Mullica Hill Historic Walking Tour

The Brick Row

1771 · South Main at High Street

Stop 3 of 13 · Core Loop · Old Town Hall Museum 4 min · Map · About 2 min read

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These brick houses are in the earliest picture anyone has found of Mullica Hill, a wood engraving cut in 1844. By then the center house was already seventy-three years old.

The center house went up in 1771. Its neighbors followed in 1811 and about 1830, and the National Register survey counts the trio among the district's noteworthy Federal-style examples, right down to the 19th-century privy that still hides behind the center house. Set the photograph from around 1900 against the row today and the game is finding any difference at all. A landmark, and it has earned the word the honest way: by simply not changing.

The brick houses themselves were homes. The working life of this corner ran next door, in the separate corner store beside the row at 46 South Main.

Into the early twentieth century that store belonged to E. C. Bunning, whose old-line country store anchored commerce at this end of the village. C. C. Estilow's store did the same at the north end, and the two men held to a gentleman's understanding, each keeping to his own end of town. When the village organized its modern fire company in 1904, Ed Bunning's name was on the incorporation papers.

Then, in the late 1940s, the old order at the corner ended in glass and steel. "Izzy" Lees and "Smiles" Kaplan took over Bunning's store and gave it a front the township had never seen: glass block and shining stainless steel, wrapped around the first self-service shopping Mullica Hill ever had. L&K Market announced a new era at the counter, and in its turn gave way to the supermarkets that outgrew the village entirely.