State Senator George Washington French Gaunt was a volunteer firefighter in his hometown of Mullica Hill, fifty-two years old in 1918, having served as President of the New Jersey Senate and having acted as Governor of New Jersey two years earlier, in 1916. There was a fire, and he ran toward it the way a neighbor does, and the injuries he took fighting it killed him here at home in September of that year. The house his name is on is the one you are standing in front of now.
The Senator's son inherited the house with his wife Marion, and a generation later, when the country fell into the Depression, Marion climbed the stairs of this house to the attic with a sewing machine. She started cutting fabric on the third floor while the world came apart below. Her work survived the Thirties. By the early 1940s she had a wartime contract and had outgrown the attic, expanding into the Gaunt Store buildings just down the block. People remembered her simply as Mrs. Gaunt. Petrina Ochipinti, who passed in 2014, had worked at the Gaunt and Bendinger sewing factory for fifty-two years.
Marion Gaunt outlived her father-in-law by seventy-six years. She died in 1994 at age ninety-six and was buried beside him in the Friends Burial Ground you just walked past. Before her death, she gave the Senator's ceremonial Senate gavel to the Harrison Township Historical Society. It sits today in a case at the Old Town Hall museum down the street, where the tour began. The Senator's name is on the National Register listing for this house. His daughter-in-law's quieter enterprise is what carried his absence.
