This house belonged to Senator George F. Gaunt, and the public career Mullica Hill remembers him for was built out of these walls for the second half of his life. His sphere was agriculture. He served sixteen years as Master of the New Jersey State Grange, the agricultural fraternity that organized farmers across the state, and in those years grew its membership from three thousand to twenty-five thousand. The National Grange named him its Lecturer and gave him its highest honorary degree, High Priest of Demeter. He sat on the New Jersey State Board of Agriculture in a county that was running on tomatoes, sweet potatoes, asparagus, and apples. The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia elected him to its board. His political career ran in parallel. He served three terms in the New Jersey Senate, was elected its President, and acted as Governor of New Jersey in 1916. None of it took him out of this village. He stayed a volunteer firefighter at home.
In 1916, the fire bell rang in Mullica Hill, and George Gaunt grabbed his coat and ran toward it the way any volunteer would. He never recovered. He passed away two years later, in September of 1918, at age fifty-two. A sitting state senator, the past President of the New Jersey Senate, a man who had served as acting Governor of New Jersey, died at home of injuries taken fighting a village fire.
After the Senator's death, his son and his daughter-in-law Marion inherited the house. When the Depression closed in, Marion went up to the attic with a sewing machine and started cutting fabric on the third floor while the country came apart below. Look up at the top story of the house. The original two arched windows are gone. Marion had them rebuilt as three larger openings, because she needed the light to sew. By the early 1940s she had a wartime contract and had outgrown the attic, and the operation expanded down the block into the Gaunt Store buildings. People in the village came to know her simply as Mrs. Gaunt. Marion outlived her father-in-law by seventy-six years. She died in 1994 at age ninety-six and is buried beside him in the Friends Burial Ground you just walked past. Before her death she carried the Senator's ceremonial Senate gavel down to the Old Town Hall museum where this tour began. The Gaunts kept this house for more than a hundred and twenty years. It changed hands outside the family for the first time in 2022. As you continue walking, look at the Church Street side of the building. The carriage step the Senator used to climb into a coach is still set in the grass between the sidewalk and the curb.
