Harrison Township Historical Society

Harrison Township Historical Society 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.

Ride up Mullica Hill's Main Street more than a century ago and stop here.The photographer is standing in the road to tak...
08/27/2026

Ride up Mullica Hill's Main Street more than a century ago and stop here.

The photographer is standing in the road to take this, which tells you all you need to know about the traffic. A few doors up the block, the postmaster is a harness maker by trade.

The brick row beside the store was already old. Its oldest section went up in 1771, five years before the Declaration of Independence; the store came along the better part of a century later. Our records call it Elkinton's, and later E. C. Bunning's, a country store.

The name over the door changed, and changed again, and the building stayed. Today it is High Street Delicatessen.

So on Saturday, October 3, you can walk into this photograph. The 24th annual Mullica Hill Ghost Walk begins inside it, at High Street Delicatessen 46 South Main Street. For a walk built on the idea that the past never quite leaves Main Street, there could hardly be a better front door. Our thanks to the deli for hosting the start this year.

The 2026 Mullica Hill Ghost Walk is presented by Platinum Sponsor PNB Financial Service Center.

Tickets, times, and details are in the first comment.

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The Ghost Walk is one of our two largest events of the year, along with the Asparagus Festival in May. Between them, the...
08/25/2026

The Ghost Walk is one of our two largest events of the year, along with the Asparagus Festival in May. Between them, they are one of the main ways the Historical Society keeps the museum at Old Town Hall open and puts on free programs at Richwood Academy all year long.

This year we have opened up limited sponsorship so more local businesses can be part of it.

On Saturday, October 3, about 700 people will walk Main Street, starting at High Street Delicatessen. Sponsors are recognized on street light banners through the village, on the posters that go up in shops around town, and here on our page.

Commitments are due Friday, September 5.

If your business would like to be part of it, send us a message and we will get you the details.

Thank you to everyone who has supported this walk over the years. It is run start to finish by volunteers.

In 1827, a New Jersey man could be excused from militia duty by joining a fire company. The state had arranged it that w...
08/17/2026

In 1827, a New Jersey man could be excused from militia duty by joining a fire company. The state had arranged it that way on purpose.

Militia service was not optional. Under the federal Militia Act of 1792, every free able-bodied white male citizen between 18 and 45 was enrolled, and each man had to supply his own musket, bayonet and cartridge box at his own expense, and turn out when the militia mustered.

Then, in 1826, the New Jersey legislature passed "An act for the encouragement of Fire Companies." Members of a qualifying company were "exempted from militia duty in time of peace." A company needed one fire engine and between sixteen and thirty men. The exemption was the recruiting tool.

Mullica Hill's first fire company was formed the following year, in 1827, as much to evade military service as to fight fires.

What those men had was a hand pumper built in 1790, kept in a small building on the Friends Meeting property. A hand pumper is exactly what the name says. It moved water for as long as men kept working it, and not a moment longer.

The company reorganized in the early 20th century and in 1905 built the firehouse in this photograph, at 14 North Main Street.

It still stands at the bottom of the hill. Most people who pass it every day have no idea what it once was.

Harmony Fire Company is still in Mullica Hill, still answering calls.

He said it took four thousand trees and five axes to make the lake.Miles Gilman, called Skipper by the people who knew h...
08/05/2026

He said it took four thousand trees and five axes to make the lake.

Miles Gilman, called Skipper by the people who knew him, had the lake in his head before he had the ground. He was out looking for a site to build a lake and a park when he got a flat tire on the Ferrell Road bridge over Raccoon Creek, and standing there he found it. The old sawmill and its pond were long gone. For generations this creek had been made to work, turning wheels for grist and lumber, and what he saw there was water put to no purpose but pleasure.

He bought the farm and cleared the ground by hand, one axe stroke at a time he said, and in August 1928 the water went over the dam.

For a modest admission anyone could come and swim, boat, fish or spread out a picnic. Cottages could be rented for the summer, and building lots leased by those who meant to stay. In 1936 he was given a surprise birthday party, and it stuck. Official by 1939, Lake Gilman Day is still held every year in July, with games, a pie-eating contest, and a flotilla of decorated canoes and rowboats out on the water.

Gilman was a World War I Navy veteran, and it was his push that put the Rock of Ages monument on Ferrell Road, honoring the World War II veterans from Lake Gilman. He died in 1948 and was buried behind that monument. The people with cottages at the lake formed a corporation so that nobody could develop it.

The first of these photographs was taken at the pageant in 1955.

Clint Stratton's name outlasted the building it was nailed to.He ran the auction at Ewan. Nobody hires an auction. They ...
08/01/2026

Clint Stratton's name outlasted the building it was nailed to.

He ran the auction at Ewan. Nobody hires an auction. They hire a man, and they trust him to stand up in front of their neighbors and do right by them. His name across the front was the whole business.

The sales ended. The building came down. The sign came off the front of it, and after that it belonged to whoever happened to have it.

It could easily have ended there. Instead, somebody who had it attached the documentation to the back and fixed it down so it could not come loose. Whoever ended up with it next would have no excuse for not knowing what they had.

Nobody asked them to do that. There was nothing in it for them. It is the entire job of a historical society, done by one person with no historical society behind them.

It came up for sale thirty minutes south of here. Someone from around here saw the name and knew it. He bought it and gave it to us.

It goes up at Richwood Academy Cultural Center this year. A sign off a building that is gone, on the wall of a building that is not.

Somebody was looking after it before we were.

Take your mark. For one second, the whole pool goes silent.You are eight, or ten, or fifteen. Toes curled over the edge ...
07/29/2026

Take your mark. For one second, the whole pool goes silent.

You are eight, or ten, or fifteen. Toes curled over the edge of the block, arms swung back, the water flat and waiting below you. You can hear your own heartbeat. Then the horn, and the quiet shatters all at once.

But you were never really up there alone. There was a teammate hanging over the lane rope screaming your name, a coach clicking a stopwatch, a row of little kids on the deck who wanted to be you someday. You did not just swim your race. You swam so the whole team could have the point.

This was Raccoon Valley in 1974, the squad in their stars and stripes. Some of them are almost certainly reading this right now.

And this summer, a new team climbed those same blocks and did something no Raccoon Valley squad had managed in over a decade. The Masked Bandits won in the Olympic Division.

Every kid who ever raced for this club knew that silence before the horn. This team is the one that finally broke through. Congratulations, Bandits. You did this for all of them.

The 1974 squad is here too. Tell us who you recognize.

Photographs courtesy of Jon Steward and Raccoon Valley Swim Club

The boy riding the steam engine grew up to own the ground it ran on.That was his grandfather's yard, and his grandfather...
07/27/2026

The boy riding the steam engine grew up to own the ground it ran on.

That was his grandfather's yard, and his grandfather had put a railroad in it.

J. Webber Gaunt was a businessman in Mullica Hill. That is not what anyone remembers about him. What they remember is that there were steam locomotives running behind his house on Main St. at a time when the town's own trains had long since stopped, and that if you knew about it, you were welcome to come and see.

Word travelled the way it did then, one family telling another, and people drove in from well outside Mullica Hill on a Saturday for no other reason than that. They stood in the yard of a man most of them had never met, and he does not seem to have minded at all.

It was never a one-man project either. Neighbors gave him their weekends, year after year, working on somebody else's railroad because they wanted to be part of it. That is the kind of help a person has to earn.

Mostly, though, it was for the children, and nobody planned that. It is simply what happens when you put a working steam engine in front of a seven-year-old.

Three of the locomotives survive. Two are still with the family. The third is in a museum in Lancaster, PA, where people walk past it every week with no idea whose backyard it came out of.

He was not trying to be remembered. He wanted trains, and he could not see the sense in keeping them to himself, and there are people around here who have never forgotten a single afternoon of it.

Ask anyone who grew up at a swim club, and watch their face soften.A swim club was never really about the pool. It was a...
07/24/2026

Ask anyone who grew up at a swim club, and watch their face soften.

A swim club was never really about the pool. It was about the friends you only saw in summer, the kids from school who suddenly lived at the same place you did, every day, from the last bell in June to the first one in September. It was your parents talking under an umbrella while you did the same cannonball forty times in a row. It was the first place that ever felt like it belonged to the kids.

In Mullica Hill, that place has a name. Raccoon Valley Swim Club has sat in the valley the Raccoon Creek runs through since 1957, doing the same quiet work every summer since, turning classmates into lifelong friends and neighbors into something close to family.

The kids who learned to swim there in the early years grew up and brought their own. Some of the families in that water this week are the third generation of their name to call it home. The friendships that started at the edge of that pool have outlasted schools, jobs, and moves clear across the country.

The dog days are here. Down in the valley it's happening again right now: some kid is climbing out dripping to go find the friend they will still be calling forty summers from now.

Photographs courtesy of Jon Steward.

"Girls Just Want to Have Fun" started with a farm stand sign on Route 77. The man who wrote it said so himself, standing...
07/18/2026

"Girls Just Want to Have Fun" started with a farm stand sign on Route 77. The man who wrote it said so himself, standing right in front of Mary Sorbello.

She almost missed the moment entirely. Those were the hectic years, the years she later said she just barely made it through each day. She and Rosario had started the market in 1961 with nothing but an umbrella, a few peaches and tomatoes, and three little girls at her side. By 1968 there were six Sorbello girls, every one of them working the stand through the long heat of Jersey summers. When the business earned its own building in 1975, Mary named it for her daughters: Sorbello Girls Farm Market.

She had no idea who was reading that sign as they drove past.

Then one summer day, a young man pulled in with a carload of friends and asked to see the place for himself. He told Mary he had passed her stand for years on his way down the shore. Every trip he read the same sign, and every trip he wondered about those girls working all those hours in the heat. Did they like the work? Or would they rather just be having fun? He told her that wondering became a song. Cyndi Lauper carried it around the world. Mary asked his name. He said Robert Hazard. She was so stunned she could barely speak, and by the time she found her words, he was gone down Route 77.

So she did what a busy mother of six does with a moment too precious to lose. She grabbed a paper bag and wrote his name on it, and she kept that scrap of paper, and the story behind it, in her mind and heart for all those years.

The building still stands on Route 77, looking much as it did the day he pulled in, and the market is still run by the family whose name is on the sign. Stop in and ask about the paper bag.

Photos courtesy of the Sorbello family.

The youngest people in these photographs are in their fifties now.By America's 300th birthday, the Bicentennial will hav...
07/04/2026

The youngest people in these photographs are in their fifties now.

By America's 300th birthday, the Bicentennial will have passed out of living memory. Today is the only great American birthday where the people who remember the last one are still here to tell it. If you were on a curb in 1976, in Mullica Hill or anywhere else, you are the keeper now.

That June, Harrison Township threw its party a week early: a parade down Main Street on the last Saturday of the month, floats and antique cars and marching units, the Miss Harrison Township finalists riding in the parade, and two days of celebration at the 4-H Fair Grounds.

So tell us 1976. Where you stood, what came around the corner first, who held your hand. These photographs survived because one family kept them, and we thank Stewart Duffield for sharing his. And before today ends, add one photograph of your 250th below. Fifty years from now, someone will ask what this day was like. Let's leave them the answer.

Happy 250th birthday, America. From a town that started the party early.

Address

62-64 South Main Street
Mullica Hill, NJ
08062

Opening Hours

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

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