Mullica Hill Historic Walking Tour

The Stratton House

1848 · 39 South Main Street

Stop 12 of 13 · Core Loop · Old Town Hall Museum 3 min · Map · About 2 min read

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A Mullica Hill man kept the bullet that took his leg, and in his later years he showed it to the town's children from this porch.

Edward L. Stratton, elder son of Congressman Nathan T. Stratton, went to war in 1862 as a captain of the 12th New Jersey Volunteers. Chancellorsville, in May 1863, sent him home: a minié ball shattered his right leg, and the surgeons took the leg off. Stratton asked for the bullet, and he never let it go.

The Army was not finished with him; 1865 brought him brevets as major and as lieutenant colonel, the citations reading gallant and meritorious service. His family paid the war a second price. His younger brother James, a lieutenant in the same regiment's Company F, was killed at Ream's Station, Virginia, in August 1864, still short of his twenty-first birthday. A fellow officer's tribute survives in the county's 1883 history: "The example of loyalty, of bravery, of an intelligent and dignified manhood which he has left will not soon be forgotten."

Edward took up life in this house and kept it for half a century, until his death in 1915. The house was worth coming home to.

The historic district inventory dates it to 1848, enlarged in 1867, and lingers over the materials: dark red Philadelphia brick laid with fine butter joints, iron porch columns, a widow's walk riding the hip roof. Neighbors remembered the Captain on the porch below it, producing the flattened ball for the town's children, his whole war in the palm of one hand.

Nor did he retire from the town. When Mullica Hill organized its modern fire company in 1904, the meeting at the Town Hall put Captain Stratton in the chair, and when the county's 1883 history needed a chapter on the Baptist church down the street, Stratton wrote it. The brothers rest today behind that church at Stop 6, the one who came home and the one who did not, a few hundred yards from this porch.