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.

You don't need roots here to be part of this town's story. You just need to be living it.Our doors are closed for the se...
06/24/2026

You don't need roots here to be part of this town's story. You just need to be living it.

Our doors are closed for the season, but the work doesn't stop in the summer. It's the opposite. With the building quiet, this is when a few volunteers sit down at these tables and do the slow part: sorting boxes, sleeving photographs, reading letters that have to be read before anyone can say what they are, putting a name to a face. Most of it never makes it into a frame. It gets identified, dated when we can manage it, tucked into acid-free boxes, and quietly protected so it is still here for the people who come after us.

Here is what people get wrong: they think history is the old stuff. The 1800s house, the faded portrait. It isn't. A photo from a 2003 Little League team, a printout from a school play, a snapshot of Main Street the way it looked five years ago, that is history too, or it will be, and someday someone will be grateful it was saved. The town you are living in right now is the town somebody will be researching in fifty years.

So this is an open invitation. If you have photos, programs, flyers, anything that captures a piece of life around here, recent or old, we would like to preserve it. You do not have to be from a founding family. You just have to be part of what this place is now, and you already are.

The work goes on all summer, even with the doors shut. We are glad to be the ones keeping it safe.

You only get one high school graduation. For most people it is the one they never forget, the night childhood starts giv...
06/18/2026

You only get one high school graduation. For most people it is the one they never forget, the night childhood starts giving way to what comes next.

The hallway in these pictures was photographed in 1960, empty, before a single student had ever walked it. A year earlier the same ground was an open field off Breakneck Road, the land Harrison and Mantua Townships bought to raise a school together.

It has looked that empty every June since. Another class finishes, the lockers clear out, and for a few weeks the halls go quiet. More than sixty years of classes have walked them and then walked out for good.

The seventh graders who walked in first are in their late seventies now. Many of their children and grandchildren walked these same halls after them. Tonight the parents in the stands watch their own kids do exactly what they once did, walking out to a name called over a loudspeaker and a long summer waiting on the other side.

Congratulations to the Clearview Class of 2026, and to every senior graduating across our area this month. Years from now, you will still remember that night.

If you walked these halls, or halls like them, tell us when. Drop your class year, a photo, or a memory below. And if you know a face in any of these early pictures, tell us who it is. Someone out there has been waiting to see it.

Five signs have stood on Main Street for about a month now. Each one has a QR code and a three minute story behind it.Wh...
06/16/2026

Five signs have stood on Main Street for about a month now. Each one has a QR code and a three minute story behind it.

When we asked whether Mullica Hill wanted more of this, the answer came back loud. More than 25,000 people saw the post, it was shared close to a hundred times, and it traveled well beyond the people who usually follow us. Thank you.

And to everyone who actually walked it, reading about a building you have passed a hundred times, thank you. You are the reason this worked.

The signs come down next week. This coming weekend is the last one to walk it. Start at the Old Town Hall Museum at 62 South Main and head north. If you want the full route on your phone, the link is in the comments. And if you have already walked it, the best thing you can do is send this post to someone who hasn't.

While you are out there, tell us what worked. Were the stories the right length? Was the route easy to follow? What did you want more of? Drop it in the comments or send us a message on Facebook. We are using what you tell us to shape the fall version.

And yes, there's a fall version coming. A longer route, more buildings, more stories down Main Street. Here's the honest part. We're an all-volunteer society. Every sign you saw was researched, built, and planted by people who live here, on their own time. Growing the tour for the fall takes real money: printing, signs, stakes, and the domain that keeps it online. If you want to see it expand, a donation is the most direct way to help. Any amount moves the fall version forward, and the link to give is in the comments. Want to lend a hand with the signs or share a story about one of these buildings? Send us a message and we'll find you a place.

One more thing. The museum is closed now until October while volunteers sort through this year's donations and get ready for the Ghost Walk. We will see you in the fall.

Thanks for walking them, reading them, and sharing them. That's what keeps them from disappearing.

06/14/2026

Join us as we watch a documentary film!

A week ago we wrote about Mullica Hill's heyday as an antique town. Main Street has changed, but the Yellow Garage Antiq...
06/12/2026

A week ago we wrote about Mullica Hill's heyday as an antique town. Main Street has changed, but the Yellow Garage Antiques and a few others have kept the tradition going.

Tomorrow is the one Saturday a year when the rest of it comes back.

The 20th Annual June Festival of Antiques runs 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Gloucester County 4-H Fairgrounds. Dealers come in from across the Northeast. Real antiques, not reproductions. Furniture, stoneware, glass, primitive Americana, jewelry, advertising, the kind of pieces you won't see again.

After the show, make a day of it. Browse the Yellow Garage on South Main, walk through Main Street Market, and stop into William Heritage Winery for the afternoon.

The Old Town Hall Museum is open 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. tomorrow if you want to stop in. It's also one of the last weekends to do the Historical Society's self-guided walking tour before it goes on summer break. Five historic homes along South Main, each with a QR code and a three-minute story. Starts at Old Town Hall.

$5 in advance, $6 at the gate. A portion of every ticket benefits the Historical Society.

Photos below from past years, all from the Yellow Garage's archive.

See you tomorrow.

The school year is nearly over, and with it comes that strange quiet every parent knows. The schedule loosens, the days ...
06/11/2026

The school year is nearly over, and with it comes that strange quiet every parent knows. The schedule loosens, the days stretch out, and summer is suddenly, wonderfully here. It stirs a familiar urge: to leave the everyday behind for a day.

Mullica Hill has been a fine place to do exactly that for a hundred years.

In the 1920s, the start of summer here might look like a group in their finest gathered beside one of M.J. Bishop's buses, ready to set off for a day out together. Those same buses ran from the building that is the Yellow Garage Antiques today.

The reasons people visit have changed, but the building has never stopped being a good way to spend a summer afternoon. Inside, dozens of dealers fill the old garage with furniture, glass, jewelry, and the kind of well-kept things that carry a story from one household to the next.

So as the season opens up, give yourself a slow day. Wander, linger, and let the afternoon run long.

The 20th Annual June Festival of Antiques, presented by the Yellow Garage with the Harrison Township Historical Society. Saturday, June 13 at the 4-H Grounds.

https://www.facebook.com/share/1CkrWYTZvf/

He graduated near the bottom of his high school class. A school assessment branded him with a low IQ and marked him a sl...
06/09/2026

He graduated near the bottom of his high school class. A school assessment branded him with a low IQ and marked him a slow learner. No one had the word for it yet, but today we would call it dyslexia.

The boy they wrote off grew up to make flowers out of glass. Not loose impressions of flowers, but blossoms, roots, bees, and vines so botanically exact that people have stared at his work and refused to believe it was glass at all. They were certain he had found some way to seal real flowers inside.

"I want people to go beyond the wizardry of whether it is real or glass," he has said. "It is about respect for living things."

His name is Paul Stankard, and he lives right up the road in Mantua, NJ. He is considered a living master of his art and a pioneer of the studio glass movement, with work in the Smithsonian, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and more than seventy museums around the world. After sixty years at the torch, he is still working. His glass draws on the poetry of South Jersey's own Walt Whitman and the wildflowers of the region, and it has been called blossoms suspended in stillness.

His work is featured in our current exhibit, Hometown Revolutionaries: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, at the Old Town Hall Museum this Saturday, June 13, from 11 AM to 1 PM.

This is the final day to see the exhibit before the museum closes for the season and reopens in the fall. It falls during the June Festival of Antiques next door at Yellow Garage Antiques, so it is a good morning to be in Mullica Hill. Old Town Hall is at 62-64 S. Main Street. Admission is free.

06/07/2026

Jazz in June is back for its fourth year, and this time it lands on a milestone. May 26 marked the 100th anniversary of Miles Davis's birth, so this concert joins jazz lovers around the world in celebrating one of the music's true icons.

Rowan University's RMG Jazz Quartet opens the summer season at Richwood Academy with a program of jazz and funk running from Miles Davis to Thundercat, with stops at Herbie Hancock, Charlie Parker, and Roy Hargrove along the way.

The quartet is four Rowan University musicians: Kyle Miller on guitar, Dominic Szalabofka on tenor sax, Colin Becker on bass, and Gino Antonelli on drums. Kyle and Dominic are seniors, Colin and Gino are sophomores. Hearing them is part of a longer Richwood tradition of giving the public a chance to meet the College of Performing Arts' best young players before the rest of the world does.

The Cultural Center is at 836 Lambs Road, Richwood, with plenty of on-site parking. The concert will also be livestreamed and archived on the Harrison Township Historical Society page and posted to YouTube.

Come early and make an afternoon of it. Before the concert, stop by the Old Town Hall Museum in Mullica Hill to see the new exhibition, "Hometown Revolutionaries: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness." It explores generations of Gloucester Countians who did revolutionary and pioneering things from 1776 to today, including two very different musicians: hymnwriter C. Austin Miles and the "Godmother of Punk," Patti Smith. You can hear a 1920s recording of Miles's most famous hymn, "In the Garden," and watch Patti Smith's induction performance at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The museum is at 62 S. Main Street and is open Saturdays and Sundays, 1 to 4 PM, through June 13.

For the better part of three decades, antiques were the reason people came to Mullica Hill.It was not always that way. A...
06/07/2026

For the better part of three decades, antiques were the reason people came to Mullica Hill.

It was not always that way. A 1981 article in The Press recalled that just over a decade earlier, the village had been little more than old homes and about three antique shops. By the time that piece appeared, there were more than twenty, tucked into a quarter mile of Main Street, and on weekends the town filled with antique hunters. Trucks still rumbled down Route 45 and rattled the shop windows as they passed. One longtime shopkeeper, Kate Lamborne, had made her peace with it. You learned to cope, she told the reporter, when you lived on the main highway.

There was a quiet symmetry to it all. The shops were often the old houses themselves, Quaker homes from the 1820s and before, given a second life with a bell over the door.

By the 1990s, the town had made a whole season of it. The annual Fall Open House drew more than seventy merchants, along with an antique car show, a Civil War encampment, a Victorian fashion show, a free shuttle the length of Main Street, and a temporary post office stamping a commemorative postmark. There was a Labor Day sidewalk sale, and at Christmas a tour through a dozen of the village's private homes, with the proceeds coming to this Society. The shops carried names that regulars still say with affection: the Mews and Wolf's Antiques, the Old Gray Mare and Deja Vu, the Sign of St. George, the Old Post Shoppes, Kings Row, and the Warehouse at Mullica Hill Station.

We are trying to document those years more fully, and we suspect the best record of them is sitting in your photo albums. If you have pictures from that time, the shops, the crowds, the open houses, the signs that once hung along Main Street, we would be grateful if you shared them here.

Which shop do you remember best, and what did you carry home from it?

Do you remember how hot the metal slide got at Ella Harris Park, and how you went down it anyway, because it was summer ...
06/06/2026

Do you remember how hot the metal slide got at Ella Harris Park, and how you went down it anyway, because it was summer and you had the whole day ahead of you?

A lot of us grew up on that playground without ever asking the obvious question: who was Ella Harris, and why is her name on the sign?

She was one of the people who quietly built modern Harrison Township, and she had been at it a long time. Local history remembers her as the town's great "joiner," and the record bears it out. She organized the Mullica Hill branch of the American Cancer Society, started the Red Cross Bloodmobile in the township, and helped found one civic group after another. So when the township opened its new offices on Bridgeton Pike in the mid-1970s and the open field beside them became its first public park, the work went to exactly the right person. Ella chaired the Bicentennial Committee, taking that empty field, and spending the better part of two decades turning it into ballfields, tennis courts, a pavilion, and the playground so many of us remember. In 1982, the township named the park in her honor.

But the park is only half of it. She also started Harrison Township Day. It was already a tradition by the time most of us were old enough to run around it, whether that was the early 2000s or well before: school almost out, summer finally here, the whole town in one place. The best day on the calendar.

The park, and the day everyone waited for. Both of them hers. Ella Harris died in 1994, at 83, but on a night like tonight, with the whole town back at her park, she does not feel very far away.

Harrison Township Day is today, at Ella Harris Park, the place she built for exactly this. Come spend the evening the way you remember it, and stay for the fireworks at 9.

Address

62-64 South Main Street
Mullica Hill, NJ
08062

Opening Hours

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

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