Saddlertown

Joshua Saddler, reputed to have been a Maryland fugitive slave whom Quaker Josiah Evans helped gain freedom, appears in confirmed records by 1834 as a free person of color living with his family in the community. On May 3, 1842, Joshua Saddler bought five acres in Haddon Township, then Newton Township in Gloucester County, New Jersey, from the estate of John Rowand for two hundred dollars, and the tract became known as Saddlertown. Joshua and his wife Hannah lived there for the rest of their lives, as did many of their eleven children; Hannah died there on September 12, 1877, and Joshua died on January 15, 1880. In a will proved on February 5, 1880, Joshua expressed his wish that the land remain in family hands and warned against wasting it by cutting its timber. On August 22, 1892, Haddonfield Quakers Charles and Beulah M. Rhoads bought part of Joshua Saddler's original five-acre property from his grandson Jefferson Fisher, Jr., and built a combined church and school for Saddlertown residents, completed in 1893; its eight founding members were Robert Hankinson, Elizabeth Hankinson, Joseph Hankinson, Jefferson Fisher, Jr., Mary Ann Fisher, Moses Cornelius, Margaret Fussell, and Isaac Saddler, and it is now called Rhoads Temple United Methodist Church. Children attended school on the church's first floor from 1893 until 1912, when the Haddon Township Board of Education erected a new one-room schoolhouse on land bought from the estate of Aaron Stoy. The community expanded again in 1899 when Dr. Lawrence L. Glover bought land from Sarah Elizabeth Hunt and added eighteen building lots to the tract. Saddlertown also included the Saddlertown Summer Rest Cottage, founded in 1893–94 by Isabel M. Shipley of Camden, New Jersey, as a summer home for aged and infirm colored people; for at least twenty years she reportedly cared for two hundred people.

Westmont, New Jersey · United States