The Jail on the Corner

North Main at Arbour Lane

Waypoint F · On the way · Old Town Hall Museum 10 min · Map · About 2 min read

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There is nothing on this corner but grass. That is exactly why it is on the walk: what stood here kept getting stranger.

The derelict narrow frame building with a bracketed storefront cornice, standing over a raised stone basement; a man stands at the open basement door on the side street. — The little building on the jail corner near its end. A man stands at the basement door on the Union Street side; village memory puts the jail in that stone cellar.

The National Register file for the historic district is blunt about the ground: this corner is the site of the original Mullica Hill jail. Village memory in the Society goes smaller and more particular: the jail was the stone basement of the little frame building in these photographs, it saw little use, and what use it saw was mostly disorderly drunks sleeping it off. The old county papers fit that picture from the other side. When a Mullica Hill constable made a serious arrest, the news items show him landing his prisoner in the county jail at Woodbury. Whatever this cellar held was not the county's business.

The small storefront with a hanging Antiques sign beside the window, older cars parked across the street and a masonry garage beside it. — The hanging ANTIQUES sign over the porch. The first word on the sign is too faded to read with certainty.

By 1933 the insurance men who mapped the village marked the building as a plain dwelling over a basement, and the corner around it had gone automotive, gasoline tanks at the curb and a repair garage behind. Then, in years the photographs catch but do not date, a hanging sign appeared over the porch: ANTIQUES.

That sign is why these photographs matter. The same National Register file dates Mullica Hill's first antique shop to 1967, the start of the trade that remade Main Street. Whether this sign hung earlier is an open question: no record of the shop has been found, the first word on the sign is too faded to read with certainty, and the photographs themselves are not firmly dated.

The frame building seen from the side street, a street sign reading Union St. and N. Main St. in front of its storefront corner. — The corner from the side street, the street sign reading Union St. and N. Main St. The same street is Arbour Lane today.

The census of 1950 puts the Hutton family at this corner, in the old house that still faces the empty lot from across the side street; the Register survey calls it the Hutton House. The little building beside them did not last. It came down sometime after these photographs, a gas station took the lot, and then the gas station went too. The corner that held the jail and an antiques sign now holds nothing but this story.

Did You Know

The side street at this corner has worn three names: German Street on the 1933 insurance map, Union Street when these photographs were taken, and Arbour Lane today.