The High Street Spur

1909 and 1919 · Up High Street, a drive rather than a walk

Off the route · A drive rather than a walk · Map · About 2 min read

On High Street, west of the brick row, a church and a school tell two parts of the history of Mullica Hill's Black community.

Mullica Hill's African American congregation organized itself years before it had walls. Services met in family parlors, and then in Old Town Hall, the very building where this tour began; in November 1908 the county paper noted a debate staged in the town hall "for the benefit of the Mount Calvary Colored Church," the building fund at work a year before ground broke.

The cornerstone went down on High Street in 1909, the first church built by Black residents of Mullica Hill. Its site on the rise put members in mind of Calvary, and Mount Calvary became its name.

The 1909 sanctuary did its work for sixty-seven years; the church that stands today replaced it in 1976.

A 1954 photograph of the congregation, not shown here, records the families who filled it, the Banks, Clark, Coleman, Gaines, Harris, Hill, Jackson, McCree, Thompson, and Washington families among them; some of those families were part of the founding itself.

The school stood farther along the street. High Street School taught Mullica Hill's Black children for three decades beginning in 1919, and the tradition handed down in town is that the neighborhood school existed because Black citizens asked for it, to open teaching positions to Black teachers; the one-room schools out in the countryside stayed integrated. Consolidation ended the school in 1950. The building was sold off, worked as a farm building for years, and came down in the 1990s. The church remains. The school survives in photographs and in the families who learned there.