Bodo Otto Jr. House

Bodo Otto, Jr. House
522 Kings Highway
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This house is a private residence.
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This house was the home of Dr. Bodo Otto, Jr., who served as a surgeon and militia colonel in Colonel Read's Battalion in the Revolutionary War. He was born in 1748 in Germany. His family immigrated to Philadelphia in the 1750s.

Otto's father, Bodo Otto, Sr., who was also a doctor, served as a senior surgeon in the Revolutionary War. In 1777, Bodo Otto, Sr. ran a hospital in the Old Barracks in Trenton. In 1778, the elder Bodo was placed in charge of the hospital at Yellow Springs, where many of the sick soldiers from the Valley Forge, Pennsylvania encampment were treated. Bodo Jr. went to work at the hospital as well, and continued to work there until 1781. In 1778, while Otto Bodo, Jr. was at Yellow Springs, this house was burned and damaged by Loyalists, and subsequently rebuilt.

Dr. Bodo Otto, Jr., died on January 20, 1782, and is buried several miles from here in the Trinity Episcopal Church Cemetery in Swedesboro. [1]

Nicholas Collin, the Reverend at Trinity Church in Swedesboro, preached Otto's funeral sermon. Otto had been a friend of Collin, and he had once posted bail for Collin when he had been arrested by the militia for suspicion of being pro-British. In Collin's journal, he wrote of the type of person Otto was, including the remarkable fact that Otto helped get a pardon for one of the men who had burnt his house. Collin wrote: [2]

"[I] preached a funeral sermon for the Med. Doctor Bodo Otto in his house, a short mile from Raccoon [now Swedesboro], and buried him at the church... He was in all respects an honorable man, and he had so far as he was able to, prevented much evil during the war. Among praiseworthy actions he obtained pardon for one of the refugees, who had burnt down his house and who for this and other [crimes] would otherwise have been hung... A great crowd of people of all sects was gathered, for he was generally respected. His old father stood trembling at his beloved son's grave, weeping bitterly."