Join us for our Annual Candlelight Dinner on Wednesday, March 22, at Il Villaggio restaurant, 211 Haddonfield-Berlin Road, Cherry Hill. Our featured speaker will be George Boudreau, PhD, a cultural historian and expert on the country’s founding era. Dr. Boudreau is a professor and author and the editor of Women in Washington’s World and A Material World: Culture, Society, and the Life of Things in Early Anglo-America, among many other works of history. His talk is titled “Balancing the Story: The Challenge of Telling the Lives of Women in George Washington’s World” For more, see his website.
Cocktails start at 6pm and dinner at 7pm. Dr. Boudreau’s program will begin at 8pm. Tickets ($90 for members, $100 for non-members) include dinner and must be ordered in advance.
Please join the Historical Society of Haddonfield, as we present C. Adrienne Rhodes and other members of the Preserving Black Haddonfield History Project (PBHHP) discussing their work on recording and preserving Haddonfield’s Black History. This collaboration with the Haddonfield Memorial High School and the Preserving Black Haddonfield Project Organizing Committee, a subgroup of the Haddonfield alumni society, aims to collect and share biographical stories of elder citizens’ experiences in Haddonfield.
Click here to register for this free virtual lecture!
From page 17 of Doug Rauschenberger and Kathy Tassini’s Lost Haddonfield: “This view down Chews Landing Road towards Barrington was probably taken near the center of the present day Oak Avenue in an area then referred to as Goat Hill. Taken about 1886, this photograph shows the agricultural appearance which predominated in the vicinity in the late 19th century.”
Join us for a free virtual program, on January 17th at 7:00pm, for “Garden State: Living Off the Land in 19th Century New Jersey.”
Explore the agricultural history of New Jersey and its profound influence on farming today. This program will use the museum’s extensive collection of farming-related tools to bring to life this key aspect of New Jersey’s history. It also looks at what it was like to live and work on a 19th-century New Jersey farm.
Our presenter, Danielle Crigler, is a 21st-century educator with 8 years of social studies experience in urban and suburban schools. She has her master’s in Curriculum Development and has been the Curator of Education with the Museum of Early Trades & Crafts since 2021.
Sign up here to register and receive links to the program.
Early agricultural tools—including scythes and pitchforks—from the HSH museum collection. Photograph courtesy of Mike Underwood.
Ox yokes and collars from the HSH museum collection. Photograph courtesy of Mike Underwood.
Long before Borough Hall, the State Archives or even Facebook gathered details on people’s daily lives, one’s church might be the only place making note of your birth, death, and milestones in between. The history held by these churches is a treasure, but a buried one. These houses of worship were designed to serve their congregants and a religious purpose, not the needs of academics and others searching for illumination of the past. Five years ago, Carol Smith and the Christ Church Preservation Trust undertook to unearth these treasures, hold them up to the light and place them where all could see it. She’ll recount these efforts and some of the stories discovered in her upcoming talk: “Preserving the Past: Stories from the Records of Philadelphia’s Historic Congregations.”
Philadelphia is especially rich in this history. Pennsylvania’s early principles of religious tolerance made it a welcome home to some of the oldest and most diverse congregations in the United States. Christ Church, St. George’s Methodist Church, Gloria Dei, Mikveh Israel, African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas, Episcopal Dioceses Archives, Presbyterian Historical Society, St. Peter’s Episcopal Church and American Baptist Historical Society all participated in “Digitizing the Records of Philadelphia’s Historic Congregations: Providing Documentation for the Political, Social and Cultural Developments in Philadelphia.” After countless hours of digitizing and transcribing, the 18th and 19th Century records from these institutions and more are in a form that is easily accessible and preserved. The stories revealed are often more than just basic facts. There are hints to financial and social status of members, and church histories of missionary work give clues to indigenous cultures that might otherwise have never been recorded.
Carol is familiar to many in the Historical Society. After arriving in Haddonfield in 1990, her particular set of skills was quickly enlisted to assist the Society as Vice President and President, and she now chairs the Development Committee. She received a BA in American Civilization and a Masters in Material Culture from the University of Pennsylvania. An independent curator and certified Archivist, in 2005 she began her work with the archives at historic Christ Church. That led to this ambitious project in conjunction with the Philadelphia Athenaeum, and in 2022 she received the Sister M. Claude Lane award from the Society of American Archivists for her work.
