In 1920, the township faced a choice: widen Woodstown Road into the corner of the Old Town Hall, or move the building. They moved it. The whole structure was lifted off its foundation and set back to where it stands today. It was forty-nine years old that summer, and it was already the second life of an idea that had begun with five-dollar shares.
In the spring of 1871, a group of Mullica Hill citizens had organized a private stock company called the Town Hall Association to fund a public meeting hall for the village. Stock sold at five dollars a share. Joseph Jessup supplied the oak frame lumber. Isaac Stevenson supplied the cedar siding. Thomas L. Sharp built the building. Total cost ran between thirty-five hundred and four thousand dollars. The Township of Harrison paid five hundred dollars for shares to gain election and town meeting rights on the second floor. Twelve years later, on March 24, 1883, the Township bought out the stockholders entirely and the Town Hall finally became municipal property.
The hall had a wider life than government meetings. Graduations happened on its second floor. So did dances and lectures and theatrical entertainments. In 1926, Stark Brothers Nursery of St. Louis came here for the celebration of the discovery of the Starking apple, a red sport that had been found growing on a tree of green apples on a farm a few miles south in Ferrell. Stark Brothers later propagated the variety into one of the dominant commercial apples of the twentieth century. They could have held the ceremony anywhere. They chose this room. The Harrison Township Historical Society has occupied the building since 1971 and was founded that year specifically to preserve it. Inside the museum is the ceremonial Senate gavel of State Senator George Washington French Gaunt, gift of his daughter-in-law Marion.
