Haddonfield, northwestern Gloucester County's market town, stood at the crossing of the region's main highways, drawing travelers to its three taverns and customers to its shops and craftsmen, while the market house, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, coopers, tanners, and the grain, saw, and fulling mills on Cooper’s Creek made it a busy community on the eve of the Revolution. Most residents belonged to the Religious Society of Friends, a determined pacifist sect, but their convictions did not spare the town from war. Haddonfield served as the normal rendezvous for the South Jersey militia, and during the British occupation of Philadelphia, from September 1777 until April 5, 1778, American troops garrisoned the town. Enemy forces occupied Haddonfield on October 21, 1777, and again in late February 1778; British light infantry raided it on April 5, 1778, and Loyalist soldiers on May 9. From June 18 to 20, an army of 21,000 persons flooded Haddonfield as the British marched from Philadelphia to New York, robbing houses, gardens, hen houses, and barns while thousands of horses consumed crops, and militia units continued to pass through the town into 1783. Residents endured the presence of English, Welsh, Scots, Irish, German, and Loyalist enemy soldiers, while the rebel militias and Continental units were largely of European descent, though the 2nd New Jersey regiment included two Native Americans and one man of mixed race, and the 1st and 2nd Rhode Island regiments that marched through on the way to Fort Mercer included about 60 men of African American and Native American ancestry.