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.

Documenting Our Dead

Over the past three years, as a result of a number of project assignments, Hunter Research has been developing a new specialty in cemetery recordation.  This expertise has grown out of two challenging endeavors completed for the Greater New Jersey Conference of the United Methodist Church.  This work entailed researching and field-inventorying seven “orphan” Methodist cemeteries scattered across New Jersey and resulted in the creation of a cemetery-specific geographic information system (CGIS) for each burial ground.  The CGIS allows users to identify through an interactive map the locations of memorialized individuals within a cemetery.  Also accessible through the CGIS are photographs of grave markers and monuments linked to the memorialized individuals and relevant web links to www.findagrave.com.  The CGIS is a tool of immense potential benefit to cemetery managers and persons intent on pinpointing the whereabouts of a particular memorialized individual, be they relatives, friends, researchers or the merely curious.  We are presently applying this same methodology in a study of the Pennington African Cemetery in Pennington, New Jersey.