The School That Moved

24 and 26 Woodstown Road

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

Start anywhere. Follow the next-stop button to keep exploring.

In 1908 this lot needed room for a new school, and the old one refused to die. It was hauled across Woodstown Road, remade as a double house at numbers 24 and 26, and handed over to family life. People live inside the old school today.

The two-story schoolhouse with twin front doors and a bell cupola centered on its roof. — The 1855 Union Academy schoolhouse, later moved across Woodstown Road and converted into a double house.

The school that crossed the road was far from the first one here. Quakers built a log school on this lot around 1720, among the earliest anywhere in Gloucester County. Two more buildings came and went before the lot got its lasting name in 1824, when Union Academy opened here as a public school. The two-story school that later crossed the road arrived in 1855.

The 1908 project was village news all spring: the county paper reported six contractors' bids opened that May while examinations wound down in the old academy. The Colonial Revival school they raised, stuccoed brick under a hipped roof with a Palladian window in its front gable, is the sixth schoolhouse on the lot.

The lot also holds one of the town's proudest mornings. Company A was Gloucester County's first company into the Union army, and on April 30, 1861 it marched up from Woodbury to be received here at the Academy.

That afternoon three young women of the village stepped forward with a flag the town's women had sewn and gave it to the company. They were Helen Coats, Sue Batten, and Lucretia Stratton, the former congressman's daughter. The survivors carried that flag's honor through the war's great battles and stood at Appomattox for the surrender before they saw this lot again.

An American flag with battle names painted across its stripes, Springfield Station to Cold Harbor. — The flag of Company A, 3rd Regiment, First New Jersey Volunteers, made by the women of Mullica Hill, its battle honors painted onto the stripes.

About forty veterans and their wives posed on a lawn before a porch, the women seated in long white dresses. — Company A's veterans and their wives, photographed at Dr. James Wamsley's home on September 14, 1909. Their enlistment lay forty-eight years behind them.

School consolidation in 1950 left the 1908 building hunting for work, and it found plenty: a sewing factory, a lodge hall, a warehouse, even a boat works. In 1969 Friends School of Mullica Hill brought lessons back into it, and the building served students for decades more.

The square two-story stuccoed school under a hipped roof, an arched window in its front gable and a cupola on top. — The New Union Academy of 1908, the sixth schoolhouse on the lot, and home of Friends School for decades after 1969.