In 1844, citizens of what would become Harrison Township met inside what was then the Eagle Hotel and decided to organize themselves as a township. The first sessions of the Harrison Township Committee took place in this room. The civic life of the place was assembled at a tavern table before there was a Town Hall down the street.
The hotel itself was already old by 1844. The southern half of the village was historically called Spicerville, and in 1772 Captain John Cozens had opened a tavern at this location, four years before the United States declared its independence. The Harrison Township Historical Society treats Cozens's tavern as the institutional ancestor of the building beside you. Twenty-seven years after the township meetings inside its walls, the new Town Hall opened up the street, and government business moved out of the hotel for good. The hotel kept going. A real estate sale was advertised "at the Eagle hotel, in Mullica Hill" in September of 1894, the cleanest period attestation of the building's name to surface in surviving records.
The structure you see is the result of nineteenth-century construction in stages: three stories, five bays, a double-fronted facade, and a concave mansard roof with bracketed gabled dormers above. The aluminum siding was added much later. By the late twentieth century the hotel function had ended and the building had been adapted to other uses. The 1991 National Register inventory lists the resource simply as the "Old Hotel," still standing on the east side of South Main where the old Spicerville section meets the rest of the village.
