Harrison Township Historical Society

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.

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?

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.

06/04/2026

Every town has a corner that everything moves through. In Mullica Hill, for a long time, it was this one.

It sat where the roads met, in the shadow of the Old Town Hall, on the busiest patch of ground in the village. That was no accident. When the automobile changed everything, this is where Mullica Hill came to keep up with it: to fill the tank with Sinclair gasoline, to have a tire patched or a dead battery swapped, to climb aboard one of M.J. Bishop's buses and ride out toward the rest of the world. Errands, engines, departures, arrivals. If you lived here, you passed through this corner, and so did nearly everyone you knew.

When the buses finally moved on, the building did not. It simply went on finding new work, sometimes several trades at once: a lumber shop, a plumber, a sharpening shop, a Southwestern decor store, and a hot rod garage, each leaving a little of itself in the brick.

Today it is the Yellow Garage Antiques, where more than thirty dealers have filled those same bays with a century of beautiful things. The question on this corner used to be "where are you headed." Now it is "what you can't bring yourself to leave behind."

This month, the whole region comes to find out.

Join us for the 20th Annual June Festival of Antiques, presented by the Yellow Garage Antiques along with the Harrison Township Historical Society. Saturday, June 13. Come find the piece that was waiting for you.

Event page - https://www.facebook.com/share/18fBfht9CJ/

05/30/2026

A Mullica Hill building older than the United States. A Town Hall that was lifted off its foundation and rolled back from the road in one piece rather than be torn down. A sitting state senator who ran toward a village fire bell and never recovered. A produce warehouse that at its peak held nearly a million bushels of sweet potatoes at a time. A Quaker meeting house whose gable was blown down by a great wind not long after it was finished, then rebuilt.

Five buildings. All still standing on Main Street. Five short stories you have probably never heard about places you've walked past.

For the last couple of weeks, the Harrison Township Historical Society has had a yard sign in front of each of these five buildings. On each sign is a QR code. Scan it with your phone and you get a 3-minute story about what you are looking at. The tour also points out where to grab a bite or step into a shop along the way, so you can make a Saturday of it. Free, built entirely by volunteers through the Society.

This is a pilot. We need to know if Mullica Hill wants more. If enough of you walk it and scan the signs in the next few weeks, we keep building, more buildings, more stories, all the way down Main Street. If we don't see the interest, the signs come down.

This morning is a good one to stroll Main Street. Start at the Old Town Hall Museum, 62 South Main, and walk north. The museum itself is open this afternoon, 1pm to 4pm.

If you can't make it down this weekend, share this post with someone who can. That's the other way to keep these stories from disappearing.

05/28/2026

The woman who sang at the Nobel Prize ceremony for Bob Dylan grew up one block from the Woodbury, NJ border.

She graduated from Deptford Township High School in 1964. Her class voted her Spartan of the Year. Three years later she took a Greyhound bus to New York City with no place to stay and thirty-two dollars in her pocket that she had found in an abandoned purse in a phone booth. Today, Rolling Stone ranks her among the 50 greatest artists of all time. Her name is Patti Smith

Before any of that, she was just a kid in Deptford, NJ.

Her father worked the night shift at the Honeywell plant. Her mother waited tables and went door to door for the Jehovah's Witnesses with Patti in tow. The family lived in the Woodbury Gardens section of Deptford Township, in a small house across the road from a Quaker family's orchard and across the street from Hoedown Hall, where local square dancers gathered on weekends. "There was no culture there," she has said. "There was a small library and that was it." So she rode the bus into Philadelphia and bought her first Bob Dylan record at the Woolworth's at 13th and Chestnut.

When she was twelve, a Kingdom Hall elder told her there was no place for art in God's Kingdom. Patti left the religion.
Years later, her first album opened with the line, "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine."

She enrolled at Glassboro State College, now Rowan University on an art scholarship. She left after three years. In New York that summer of 1967 she slept in Central Park and inside the bookstore where she eventually got hired. There, she met a young photographer named Robert Mapplethorpe. They lived together at the Chelsea Hotel. They were each other's first audience, first critic, first family. She would write a memoir about him forty-three years later. It won the National Book Award.

In late 1977, Bruce Springsteen had a song he could not finish. His producer carried the tape down the hall to the studio where Patti was recording her third album and asked her to take a crack at it. She brought it home. She was supposed to get a long-distance phone call that night at 7:30 from a man she was falling in love with, Fred "Sonic" Smith, a guitarist from Detroit's MC5. The phone calls cost more than they could afford, so they only talked once a week, and that night Fred was running late. By the time he finally called, just before midnight, Patti had written every verse.
The song was "Because the Night." It hit number thirteen on the Billboard Hot 100.

She married Fred in 1980. He died on November 4th, 1994.
Her new memoir came out on November 4th, 2025. Thirty-one years to the day.

It is called Bread of Angels. She wrote it about where she came from. The Quaker orchard is in it. The Kingdom Hall is in it. A South Philly boy named Butchy Magic, who once pulled a hornet stinger out of her neck outside a Jersey dance, is in the title. From the book: "I did not want to grow up. I wanted to be free to roam, to construct room by room the architecture of my own world."

She told the Philadelphia Inquirer last November: "People think of me as a New Yorker. But I was pretty much formed by the time I got to New York. The places that helped form me were Philadelphia and rural South Jersey."

The Harrison Township Historical Society's featured exhibit on Patti Smith is at the Old Town Hall Museum, 62 S. Main Street in Mullica Hill, through Saturday, June 13. Open Saturdays and Sundays, 1 to 4 PM. Free admission.

05/25/2026

The man in this photograph was shot in the head by a sniper on Okinawa. The bullet went through his helmet and stopped in his brain. There was little hope he would live. He lived another fifty-three years, and most of them right here in Richwood.

His name was Louis Reuter Jr. He was born in July of 1913 on his family's farm in Richwood, the eldest of six. He loved his hometown, and he wanted to see what was beyond it. In 1935 he graduated from Dickinson College, came home to South Jersey, and stood in front of high school classrooms in Paulsboro, Glassboro, and Woodbury, teaching history.

In 1941 the Army drafted the history teacher. They put him in Company G of the 381st Infantry Regiment, 96th Infantry Division, the outfit that called itself the Deadeyes, and they sent him to the Pacific. He fought through Leyte in the Philippines in 1944. Then came Okinawa.

By the spring of 1945 his division was at the foot of a 500-foot wall of rock called the Maeda Escarpment. American soldiers had their own name for it. They called it Hacksaw Ridge.

On April 27, Captain Reuter and two enlisted men slipped into an empty cave on the face of that ridge. They worked their way deeper, past Japanese voices they could hear but could not see, until a side tunnel opened into a hidden observation post fitted with a telescope. Reuter looked through it and saw the entire American advance spread out below him, all the way back to the landing beaches. Hacksaw was not a ridge. It was the roof of an enormous underground fortress, and the enemy inside had been watching the Americans the whole time. It was the first hard intelligence the Army had of what it was really up against. Reuter was awarded the Silver Star.

Two weeks later, on May 13, a sniper found him.

The bullet was removed from his head on the battlefield where he fell. He lay unconscious for days. Months later, when surgeons finally operated on his brain at a military hospital in Virginia, the Army nurse assisting at the table was his own sister, Carolyn.

He did not die. What he did instead was begin again. He had to regain the use of his arms and his legs. He had to learn to speak, and he would speak haltingly for the rest of his life. Through years of therapy, the history teacher learned to read and write a second time. He never returned to a classroom. He never worked full time again.

The war took his profession. It did not take his love of history.

In the early 1950s, Louis Reuter joined the effort to save the old Richwood Academy schoolhouse. In 1971 he became a founding member of the Harrison Township Historical Society, and he led the effort to restore Old Town Hall. He filled his home at Mt. Pleasant Orchards with antiques and gave tours to anyone who would come. The teacher who lost his classroom spent the rest of his life teaching his town anyway.

He kept one thing from the war on his mantel. An oil lamp, with a shade he had painted himself. On it, in his own halting hand, he wrote the name of his old unit and a single line: Once a Deadeye, always a Deadeye. The men of Company G. The ones who came home, and the ones who did not.

Louis Reuter died on May 7, 1998. His medals, his uniform, his portrait, and that hand-painted lamp all came to the Society he helped found. They are on display now at Old Town Hall, the building he helped restore.

Here is the hard part of Memorial Day. It does not belong to the men who came home. It belongs to the ones who did not. Louis Reuter knew that better than most of us ever will. He got fifty-three years on the far side of that bullet, and many of the men who climbed Hacksaw Ridge beside him did not even get fifty-three more days. He carried them for the rest of his life.

Today we carry all of them.

Thank you, Major Reuter. And to the men of Company G who never came home, to Richwood or anywhere else, this Memorial Day is yours.

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Come honor him in person. The Louis Reuter Jr. featured exhibit is on display at Old Town Hall, 62 N. Main Street, Mullica Hill, through Saturday, June 13. Open Saturdays and Sundays, 1:00 to 4:00 p.m. Admission is free. Come see the medals, the lamp he painted, and the building he saved.

05/23/2026

See that little dark smudge near the top of the roof in this old photo?

It is a weathervane. And it is the only thing in that picture that still exists.

The building is gone. The picket fence is gone. The people who walked through that gate are gone. The weathervane is fine, and this weekend you can go stand in front of it.

That building was Harrisonville Hall, the old village town hall, a carriage works on the lower floors and a public hall up top. It was taken down around 1900. The weathervane, though, was older than the building it sat on. Its story starts twenty years before the hall was ever built.

A blacksmith named Samuel Pimm forged it in 1844, in Harrisonville, about four miles down the road from Mullica Hill. It is an iron raccoon, and it is thumbing its nose. The raccoon was no accident. The Whigs were one of the two great political parties of the 1800s, the rivals of the Democrats in the decades before the Republican party existed, and the raccoon was their mascot. When opponents tried to turn that raccoon into an insult, the Whigs answered by having the animal thumb its nose right back. Pimm liked that piece of defiance enough to forge it in iron. This was Whig country, which is why both the township and the village of Harrisonville carry the name of William Henry Harrison, the Whig president elected in 1840.

For its first twenty years the raccoon stood on a pole outside two homes. In 1865 it was raised onto the roof of the new Harrisonville Hall, where it rode the wind until the hall came down around 1900. Then it returned to the blacksmith shop where it was made, and went right back up, this time on the roof of its own birthplace, until that building too was torn down in the 1950s. There is an old photograph of it on each. Look closely at either roofline and you will find the same small shape against the sky. Every building that ever held it is gone now. The weathervane outlived them all.

For years after that, the raccoon belonged to the Gloucester County Historical Society, which kept it safe. Then the Society did a generous thing. They sent it back. After more than 180 years on the move, the weathervane came to rest about four miles from where Samuel Pimm made it.

It hangs today in the stairwell of the Old Town Hall Museum, between floors, up off the ground where a weathervane belongs.

After all that traveling, it is finally close enough to look it in the eye.
It is going to be a wet weekend, a good one to spend an hour out of the rain. The Old Town Hall Museum is open today and tomorrow, 1 to 4, and admission is free. 62 S Main St. Mullica Hill

Come meet the old raccoon. He is glad to be home.

05/22/2026

A few weeks ago we told you about a group of Clearview students heading to Houston for the FIRST World Championship, and we said we would be rooting for them. Here is how it turned out.

Team 9848 GearView brought home the 1st Place Inspire Award in their division. That is the top honor in the program, and the second year running the team has earned it. More than 8,000 teams competed worldwide this season. The Houston championship ran in six divisions, each with one top Inspire Award, and one of those six came home to Mullica Hill. Read that line again.

The Inspire Award does not go to the best robot alone. It goes to the team that does the most across the board, and what these students do off the field is the part that stayed with us. Through a program they call GEAR Up NJ, they have launched nine new robotics teams, run 45 workshops and outreach events this season, mentored hundreds of students, and built a pathway they nicknamed the Pineapple Pipeline that pulls kids into STEM as early as pre-K.

We spend our days here saving what one generation built so the next one can find it. These students are doing that same work in real time. They are not just winning trophies. They are making sure there is a next team to win the next one.

Congratulations to the whole team, their coaches, and their families. We were proud to root for you. We are prouder still of what you are building for the kids coming up behind you.

(Houston, Texas - May 2, 2026) After earning the 1st Place Inspire Award in their division at the...

05/18/2026

Thank you, Mullica Hill.

300+ people showed up, bought tickets, walked the tour, ate, voted, and made Saturday what it was. The Asparagus Festival doesn't happen without you. The Historical Society doesn't operate without your support.

Congratulations to Marino's of Mullica Hill, who took home both people's choice and celebrity judge trophies. Three years after their 2023 win, they're back at the top.

To the other six chefs who competed: Bella Grace Coffee & Cafe, Blue Kujira, blue plate, GCIT Culinary Arts, Naples at The Warehouse, and récolte. Every one of you put real work into turning asparagus into something memorable.

To the judges, the volunteers, the sponsors, and the dozens of people behind the scenes who made the day run: thank you.

See you next year.