Greenfield Hall: A Wedding Gift Beyond Compare

In Greenfield Hall’s family room—an area 19th-century Americans would have referred to as “the keeping room”—a leather fire bucket sits prominently on the mantle.

“This belonged to John Gill,” said Jean W. Lawes, administrative coordinator of the Historical Society of Haddonfield, the organization that calls Greenfield Hall home. “It is probably one of our most prized possessions.”

The engraved bucket is one of the few items in the home known to belong to John Gill IV, the man who built the mansion, but it is one of many fascinating antiques in this Kings Highway home. The home’s furnishings were provided by generous locals and reflect various periods of the town’s history.

The objects and curiosities provide a kind of peek back at how early South Jerseyans lived.

And through these antiques and personal relics, history comes alive.

The house, a mid-19th-century beauty in the middle of town, is filled with all kinds of treasure: Chippendale-style furniture, two-century-old ivory chess pieces made in China, girlish needlepoint samplers designed to hone sewing skills and impress would-be suitors, impressively tall grandfather clocks, hand-cut wooden puzzles from early in the 20th century and dainty dolls.

Greenfield Hall is the red brick Georgian mansion the widower Gill built as a wedding gift to bride Elizabeth French. Historians say the home echoed the design of French’s fine Moorestown’s residence.

This is the third home on the property, land given to John Gill I in the early 18th century by cousin Elizabeth Haddon Estaugh, the borough’s founder.

Observant visitors will see links to local history throughout the home. There is a needlepoint sampler by Sarah Jane Matlack, whose brother was a scribe of the Declaration of Independence. Matlack would marry John Middleton, whose family owned the land that later became the site of Haddonfield Memorial High School.

A Victorian parlor features a triangular-shaped, five-tiered, walnut whatnot shelf.

“The Victorians prided themselves on travel and leisure time,” said Lawes. “They loved to display the things they collected.”

The home is chockablock with interesting knickknacks. Visitors can eye a castor oil bottle from a local pharmacy, Willard’s Telephone Drugstore, so named because it featured a newfangled telephone. There is an odd Victoriana decorative arts piece composed of human hair.

Magnificent grandfather clocks still toll the time.

“It’s the most delightful heartbeat in the house to hear them ticking,” said Lawes. “It’s just lovely.”

Objects were made to last (the tiger maple banister), serve a purpose (the huge plantation doors that sealed in warmth and kept out cold) and delight (elaborately detailed doll houses and dolls).

Some pieces followed both form and function.

“Isn’t this lovely?” asked Lawes, showing off a sewing cabinet decorated (by decoupage, perhaps) with cherubs. “That’s sweet, isn’t it? Very sweet.”

Upstairs is an early gizmo with a mirror and extension attached to an exterior wall. The so-called “busy-body,” invented by Benjamin Franklin, functioned as a kind of early warning system to alert the homeowner to a visitor below.

“If someone knocks on your front door, you can see who’s there,” explained Lawes.

For more information about tours and hours of operation at Greenfield Hall and the Samuel Mickle House, see historicalsocietyofhaddonfield.org.

The nearly three-century old Mickle House, one of the borough’s oldest buildings, is now a historical research library.

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