North Main Extension

The Union Store

1866 · 46 North Main Street

Extension stop N3 of 5 · Old Town Hall Museum 11 min · Map · About 2 min read

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

This former cooperative store helped turn Mullica Hill into an antiques destination.

The unpaved north end of Main Street in deep tree shade, the store's awning and porch at left and a pump at the corner. — The Union Store on North Main Street, about 1900.

The Union Store Company was a cooperative, organized early in 1866, and it began in borrowed quarters. By May of that first year it had moved into what one 1883 account called a "large and commodious store-house" of its own: this building, the only store north of the creek. The founding corner was North Main and Woodland Avenue; the new store stood at 46 North Main. The company grew into one of the village's leading merchants, the commercial anchor of a north end that otherwise stayed residential, and the building still reads as the fine 19th-century store it was.

Its civic weight lasted decades. At the turn of the century the company still answered to its local stockholders at an annual meeting. And when a farm went under the auctioneer's hammer, the legal notices set the sale "in front of Union Store", the north end's public square in all but name.

A boxy delivery truck lettered J. A. Crane General Merchandise, Mullica Hill, N.J., parked before the store porch, the signs above offering oils, greases, auto tires, and gasoline at eleven cents. — J. A. Crane General Merchandise, the store's delivery truck lettered Mullica Hill, N.J. at the curb, and the porch signs offering oils, greases, auto tires, and gasoline at eleven cents.

A woman in a long white dress holds a horse hitched to a covered delivery wagon on an unpaved street, store signs on the porch behind. — A delivery wagon near J. A. Crane's store on North Main Street.

By the Second World War the store belonged to C. C. Estilow, who kept the country-store tradition going on this side of town. Estilow filled his front window with a wartime collage, the faces of Mullica Hill's own servicemen gathered photograph by photograph from their families, and the display stayed in the window until the war ended. Anyone passing this corner could stop and find the town's sons.

The store years wound down after the war, and for a while the building took everyday work: a restaurant in the 1950s, a Head Start classroom in the 1960s. Then came another use. Hill Creek House, an antiques shop, opened in the old store in the late 1960s, and the trade that followed remade the village. The National Register nomination counts the arithmetic: one antique shop in 1967, four by 1970, eighteen by 1977, more than eighty-five by the district's listing in 1991. The antiques trade taught the town to see its own architecture again, and every stop on this tour owes something to what started behind these windows.

The tall gabled store painted in two colors, Kings Row Antiques signed over the porch and a vertical Antiques sign beside its display windows. — The former Union Store during its Kings Row Antiques years.

Antiques took hold here

The Society's museum shop and the village's antique dealers are open most weekends; the Old Mill Antique Mall at the north end of the loop has been in business since 1967.

Eat and shop guide →