Cherry Hill: A Brief History

Mangiafico

CHAPTER 1

EARLY BEGINNINGS

Looking at Cherry Hill today, with its multitude of housing developments, office parks, shopping centers and crowded highways, it’s difficult to imagine that just sixty years ago the community looked much like those not far to the east. Then known as Delaware Township, and originally as Waterford Township, the twenty-four-square-mile community had fewer than ten thousand residents. The landscape was dominated by the bucolic farms and woods that inspired an 1886 depiction of the town as a prosperous agricultural community composed chiefly of gristmills and carriage-making shops.

The area’s original inhabitants were the Lenni-Lenapes, Native Americans who coexisted peacefully with English settlers, followers of William Penn who arrived in the late 1600s. The Lenni-Lenapes, meaning original peoples, migrated from the north, most likely from Canada, and were forced south by famine and war. When the colonists arrived, they called the Lenni-Lenapes the Delawares because most of them lived along the Delaware River. The Lenni-Lenapes lived in villages composed of about five hundred people. The men were accomplished fishermen and navigators who hunted and gathered food in the woods. The women tended the crops of corn, squash, sweet potatoes and beans in the rich lands along the river.

It is said that the peaceful ways of the Quakers won over the local Indians. However, the Indians did not profit from this relationship. Their customs did not allow for them to change their ways of doing things. The Europeans cleared the forests, thus changing the habits of the animals that the Indians hunted. They exposed the Indians to diseases to which they had no immunity, such as smallpox, tuberculosis and measles. In addition, the Indians were not equipped to handle the alcohol they got from the Europeans.

As more and more Europeans continued to pour into the area, their general perceptions and treatment of the Lenape began to change. By 1664, the Lenni-Lenape population in South Jersey had already been decimated by disease and dominance by the Europeans. In 1677, the Proprietors had secured an Indian deed for all of the land between Big Timber and Rancocas Creeks. The purchase price was a collection of blankets, kettles, needles, pipes, fishhooks, bells, combs, guns and brandy. It appears that the Indians had assumed that they would be sharing the land with the Europeans.

The number of Lenni-Lenapes in what is now New Jersey plunged from about twelve thousand when the first settlers arrived in the area to fewer than three thousand in the eighteenth century. By the nineteenth century, most of the remaining Lenni-Lenapes were living on reservations outside New Jersey. However, one of the earliest reservations in the country, Brotherton, was established in 1758 in what is now Shamong Township in Burlington County, only a few miles from what is now known as Cherry Hill. Local folklore says that the last of the Native Americans in the township died on Benjamin D. Cooper’s property and was buried in the corner of an apple orchard that came to be known as Indian Orchard.

WATERFORD TOWNSHIP FORMED

In 1695, the English formed the community of Waterford Township, one of the original townships of old Gloucester County. Old Gloucester County comprised all of present-day Atlantic, Camden and Gloucester Counties, an area of nearly twelve hundred square miles. Atlantic County was formed in 1837, and Camden County was formed in 1844—the same year that Waterford Township became Delaware Township.

Waterford Township was situated in West Jersey, which, along with East Jersey, was one of two provinces that composed modern-day New Jersey between 1674 and 1702. Settlement of the West Jersey area by Europeans was thin until the English conquest in 1664. Beginning in the late 1670s, Quakers settled in large numbers, first near Salem and then in Burlington City, which became the capital of West Jersey. Perth Amboy served as the capital of East Jersey. To this day, the Council of Proprietors of West New Jersey, a nine-member panel that has been in existence since 1688, remains in charge of all unclaimed land in West Jersey, a portion of the state that extends from the southern end of Long Beach Island northwest to the Delaware Water Gap. There is little unclaimed land left today, but the council still exists and holds meetings once a year.

Quakers were actually called the Society of Friends and had developed in England during the seventeenth century during a time of religious and political turmoil. The name Quakers came when George Fox, the sect’s founder, told officials in the town of Derby in England that they should tremble before the word of the Lord. The judge is reported to have replied, You are the Quaker, not I. At first resented, the nickname was later accepted and used by the Society of Friends.

The Quakers developed a strong belief system, deeply rooted in Christianity, with the central tenet that a direct experience or relationship with God is available to anyone who seeks it through quiet, diligent contemplation. This search for the inner light is the pinnacle of their faith; it is attainable within any individual, regardless of sex, race or religion. The other central belief of Quakerism most widely known outside of the Society of Friends is their strong pacifist theology or peace testimony.

Equality of the sexes and a strong belief in the value of education are also tenets of the Quaker faith. Quakers often established their own schools with a rigorous curriculum, known as Friends Schools; many of these schools, established in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, are still operating today. The schools were open to girls, and many women participated as leaders in their communities and as ministers. Members of the Society of Friends were, and continue to be, organized into local congregations called Monthly Meetings. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the society exerted powerful religious and political influence over Waterford and Delaware Townships and throughout the Delaware Valley.

EARLY PROPERTY OWNERS

One of the earliest property owners in what is now Cherry Hill was Francis Collins, who, in 1682, bought 500 acres on the north side of the Arouches Creek (later Cooper’s Creek). Collins, however, never lived on that land and sold tracts of it to many of the early settlers of the township. Also in 1682, Thomas Howell purchased 650 acres on the north side of the creek and called it Christianity. Five years later, he erected a dam in order to build a mill but was indicted for obstructing the creek. In 1690, his son, Mordecai, did erect the dam and built the mill.

Another early property owner was John Kay, who purchased one hundred acres from Francis Collins in 1684. He purchased another lot of property with portions in both Haddonfield and Waterford Township in 1710 from William Lovejoy. This property, on Cooper’s Creek, included a gristmill erected before 1697; Kay added a sawmill. Kay served in the Assembly of West Jersey in 1685, was a Gloucester County justice, was a member of the Provincial Assembly from 1710 to 1716 and served as its speaker. He was also a trustee of the Newton Meeting from 1708 to 1740. When in the assembly, he was chairman of the committee to make the boundary line between New York and New Jersey and to fix the partition line between East and West Jersey. Records show that from 1685 to 1707, Friends meetings were held in his house. He also served as a trustee of the Newton Meeting and burial ground beginning in 1708.

John Kay was the first of four generations that would work this farm and mill property, which passed to his son, Isaac Kay, in 1742. The younger Kay, married to Mary Ann Gregory in 1738, had a family of five children when he began improving the property by building a farmhouse about 1748. The house, which still stands today as part of Croft Farm, was added to by subsequent owners but is one of the oldest remaining in the county.

The first non–Native American settlers in what is now Cherry Hill were Samuel and Elizabeth Coles, who arrived from England around 1682 along with William Cooper. Cooper and Coles both hailed from Coles Hill in Hertfordshire. The Coleses settled on five hundred acres of land on the north side of Cooper’s Creek along the Delaware River in what is now Camden. In 1685, the Native Americans told Coles that there was better land back from the Delaware River. Thus, he purchased one thousand acres of forest on the south branch of the Pennsauken Creek. He called the property New Orchard. Coles became a legislator and commissioner. He returned to England in 1692 and died on the return trip. His son, Samuel, inherited the property and lived there until his death in 1728.

Samuel Coles, a grandson of Samuel Coles, built his two-and-a-half-story Flemish bond brick house in 1743. This house still stands as a private home on Old Cuthbert Road. It has a fireplace that bears the inscription SC1743. In the 1800s, the cellar served as a jail. Another Coles descendant, Kendall Coles, prominent in local government during the Revolutionary period, built his house between 1778 and 1780. It was thirty feet by twenty-two feet and was two stories high. This building has been modified but now serves as the Unitarian House on Kings Highway.

Samuel Coles’s neighbor, in England and the New World, was William Cooper, whose land was on the opposite side of the creek. William Matlack and his wife, Mary Hancock, also occupied hundreds of acres of land on the north branch of Pennsauken Creek. William Matlack arrived in Burlington in 1677 from Nottingham, England. A carpenter by trade, he purchased one thousand acres in Waterford and named them Cropwell after his hometown in England. In 1717, he bought two hundred acres at Springdale and Evesham Roads and gave them to his son, Richard. It was on this property that William and his wife were originally buried. The bodies were later moved to their present grave site on Balsam Road, in the Woodcrest development. William’s grandson, Timothy Matlack, penned the Declaration of Independence.

Other pioneering families that settled Waterford Township included DeCou, Ellis, Evans, Lippincott, Roberts and Stokes. In 1691, Simeon Ellis bought two hundred acres of land from Francis Collins that straddled what is now Kings Highway. Ellis’s purchase of four hundred additional acres in 1695 from Collins’s daughter, Margaret Hugg, included what would become the village of Ellisburg,