This building is where Harrison Township began. In 1844, a group of citizens of what would become Harrison Township met inside what was then the Eagle Hotel and voted to organize themselves as a township. The first sessions of the Harrison Township Committee were held in this building. The Old Town Hall down the street where this tour started did not yet exist. Civic life in this place was assembled at a tavern table here before it was assembled anywhere else.
The tavern was already old by 1844. Four years before the United States declared independence, a man named Captain John Cozens opened an inn at this exact spot. That was 1772. Cozens's tavern was one of two in town where stagecoach travelers ate, slept, watered their horses, and picked up news from Philadelphia. For three quarters of a century, it served as the public room of Mullica Hill. People did business in it. They argued politics in it. They sat together long enough that in 1844 they decided to organize themselves into a township, and they did it in the same room they had been gathering in for decades.
The structure you see is the result of nineteenth-century renovation in stages: three stories, five bays, a double-fronted facade, a concave mansard roof with bracketed gabled dormers above. The aluminum siding came much later. The hotel closed before the mid-twentieth century, and the building was converted to apartments. In 1991 the National Register listing for the village's historic district described it simply as the "Old Hotel." Still standing on the east side of South Main, it is the only building on this walking tour older than the United States, and the building where the first sessions of the Harrison Township Committee were held.
