Glover Fulling Mill & Kings Run

In the McLaughlin-Norcross Dell area of Camden County Park, steep slopes shaped by King’s Run reflect a landscape used since the Colonial period, when the navigable waterway served as the area’s first transportation route during the 17th century beginnings of European settlement in West Jersey. A brick and stone fulling mill stood there until the 1920s, on the opposite side of the stream behind the Dell stage. Built by John Glover in 1773-76, the mill used a dam and a headrace to direct water from King’s Run onto a waterwheel, whose motion powered wooden hammers that beat cloth in a water-filled trough to clean it and thicken it by controlled shrinking. After fulling and dyeing, cloth was stretched in open fields to dry evenly and squarely, and a tail race returned the water to King’s Run. Betsy Ross was a customer, and tradition holds that fabric for the American flag was processed there. Fire destroyed the mill in 1822, but it was rebuilt later that year. By the second half of the 19th century, steam-powered textile mills of the industrial revolution had overtaken cloth manufacture, and after the Civil War the mill passed out of production. The property was sold to the Borough of Haddon Heights in 1911, and although the mill was soon torn down, portions of the tail race, dam embankments, and mill foundation survive, while the stream’s present course reflects the old dam’s location. Nearby was also the site of a Revolutionary War skirmish with British General Cornwallis after the Battle of Red Bank in 1777, and a cannonball found during the Works Progress Administration’s creation of Camden County Park in 1937 is now at the Haddon Heights Library.

Haddon Heights, New Jersey · United States