Mullica Hill Historic Walking Tour

The Foundry That Turned Around

1857 · South Main & East Church Streets

Stop 10 of 13 · Core Loop · Old Town Hall Museum 5 min · Map · About 2 min read

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The shop building on this corner did something few buildings ever do. Rather than come down, it later went around: picked up, carried to the back of its lot, and rotated, so that the face which once greeted Main Street now greets Church Street.

Buildings in Mullica Hill do not get demolished easily. They get repositioned. An iron foundry and machine shop rose on this corner of South Main and East Church in the 1850s. One record credits it to Jacob Stratton and John Reece in 1857; another has Stratton raising the foundry a few years earlier still.

What no source disputes is what came next. On the first day of January 1868, the property passed to the partnership that gave the corner its name. Hoffman & Reece set about supplying the farm country around them: plows and cultivators, harrows and rakes, small castings of every kind, and iron railing, rod and cast, for the ornamental fences that dressed the village's front yards. In time Reece stepped back, and Jacob Hoffman carried the shop alone.

By 1882 the firm's own wheelwrighting and blacksmithing stood "in the centre of town", as the 1882 census of village trades put it, one entry in a list of a dozen-odd going concerns serving about four hundred people. And some of the foundry's iron may never have left the village. The cast panels that now form the altar rail at St. Stephen's are credited by parish tradition to this corner: iron poured here, standing in the chancel up North Main to this day.

This intersection has one more story under it. The frame church the Episcopalians raised on the north corner in 1813 was the township's second church. When their stone church went up on North Main in 1853, the old building passed out of holy use and ran down through the years, private school, then piggery, then demolition. The congregation's story is told at Stop N5 on the North Main extension.