In the early 1720s, Thomas Moore, this town’s namesake, first innkeeper and tavern owner moved to this quaint village from Salem County. At the time, the western part of Moorestown was called Rodmantown. In 1732 he bought up a large 33-acre tract of land on the north side of Main Street from just west of the Friends’ cemetery to Locust Street and bounded by what is now Second Street on the north for the sum of forty-nine pounds. As the town’s first major real estate agent, he sold most of the lots, but he set up his home and inn near the corner of Union and Main Streets. By 1745 he had applied to the state for a liquor license which was in use until at least 1760 when Moore died.

It was a small establishment by modern standards. According to James Purdy in Moorestown Old and New,

“…His ‘hotel’ consisted of just four rooms, all told. Two were on the ground floor, and two were upstairs under the roof. These latter were so unambitious that a man could stand in the middle of either of them and touch the peak of the roof with his finger tips; from which it may be inferred that no very massive furniture was at the disposal of Mr. Moore’s guests. The manner of getting up stairs, too, was somewhat different from going up in a modern elevator. The stairway was open at the back, like ordinary cellar stairs, and led up to a trap door in the floor of one of the upper rooms. At the foot the stairway was unattached, but at the top it was fastened to the beam by a pair of hinges. In the day-time, when people were not supposed to have any use for their bedrooms, the stairs were swung up against the ceiling and fastened there by an iron hook, so that they were quite out of the way. As bedtime approached, the hook was displaced and the stairs made available.”

In the 1890’s, the old tavern building had fallen into disrepair. It was torn down by surveyor Uriah Borton so that he could build a new home on the site. This house was later demolished in the 1930s for the installation of a gas station, which eventually became the home of Cornerstone Bank. Recently The Bank of  Cornerstone Bank was converted to The Bank of Princeton.

140 East Main Street, Moorestown

The house at 140 East Main Street is a contributing property in the Moorestown Historic District listed on the National and New Jersey State Historic Registers.

The oldest portion of this house was built  c. 1783, during the waning days of the American Revolution by Richard Edwards. He was a prominent local citizen who served in 1782 on the township committee and was also an overseer of highways.

The 1796 Burlington County Tax Ratables record shows him owning a house, 13 acres of land, 2 horses over 2 years old and 2 cattle over 3 years old. He also had a property in Lumberton, where he was a prosperous merchant and had a thriving liquor business in Philadelphia.

Moorestown nearly lost this beautiful historic home to severe neglect in the late 1990s. It has been completely and faithfully restored and updated by the current owners. The rear portion of the house is the original, oldest part of the home. It stood as a small, two-story house. The back room which has been remodeled as a kitchen retains an early wide-beaded-board wall and cupboard stair typical of colonial era houses.   

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The house was substantially enlarged and “modernized” around 1860 with a brick addition on the front with Victorian gables. The division of the two periods is evident by the change of ceiling heights, windows and woodwork as you moved from the front rooms to the rear. The present main stair was part of the 1860 remodeling and still retains the banister from that period. A 40-foot brick well was found in the cellar.

To the rear of the home, the current owners constructed a 2-story addition for contemporary family living.

Down the hill, in the backyard, is the mid-19th century Lippincott barn, which was originally located at the Lippincott Farm on Westfield Road (where Care One is located today). Each piece of its post and beam frame was meticulously numbered and disassembled, then trucked to this location and carefully rebuilt by Amish barn framers. The beams are held together with oak pegs. In the 1850’s no nails were used in the assembly of the barn frames. The 6”x6” timbers are primarily hemlock. Amazingly, after 170 years, the frame when reassembled was still perfectly square and plumb! This barn was moved to its current location about 20 years ago and with luck, will still be standing for another 150 years. The Lippincott barn is one of Moorestown’s few remaining barns and was slated for demolition until it was moved in 2002.

The original owner, Richard Edwards, had a daughter, Ann Edwards, who was a much-loved Quaker minister active in the Chester Monthly Meeting in present day Moorestown. Ann was born into a non-Quaker family and later became a convinced Friend, i.e., a convert to Quakerism. The date of her conversion is unknown, though it must have preceded her recognition as a minister in 1808. The Edwards family did not follow her into membership in the Society, with the exception of her sister Elizabeth, who became a member in 1815.

Edwards was particularly active as a minister between 1810 and 1818; during these years she visited Virginia, New York, and Baltimore Yearly Meetings as well as many smaller meetings under their jurisdiction. She was also active in Moorestown, NJ, and the surrounding area. Ann Edwards never married. She died on February 5th, 1820, while trying to cross the frozen Delaware River in a carriage or wagon in the company of Henry Warrington Jr., Nancy Stokes, and Esther Hunt Collins. The ice gave out under the vehicle, and Edwards and Collins were lost beneath the water.

Another resident of this home was Clayton Lippincott, who was a respected judge and the first president of the Moorestown National Bank. He wrote an important history of Chester Township in 1883 for Woodward and Hageman’s History of Burlington and Mercer Counties. This history can be found in the book Moorestown Old and New by James Purdy.



118 East Main Street, Moorestown

The Moorestown Friends Meeting House is listed both individually and in the Historic District on the New Jersey State and National Registers.

Constructed of brick, with the date worked into its west gable, the current structure is a large 2½ story example of the meeting house type. The building is lit on all sides by large multi-paned windows. A two story addition was made along its south side in 1914 and a one story social hall was added to the east in 1969.

The prominent and central position of this 40 acre campus is a testament to the importance of the Quaker tradition in the establishment of Moorestown in the 17th century.

The current 1802 structure is the third meeting house built here by the Society of Friends. The first was a 1700 log meeting house which was located on the north side of Main Street where the Friends Cemetery is located. The site is identified by a bronze plaque. Fire destroyed the original meeting house in 1720, and a new one was built of stone on the same site. After its removal, the lot on which this building stood was used exclusively as a burial ground.

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Hessian troops encamped on the original grounds and environs of the Meeting House on June 20, 1778, during the evacuation of British and Hessian forces across New Jersey from Philadelphia to New York City.

401 Bridgeboro Road, Moorestown

Though the Heulings House dates back to the early 18th century, there is little architectural evidence of this owing to major remodeling over the years.  The oldest portion of the house was built c. 1720 by Abraham Heulings. This 2-story oldest portion is believed to be part of the side of the house closest to Westfield Road. The house we see today has been built around it several times over the last 300 years.

Next to the house is a large 3-bay, 5-story, bank barn of the English type, with a heavy hewn swing beam structure. It was built in the mid 1800s and is the only one of this type in the state of New Jersey. Visible on some of the beams are the stamps of C.B. Coles & Son, a large 19-century lumber enterprise in Camden, NJ owned by Moorestown’s Charles B. Coles.

The barn has a wooden water tower on the upper level that was used to store water to cool the milk. There are stalls for horses and an area for cows on the ground floor. The barn had a 2-bay, pyramid roof Italianate-Romanesque cupola which was probably added in the mid 20th century. It was recently removed by the current owner as it was putting too much stress on the roof structure. Adjacent to the barn on the south side is a carriage house which is now used for modern “carriages.”

Abraham Heulings came to America from Gloucestershire, England. He purchased large parcels of land in what is now Delanco and Riverton in the late 1600s. Abraham was a signer of the 1676 West Jersey Concessions and Agreements which was an inspiration for America’s Bill of Rights. He was orginally a Quaker but when he married non-Quaker Esther English in 1686 he was disowned. In 1701 he acquired 700 acres here from Samuel Jennings.

In 1724 Abraham sold the farm to his son Jacob for 5 shillings. The size of the property was 335 acres, or roughly half of the 1701 acreage, “together with all houses, outhouses, barns,” etc. Jacob’s brother William was deeded an adjoining tract of the same size on the same date.

Abraham was the Chester Township Overseer of Highways in 1716, as was his son Abraham in 1756 and another Abraham in 1784. Abraham Sr., was also Constable in 1713 and Freeholder during the period 1717-1719. His son Jacob was also a Freeholder from 1729-30 and 1731.

Darling Conrow, Sr., purchased the farm c. 1740. When he died in 1801 the property went to his daughter Elizabeth. She sold to Joshua Lippincott in 1808. It was owned by a variety of residents including many Lippincott family members from the mid-1800s through 1904. Since then there have been over a dozen owners.

Hugh Hollinshead, a clock and watchmaker, built this house c. 1770. It is a 2-1/2 story, 5-register Georgian house, which features a front portico enclosure, porches on the right side and the rear, as well as floor-to-ceiling French doors on the front, side and rear of the house. A detached accessory building in the backyard is a carriage house with a pyramid hip roof.

The house was built using a timber framing construction style and is approximately 1500 sq. ft. with a 4-room layout. The original first-floor consisted of a front living room, dining room and kitchen. The original second-floor consisted of two bedrooms and a hallway. The original third floor configuration is unknown. Trees from the 18th century, an American Beech and a European Beech, can be found growing on the property today.

Hugh Hollinshead lived and had a shop here. He was a prosperous landowner of a 300 acre property as shown in the 1774 tax ratables for Burlington County. Hugh was cousin to another Moorestown clockmaker, Morgan Hollinshead whose shop, now demolished, was also located on Main Street in front of where the Moorestown Friends Meeting campus is now located. Unlike his cousin’s, very few of his tall case clocks survive to this day.

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The lane to the east of the Hollinshead House was originally part of an old road which passed between Moorestown and Mt. Laurel which was laid out as a public highway in 1761. The old road was part of a Native American system of roads that passed from the Delaware river all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. In 1796, the current Mt. Laurel Road was designed to replace the old road. The old road has been called variously “the road between Moorestown and Mount Laurel,” “the old Evesham Road” and “the road to Mount Laurel Meeting”. Having ceased to be a through road, the remnant became Pettit’s Lane, for the farm down the hill, now demolished. Through practically all of the 20th century it was known as Featherbed Lane, and it is now called Collina Way.

After the Hollinsheads, the Higbee family lived in the house. According to the Moorestown Chronicle dated June 2, 1938, Beulah Higbee gave singing lessons to David Scull Bispham, the world famous opera baritone who spent his formative years in Moorestown.

Lydia Higbee Morris returned to this house after the death of her husband Major Louis Morris with her children Louis, Jenny and John. Major Morris fought in the Civil War and after the war was stationed with his family in Minnesota. When they returned, Lydia was an active member of the W.C.T.U.

This was also the long-time home of the Benjamin Cadbury family. Benjamin was very active in Quaker affairs and worked in the family business, the Hajoca Corporation, which was one of the largest plumbing, heating and industrial supply companies in the USA at the time. The initials "HJC" can be found imprinted on several pipes in the house, for Benjamin Cadbury’s HAJOCA plumbing company.

124 East Main Street, Moorestown

The house at 124 East Main Street is a contributing property in the Moorestown Historic District listed on the National and State Historic Registers.

The oldest portion of the house was built    c. 1756. Located on the east side of the structure it included a formal parlor, a smaller back room, and two bedrooms upstairs. The entrance doorway was originally on the side. It was purposely positioned to face away from the street, to prevent dirt kicked up by passing horses from getting inside. The fireplace in the living room was said to be lined with ornamental iron manufactured in a pre-revolutionary South Jersey foundry. In the 1850s, the right side of the structure was expanded. Two stairways access the upstairs.

The house was named after a well-known resident who lived there from about 1910-1935, Dr. Samuel S. Haines, who was one of the first dentists in Moorestown.

436 Mount Laurel Road, Mount Laurel

The Mount Laurel Friends Meeting House, also known as the Evesham Friends Meeting House, is listed on the New Jersey State and National Registers of Historic Places. It is a fine representative example of Quaker architecture. With its exceptionally well-preserved interior and ingenious movable room partitions, the Mount Laurel Meeting House is one of the most pristine and intact of the larger meeting houses in New Jersey. It is the second oldest meeting house in Burlington County and is still used for Quaker services.

Constructed of locally quarried stone, it is a large (85’ x 40'), 2-1/2-story structure built in two sections. The eastern five bays were built in 1760; and in 1798 the two-bay western section was added. On the northern facade of the meeting house are lines which indicate that a building was attached. Secondary records related that this section was built in 1698 and measured 30 x 40 feet. There is a faint outline of a foundation approximately this size that can be discerned. This unit was removed in 1828.

Virtually all of the interior is of the period (save for electrical lighting fixtures and a 1877 stove setting in the middle of the floor). Wooden pews, stairways, wide board wainscoting, gallery, support columns, window moldings and doors are all late 18th century. Of particular importance are the ingenious vertically sliding partitions in the center of the meeting room dividing the large room into two separate rooms as necessary. While these paneled sliding partitions were typical features of the larger Quaker meeting houses, few are still completely intact in the state.

In addition to its architectural and religious importance, the meeting house and property was also the site of a military occupation during the Revolutionary War. British troops under the command of General Henry Clinton encamped on the grounds and environs of the Meeting House on June 19, 1778, during the evacuation of British and Hessian forces across New Jersey from Philadelphia to New York City.

Photos below are from the 1936 Historic American Building Survey (HABS)