The street was named for Charles Beckwith, a businessman and politician of the 19th century.

The story of Charles Dyer Beckwith begins in a little hamlet called Coveville, near Saratoga, N.Y., where he was born in 1838. He attended schools in Troy, N.Y., Worcester, Mass., and Philadelphia before settling down and graduating from a military school in New Haven, Conn.

To make his fortune, Beckwith, a good-looking young man with a bushy moustache and close-cropped hair, traveled to Paterson in 1860 to join his father’s iron manufacturing plant.

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The iron business was good at the time. Beckwith was received kindly in Paterson and was known around town as “popular, progressive and public spirited.” But as the 19th century was giving way to the 20th, the Beckwith iron works grew less competitive, and business trailed.

In fact, The New York Times would report in 1901 that a fire at Beckwith’s factory had “totally destroyed” the business, which had been partly idle for several years before the fire. The fire loss came to $50,000, or about $1.2 million in today’s dollars.

In 1921, about two months before Beckwith’s death, the New York Tribune reported that the iron works had gone into receivership and that the business was to be shut down. In describing the firm, the Tribune reported that the Beckwith works had fallen behind its competitors and could not catch up. This was due mostly to Beckwith’s refusal to upgrade his operation, the Tribune noted.

As the iron business trailed, Beckwith tried politics and was successful for a few years.

Beckwith, a Republican, first served as a member of the Paterson Board of Aldermen. In 1885 he defeated the incumbent mayor, Nathan Barnert, according to the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. That race for mayor was fairly easy for Beckwith because in Barnert he faced a candidate disliked by many Democrats and Republicans alike.

“[Barnert’s] course as mayor has been so peculiar that most of the time the Board of Aldermen has been unanimously opposed to him,” The Times reported. The paper didn’t discuss specifics of Barnert’s behavior but recalled that both Republican and Democratic aldermen employed a practice they called “sitting down on the mayor” to slow Barnert down.

In 1889, as his mayoralty was ending, Beckwith ran successfully for Congress. But just two years later he was defeated in a bid for a second term, a loss that might have been due to his mediocre voting record in the House of Representatives: He missed 260 of the 587 roll call votes in his two years in the House, according to GovTrack, an online tracker of Congress.

In any event, Beckwith had had enough. He packed his bags and returned to Columbia County, N.Y., where he bought a farm, and spent his remaining years managing it.

Despite Beckwith’s inability to carve himself a secure political career in Paterson, his relationship with the Silk City was not over. He was buried in a rural cemetery in Columbia County after his death at 82 in 1921. Then in 1944 his remains and those of his wife, the former Frances Jaqua, were exhumed and reburied in Cedar Lawn Cemetery in Paterson.

The switch in cemeteries is not easily explained, but it might have been due to the Beckwiths’ six children wishing their parents’ gravesite to be in a family plot at Cedar Lawn, according to an upstate New York publication, Columbia County at the End of the Century.

As it turned out, Charles and Frances Beckwith were interred just about a mile from his namesake avenue.