730 Marne Highway, Moorestown

The oldest portion of this historic farm house was built c. 1770 by Joshua Bispham. The residents of the house would have been witness to Hessian troops on June 20, 1778, marching up the Old Salem Road towards Mt. Holly to meet up with the rest of the British Army. Between the years 1812 and 1816, the house was owned by Commodore Thomas Truxtun, one of the US Navy’s most important early heroes.

During his retirement, the Truxtun family moved to Chester Township from Cranbury, NJ, in 1812. He moved to this 40-acre plantation he called Woodlawn, on what is now Marne Highway. His wife did not enjoy living in Cranbury, and the previous owner of this house, Dr. George Davis, wanted to move closer to family in Brunswick so they simply traded properties. The Truxtun family lived here until 1816, when he moved to Philadelphia. Tax records from 1812 show that Truxtun owned 40 acres of land, 3 horses, and 3 head of cattle. He described the property, which he intended to continue farming as previous owners had, as “handsome, healthy, and in a good neighbourhood.”

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As a privateer commander during the American Revolution, he captured ten enemy ships. After the war he continued to sail in service of the nation he fought to create. He was one of six commanders appointed by George Washington to the new US Navy. In 1785 he was responsible for the safe return of Benjamin Franklin to the USA from his tour as Ambassador to France.

In 1786 his ship, the Canton, was one of the first American vessels to open direct trade between China and the United States. In 1794, he published an important book on navigation, Remarks, Instructions, and Examples Relating to the Latitude and Longitude, and was one of the first to map the Gulf Stream.

He also designed the original Navy signal manual and wrote the predecessor to the Navy Regulations in use today. As commander of the USS Constellation in 1799 he defeated the French ship L’Insurgente in the Caribbean as part of the “Quasi War” with France. In 1800, he forced the surrender of another French warship, La Vengeance. Six naval ships have been named for him in recent decades, including the current USS Truxtun (DDG-103), a destroyer. He had a reputation for bravery and tenacity as a disciplined but fair commander and a superior seaman and leader.

Silas Walton was another notable owner of the plantation in the later 19th century. In addition to farming his sizable acreage, he also invented a cultivator/tiller and developed a new variety of strawberry. The house remained in the Walton family until 1983.

118 East Main Street, Moorestown

The 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.

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.

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.



201 East Main Street, Moorestown

The house at 201 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 Late Federal, stuccoed brick house was built c. 1760 by Ephraim Haines.

On June 20, 1778, British and Hessian troops encamped on his land. In his claim for damages, the items plundered or destroyed included 2750 cedar rails, 1550 oak rails, 55 oak posts, 102 apple trees, 22 sheep, 1 horse 15 years old, 1 horse 5 years old, 2 sows with pig, 11 hogs, 20 acres of grass for mowing, 3 acres of Indian corn, 5 acres of oats and flax, 3 ploughs, 35 acres of wheat and rye and 7000 feet of good pine boards. Totalling a financial loss by his reckoning of 240 pounds, 6 shillings.

Haines was a prominent and prosperous local citizen, owning a large portion of the land east of Chester Ave. He was an overseer of highways in 1764. The 1774 tax records for Burlington County show that he owned 278 acres, with 16 cattle and horses. He sold some of that land on the south side of Main Street for a new Friends Meeting House and school in 1781. Ephraim’s son Samuel W. Haines inherited the house and made additions and renovations to the house in the mid 1820s. Samuel was a tax collector in 1817-1818 and Sheriff of Burlington County from 1813-1816 and 1819-1822.

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.

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.