Soon after the brick meeting house was completed in 1808, a great wind came through Mullica Hill and leveled one gable end of the new building to the ground. The detail comes down to us through a paper read in 1897 by Hope L. Moore, who lived at the right time and place to know what the older Friends remembered. The Quakers rebuilt the gable. They had been gathering on this lot since 1797, holding trial First-day worship in a schoolhouse that stood on land Jacob Spicer had set aside in his 1779 will for a Quaker meeting house and a burying ground. They had organized formally as Woolwich Preparative Meeting under Pilesgrove on the seventeenth day of the eleventh month of 1800. Eight years later they had finally raised the brick walls in front of you, and then the wind came.
They rebuilt and continued. In 1928, when Pilesgrove Monthly Meeting was dissolved, Woolwich Preparative Meeting became Mullica Hill Monthly Meeting. The same body still gathers in the same building today, affiliated now with Salem Quarterly Meeting and Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. The trial worship that began in the schoolhouse in 1797 has not been broken.
The burial ground beside the meeting house is older than the brick. It holds generations of Mullica Hill Friends. State Senator George Washington French Gaunt is buried here under the largest tombstone in the cemetery. He died in 1918 of injuries from his volunteer firefighter service in the village. His daughter-in-law Marion, who outlived him by seventy-six years and ran a sewing factory out of his old house up the street, lies beside him. The meeting belongs in the South Jersey Quaker antislavery tradition; specific Underground Railroad activity at this site has not been documented in archival records, but the families who gathered around the silent worship were part of the regional movement to end the practice.
