North Main Extension

Mullica House

Early 1700s · 20 North Main Street

Extension stop N1 of 5 · Old Town Hall Museum 9 min · Map · About 2 min read

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This small house carries the family name that spread to the whole village.

The record begins with a survey. On April 16, 1705, a deputy surveyor for the Province of West Jersey laid out roughly 242 acres beside the north branch of Raccoon Creek to one settler. The paperwork calls him "Erik Mulliker." Eric Mullica, born in April 1636 and raised in Sweden's Finnish emigrant community, was nearly seventy by then. William and John Mullica took up land along the same bank, and neighbors began calling the rise above the water Mullica's Hill. The family belonged to the Finnish and Swedish settlement of this valley, and within a few generations that culture had faded from the neighborhood almost entirely.

What outlasted it was a name and a building. The sturdy little dwelling in front of you, credited to the early 18th century and to William Mullica, is held to be the oldest structure standing in Old Harrison Township. Look at how low the front sits: the historic district survey records that when the modern bridge went in, the regraded road partly buried the lower front of the house. The ground came up. The house held on.

Eric himself slips out of the record as quietly as he entered it. The family's 1930 historian searched for a will, an estate, a grave, and found none; village tradition, in print since the 1840s, filled the silence by insisting he lived to one hundred. Legend gives him a century. The record gives him a hill.

For decades the name belonged only to this bank, while the Quaker settlement south of the creek answered to Spicerville. Eventually the creek stopped dividing the names, and the whole village became Mullica Hill.