Children’s Summer Home of Cinnaminson

In late 2018, Hunter Research was contacted by Moorestown Ecumenical Neighborhood Development, Inc. (MEND, Inc.), as lead developer for federal, state and county government sponsors, to assist with historic preservation compliance related to a project to build an assisted senior living facility on the location of the former Children’s Summer Home of Cinnaminson. Specifically, Hunter Research was brought in to fulfill requirements of Section 106 and a Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) with the New Jersey Historic Preservation Office (NJHPO) to mitigate demolition of the rambling late-Victorian summer home, which had been abandoned for nearly a decade. The firm’s architectural historians documented the building to the standards of the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), created a historic marker and interpretive sign and completed a historic context study of children’s summer retreats in New Jersey.

The Children’s Summer Home of Cinnaminson was established in 1897 by the Westfield Friends Meeting to provide underprivileged children of Philadelphia with a reprieve from summer heat, pollution and disease. It was part of a nationwide reform effort known as the Fresh Air Movement, which gave city children opportunities to experience the outdoors, while usually also receiving religious or moral instruction from sponsors.

Hunter Research conducted HABS Level III archival research and photo-documented the summer home prior to demolition. The HABS content was then used to prepare a traditional historic roadside cast-metal marker and an interpretive sign for placement in the lobby of the new assisted senior living facility. Hunter Research managed sign development and fabrication steps, as well as handled approvals and coordination with the NJHPO and the building contractor.

As a capstone work product completed in 2020, Hunter Research produced an in-depth historic context study of New Jersey summer homes and camps. Research revealed that the Garden State’s proximity to New York City and Philadelphia fostered many types of country and seashore retreats. Summer homes reached their height of popularity during the Progressive Era and reflected the charitable efforts of the wealthy elite and religious communities to offer children “wholesome” domestic environments in which to breath clean air and eat fresh foods. Summer camps had more of an outdoor recreational emphasis than the homes and have tended to remain economically viable until recent times. Hunter Research’s historians identified nearly 50 children’s summer retreats established between 1870 and 1920 and described their significant historical and architectural characteristics. Future researchers may use the study’s data and recommendations, which were reviewed and approved by NJHPO, to assess eligibility of summer homes and camps for the New Jersey and National Registers of Historic Places.

Waln's Mill - Chapter Closed

Waln’s Mill, tucked away on Crosswicks Creek in Upper Freehold Township, Monmouth County, New Jersey, is one of the best-preserved and best-interpreted historic mill sites in the Delaware Valley.   The gristmill and the fine Waln family mansion, built in 1774, are the highlights of the historically evocative, County-owned and managed village of Walnford set within a 36-acre tract of timeless countryside.

Restored with painstaking care in the mid-1990s, the mill building contains a remarkable array of late 19th and early 20th-century mill machinery and grist-milling equipment, some of which can be run today using electrical power.  To understand how water-powered gristmills were designed and worked, there are few better places to tour than Waln’s Mill.

Hunter Research conducted archaeological investigations at Waln’s Mill in the mid-1990s in conjunction with the mill restoration program with funding support from the Monmouth County Park System and the New Jersey Historic Trust.  This work built on excavations conducted more than a decade prior by well-known New Jersey archaeologist, Budd Wilson.  Final reporting of both the Hunter Research and Wilson explorations languished until 2019 when funding for report completion was made available by the Friends of the Monmouth County Park System.

A comprehensive report now details the history and archaeology of this fascinating mill site, which has its origins in the mid-1730s and involved three different gristmill buildings (two of them destroyed by fire), a fulling mill and a sawmill.   This note is titled “chapter closed,” rather than “book closed,” since the archaeology of Waln’s Mill is still not fully understood and the location of the original 18th-century mill still remains to be pinpointed.

Even in the most redeveloped urban landscape...

As seen from Route 29 running alongside the Delaware River, the downtown Trenton skyline is changing quite a bit these days.  The cluster of State office buildings on South Warren Street, dominated by the Hughes Justice Complex, is being supplemented by the ongoing construction of a new Taxation Building directly in front of the Labor & Industry Building on John Fitch Way. 

Remarkably, prior to construction, some fairly substantial traces of Native American occupation were found on the site of the new Taxation Building.  Several pits and hearths and numerous artifacts, dating mostly from 400 to 700 years ago, were documented by a Hunter Research archaeological team working over the winter of 2018-2019.

This location, on a floodplain terrace at the mouth of Assunpink Creek, would have been a choice spot in the landscape for local Lenape inhabitants and their forebears, and ample evidence of a sprawling Indian presence once existed here.  Now largely destroyed by urban development, occasional pockets of intact archaeological remains still survive – one such pocket was sampled right there in what used to the forecourt of the Labor & Industry Building.