for disadvantaged city boys that was known as the Junior Republics. “Her successful management of the fiscal and corporate sides of her Redington business empire gave her the confidence and strength of leadership to undertake the experiment in youth care which became her life obsession,” writes Ned D. Heindel, Ph.D.

The Republic movement began in the 1890s as an outgrowth of the fresh air summer camps for city children. The “republic” idea was the brainchild of William R. George, who put together a plan for a self-governing, self-sufficient community in a rural setting of youths who would develop practical work skills and manage their community life based on a model of the national government and free market economics. This was hailed by many prominent and wealthy Americans as a “cure” for drunkenness, poverty, crime, and sloth. George founded the first Junior Republic in Freeville, New York in 1895, which Mrs. Carter and her daughter Alice supported financially

A visit to the George Junior Republic convinced Mrs. Carter to open one at Redington and name it in honor of her late husband. Eager to begin, she first used the house that her husband has built for them in the village, but when she gained financial control of the businesses in 1898, she purchased a 114-acre fruit and livestock farm across the Lehigh River in Bethlehem Township. The movement sought to build both skills and self-respect in boys who were delinquent, runaways, orphans, and otherwise troubled by assigning them jobs such as farming, commercial fruit growing, canning, dairying, milk-delivery, and sewing for which they could earn “Carter dollars” that bought goods and privileges. Boys elected a president, vice-president, judges, and sheriffs, and were subject to trials by their peers for infractions, and punishment if convicted. A school on the grounds provided an elementary and junior high education, and students were sent to local high schools. Mrs. Carter paid for college tuition for some of the Republic’s graduates.

Though she visited frequently from her home in Philadelphia, Mrs. Carter handed the daily direction of the Carter Junior Republic to James Heberling, who ran it with a firm but kindly hand and relied on the students themselves to maintain order, efficiency and good will in the Republic and the surrounding community. Seventy graduates of the Republic served in World War I, and several lost their lives.

Despite its successes, an operation like the Junior Republics could not sustain itself without the philanthropy of patrons such as Mrs. Carter. At the 25th anniversary celebration of the Carter Junior Republic in May, 1924, Mrs. Carter announced that she was closing it and redirecting her funds into the William T. Carter Foundation, which would endow a professorship of child welfare and education at the University of Pennsylvania. She had put over $300,000 into the Republic, and had supported over 300 students, but she feared that increasing costs and her own advancing age (she was then 70) would not continue to sustain it.

Last Years and Death
Cornelia Redington Carter spent the remaining nine years of her life in the home on Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia she had shared with her husband. She frequented the lectures that James Heberling, whose position she endowed at University of Pennsylvania, gave on child welfare. She frequently hosted former Redington workers and Republic graduates in her home, and remained active in the work of the Carter Foundation until her death after a long illness on April 16, 1934. She is buried with William T. Carter in West Laurel Cemetery near Philadelphia.