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Harrison Township Historical Society

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Harrison Township Historical Society

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Preserving the stories, places, and people of Harrison, South Harrison and Elk Townships since 1971. Old Town Hall Museum + Richwood Academy Cultural Center.

Events year-round.

10/30/2026

The cop knew they were coming. The village hooligans knew where he parked.

Tonight is Mischief Night, and for years in Mullica Hill, that meant an outhouse would turn up in front of Old Town Hall by morning.

The boys scouted their targets ahead of time. The hardest part wasn’t the police. It was working an outhouse loose without falling into the pit, especially if it was still in use.

The cop had a habit, and they knew it. He sat in the same spot, watching for speeders.

So the boys gave him one.

A car would tear through town and out Woodstown Road, fast enough that there was no catching it. By the time the cop could race off behind it, the car was gone. While he gave chase, the rest of the crew set the outhouse in place. Some years there were signs on the outhouse and a dressed dummy sitting inside. Sometimes the decoy car came back through town just to get the cop chasing again, for fun.

In a small village this was all in good fun, and a couple of days later, the outhouse was returned.

The tradition ran until the 1990s, when outhouses got hard to find. Indoor plumbing ended what the police never could.

The village hooligans are in their seventies and eighties now. Some of them may even be reading this, remembering how they got away with it. If you’re one of them, don’t worry. We won’t tell.

10/27/2026

Paul Stankard worked beneath a Benedictine motto: to work is to pray.

Paul passed away October 6 at his home in Mantua. He was 83. By then his glass flowers were in more than 60 museums, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

What he had as a boy were the woods near his childhood home in Massachusetts and the wildflowers that grew there. His father, a chemist, knew his son was good with his hands and steered him into a scientific glassblowing program at what is now Salem Community College.

For ten years Paul made glass instruments for chemists. After work and on weekends, he sat at his own torch and taught himself to make flowers. No school taught what he was trying to do, so he worked it out by trial and error, over years.

In 1972, with a young family at home and his wife, Patricia, behind him, he left the steady job to make paperweights full time.

He believed God had taken as much care with a flower as with anything else, and he spent the next 54 years trying to honor that at the torch.

He spoke for the Society about glass and about writing, and this fall his work is part of our Hometown Revolutionaries exhibit at Old Town Hall. His words hang beside it:

"When the work is completed, I think of it as my prayer traveling into the future, my soul connected to time, space, and beauty."

The exhibit is open Saturdays and Sundays, 1 to 4 p.m., through December 5. Admission is free.

Our sympathy to Patricia and the Stankard family.

10/24/2026

As dusk falls, know this: 128 years ago tonight, the lights came on in Mullica Hill for the first time.

The town had watched it coming for two weeks. “The poles are being distributed and put up this week,” the Gloucester County Democrat reported on October 13, 1898. “A dynamo will be put in at the mill, by private enterprise, and operated by water power.”

Then, on the evening of October 24, the current went through. The paper’s Mullica Hill correspondent wrote that week: “Do our people realize the blessing that came to our little town on Monday evening, when the electric lights first sprang into existence and chased away the darkness and the shadows from the board walk across the valley and from the dark and shaded streets. Surely we may well prize these friendly cheering lights, and earnestly hope they have come to stay.”

Within weeks the wires reached the hotel, Elkinton’s store and the Harmony Club room, then the north end of town as far as Swedesboro Avenue. By December the face of the town clock on St. Stephen’s was being painted so it could be lit at night, and there was talk of lamps along the lake for the skaters. That winter the keeper of the Eagle Hotel (shown in this photo), John Meister, had electric lights put on its second and third floors.

They did not quite come to stay. The plant was sold to a Camden buyer in January. By May citizens were “anxiously inquiring about the return of electric street lights.” It took a town meeting, a lighting ordinance and a new forebay at the mill before the lights “sprang again into existence” on a Friday evening at then end of August 1899. That December the paper asked, “Why is our town so dark?”

One hundred twenty-eight years ago tonight, the valley was lit for the first time.

10/23/2026

He asked the surgeons for the bullet. He kept it for the rest of his life.

Edward L. Stratton, elder son of Congressman Nathan T. Stratton, went to war in 1862 as a captain in the 12th New Jersey Volunteers. At Chancellorsville, in May 1863, a minié ball shattered his right leg and the surgeons took the leg off. He asked for the ball, and he never let it go.

The war was not finished with his family. His younger brother James, a lieutenant in the same regiment, was killed at Ream's Station, Virginia, in August 1864, still short of his twenty-first birthday. A fellow officer wrote that the example he left "will not soon be forgotten." Edward came home. James did not.

Edward took up life in the brick house at 39 South Main Street and kept it for half a century, until his death in 1915. The Army brevetted him major and lieutenant colonel for gallant and meritorious service. The town kept him busy too: when Mullica Hill organized its fire company in 1904, the meeting at Town Hall put Captain Stratton in the chair, and when the county history needed a chapter on the Baptist church down the street, Stratton wrote it.

But what the neighbors remembered was the porch. In his later years the Captain would sit out front and produce the flattened ball for the town's children, his whole war in the palm of one hand.

The brothers rest today behind that Baptist church, the one who came home and the one who did not, a few hundred yards from the porch.

The porch still faces Main Street. This is one of the stops on the Mullica Hill Historic Walking Tour, and the sign is on the sidewalk at 39 South Main. Scan it and the whole story is on your phone, with the Captain's portrait. The tour is free, self-guided, twenty-six stops along Main Street, any day, no tickets. It begins at Old Town Hall Museum, 62 South Main, open this Saturday and Sunday from 1 to 4 PM. A good weekend to walk it before the clocks change. Stand on the sidewalk and look at the porch, the way the town's children once did.

10/18/2026

MULLICA HILL — The Harrison Township Historical Society presents a lecture and book signing with Dr. Tom Kinsella on Sunday, October 18 at 3 PM at the Richwood Academy Cultural Center, 836 Lambs Road in Richwood. Admission is free.

In 1882, families fleeing the pogroms of czarist Russia arrived in the South Jersey countryside to take up a trade most of them had never practiced. They became farmers. Where many such settlements failed, this one endured. The Alliance Colony became the first successful Jewish farming community in America and grew into the villages of Norma, Alliance and Brotmanville, outside Vineland, which remain today.

Kinsella is Distinguished Professor of Literature at Stockton University, director of its South Jersey Culture and History Center, and the Elizabeth and Samuel Levin Director of the Alliance Heritage Center. He has spent years gathering the photographs, documents and family memories that keep the colony's story in the record. In February the New Jersey Historical Commission recognized the Alliance Heritage Center's work with an Award of Recognition.

His book, Growing American: The Alliance Agricultural Colony in South Jersey, was published in 2021 by Stockton's own South Jersey Culture and History Center. Copies will be available for purchase and signing after the lecture.

The lecture is Sunday, October 18 at 3 PM at the Richwood Academy Cultural Center, 836 Lambs Road, Richwood. Admission is free and on-site parking is available. The program will be livestreamed and archived on the Society's page and posted to YouTube. Information is at harrisonhistorical.com, [email protected] and 856-478-4949.

10/16/2026

Forty-three families arrived in the pines outside Vineland in 1882 with no money, no English, and no idea how to farm.

They had fled the pogroms of czarist Russia. What they found five miles west of Vineland was sandy soil, scrub, and Vineland farmers who helped them learn the land.

Most colonies like this one failed. This one did not. Alliance became the first successful Jewish farming community in America, and the villages it grew into, Norma, Alliance and Brotmanville, are still on the map. If you have ever driven past Norma or Brotmanville and wondered about the names, this is why.

The faces in these photographs are the people who did it. Raphael Crystal, who came from Odessa in 1890, with his wife Martha. The Zager family in front of their homestead in 1899. Jacob Crystal with his horses, Boyd and Daisey. The next generation, three friends on a wagon in 1916.

This Sunday, October 18 at 3 PM, Dr. Tom Kinsella brings their story to Richwood Academy. He is Distinguished Professor of Literature at Stockton University and director of the Alliance Heritage Center, and he has spent years gathering the photographs, documents and family memories that keep the colony in the record. His book, Growing American, will be available for purchase and signing after the talk.

Richwood Academy Cultural Center, 836 Lambs Road in Richwood. Free, with parking on site. If you cannot make it, the lecture will be livestreamed and archived here on the page.

Photographs courtesy of the Alliance Heritage Center at Stockton University.

10/14/2026

Some of you met him here in May. The man in the photograph who was shot in the head by a sniper on Okinawa, relearned to read and write, and came home to Richwood for another fifty-three years. His name was Major Louis Reuter, Jr., and he founded this Society.

On Wednesday, October 21 at 7 PM, you can hear his whole story told in person, in the building he helped save.

Laura Shaban, a History and Education major at Rowan University, chose Reuter as her subject for the first lecture in a new series we have built with Rowan's Department of History. She came to local history through the Lindbergh trial in her own hometown of Flemington, and she sees Reuter's life of service, first in uniform and then for decades in Richwood, as exactly the kind of story worth telling in the country's 250th year.

The lecture is at Old Town Hall Museum, 62 to 64 South Main Street, Mullica Hill. It ties to our current exhibit, Hometown Revolutionaries, and there will be time before and after to see the Reuter display in person, including the oil lamp a fellow soldier painted for him: "Maj. Louis Reuter, Jr., 96th Division, 381st Infantry, Co. G, always a Deadeye." Admission is free.

If his story resonated with you in the spring, this is the night to hear the rest of it.

10/08/2026

Four young men who robbed the bank on North Main Street in 1932 and got away with $8,370. A congregation that moved up Main Street and brought its dead along. A row of brick houses already standing in the town's earliest picture, from 1844. A tractor-trailer that came through the wall of the feed store in 1964 while the feed counter stayed open.

If you have ever slowed down on Main Street and wondered about a building, the answer could now be standing in front of it.

This spring, the Society put five signs on Main Street as a pilot and asked whether Mullica Hill wanted more. Enough of you walked it and shared it that we kept going. There are now twenty-six stops with 17 having physical signs. To everyone who walked those first five, thank you.

Scan the code on any sign with your phone, and that building's story opens where it happened. There is nothing to download. Several of the buildings are homes, so please enjoy them from the sidewalk.

The loop runs a little less than a mile, up one side of South Main Street and back down the other, beginning and ending at the Old Town Hall Museum, 62 South Main. Give it about an hour at a reading pace. An optional half-mile extension goes up North Main to the town clock at St. Stephen's.

The tour is free, and the signs stay up through December 5. The museum is open Saturdays and Sundays, 1 to 4 p.m., through the same date.

If you know someone who would want to walk it, tag them in the comments.

The 54th Annual Fall Festival & Living History Weekend is October 10 and 11, with Civil War encampments and battle reenactments at 2 p.m. Saturday and 1 p.m. Sunday. If you are coming, walk the tour as well.

10/05/2026

Seven hundred and fifty people walked South Main Street on Saturday night, the biggest turnout we have had, and it sold out a full day early.

Thank you. To everyone who came out, to the shop owners and the homeowners who let us stand be on your property, and to High Street Delicatessen, who gave us the start of the night and then fed volunteers.

And to the volunteers. Eight storytellers told the same story to every group that came through, by lantern light, for three and a half hours. Guides walked a group out the deli doors every ten minutes from six o'clock until after nine. Other people checked tickets, painted faces, ran the parking lot and kept Old Town Hall open all evening. It took 50+ volunteers to pull it off and we are truly grateful.

Thank you Harrison Township Police Department for keeping everyone safe throughout the evening.

We hope you had a great time with us. Next October is the twenty fifth Ghost Walk and we hope to see you there.

Big shout out to all of our sponsors that truly helped promote this event - The Pennsville National Bank, Serendipity XIX, The Langmore Salon, Eagle Wealth Strategies, Firenze Capital Advisors, First Class Travel, Mullica Hill Family Dental, Sisters Fun to Fine Jewelry, Sorbello's Landscaping LLC, and Wingate's Tree Service LLC.

10/02/2026

Come join us for the 24th annual Mullica Hill Ghost Walk tomorrow evening! We only have 10% of tickets left, so make sure you purchase them while they last. All proceeds go to our non profit, Harrison Township Historic Society.

Address

62-64 South Main Street
Mullica Hill, NJ
08062

Opening Hours

Saturday	1pm - 4pm
Sunday	1pm - 4pm

Website

http://www.harrisonhistorical.com/

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