For the second time since 1928, the heavy rumble of trolley wheels echoed down Main Street on Halloween night for the Historical Society of Moorestown’s annual autumn ghost tours.
“While our traditional walking tours have successfully engaged the public, they are limited by physical accessibility,” said Linda Vizi, president of the Historical Society of Moorestown. “The new trolley seamlessly connects our downtown to vital historic sites. This is a powerful educational outreach experience that preserves our deep roots and ensures the stories of those who built this town are never forgotten.”
The 28-passenger trolley expanded the society’s storytelling capacity beyond the geographic constraints of the walking tours, connecting downtown to historic sites like Stokes Hill, the 1770 Commodore Truxtun House and the shadowy 1742 Thomas Cowperthwaite House. The Cowperthwaite House stands as a powerful monument to the Revolutionary War’s toll on local families. Because so many residents remained loyal to the Crown, dozens of families were forced into a heartbreaking exile in Canada, according to the historical society. After Captain Hugh Cowperthwaite, Jr. – the son of prominent Quaker Thomas Cowperthwaite’s brother Hugh – was banished for his loyalty, it took centuries for his descendants to finally return to Moorestown, standing on the very porch where their ancestors founded the town in 1682.
“You’re brought back into time,” said Gary Ell, trustee of the Historical Society of Moorestown. “You’re part of the tour and it brings you back in a really fun way to engage and learn history in a more interactive way as opposed to just listening to a lecture.”
The Oct. 9 trolley tour featured a special appearance by award-winning journalist and Moorestown native Annie McCormick, who discussed the plot of her book with the evening’s special guests. McCormick is the author of “Restless Ghosts: Murder, Suicide, and the Case That Wouldn’t Stay Buried,” a true story about a century-old mystery. Inside a Moorestown mansion two socialites – Ruth Wilson and her former fiancé Horace “Reds” Roberts Jr. – are discovered clinging to life after suffering gunshot wounds to the head. Chief of Burlington County Detectives Ellis Parker decides it’s a case of unrequited love with Roberts Jr. pulling the fatal trigger, but Roberts Jr. has multiple gunshot wounds to the head. Bradway Brown, a childhood friend who grew up a block away, hints that he knows the truth. More than three years later, Brown himself is murdered at his home. Parker, dubbed America’s Sherlock Holmes, is drawn into a second investigation that unravels the first.
Every tour featured something different, opening the vault to Moorestown’s past and giving people a chance to learn a fact or two about the place they call home. It was all done in a such a fun way with live actors and vivid narrations, Vizi noted, and the plus is that the backdrop is authentic. There is no stage and there are no props being used, making way for real stories to be told through the lens of people who know them and who have studied some of Moorestown’s most prominent figures.
The tours themselves followed not just a timeline, Ell added, but a Quaker timeline. The Quakers arrived in (Burlington County) in 1677 and they are all about the fight for equality which never ends, so the ghost tours chronicled a quest for this idea of establishing a society built on total equality. The entire tour followed a quasi-timeline spanning three centuries, from 1677 to the death of Alice Paul in 1977. The members of the historical society are always learning about the township’s earliest beginnings and what they learn, they want to share because that’s the goal, Ell said, to provide that outreach to the public. The tours were just one of the meaningful ways that the historical society can do that.
On Oct. 23rd and 24th, the History & Ghosts Walking Tours recognized a chilling anniversary. On that very week in history, Moorestown’s own Alice Paul was sentenced to a frighteningly grim jail Workhouse – a fateful moment that triggered the infamous and brutal “Night of Terror.” On the evening of Nov. 14, 1917, William H. Whittaker, then superintendent at the Occoquan Workhouse, a prison in Virginia, ordered his guards to brutally assault imprisoned suffragists. The following day, about 20 women were subjected to beatings and torture. This “Night of Terror” galvanized support for the women’s suffrage movement at a critical moment. Some prisoners were left for dead after the beatings, after being arrested for peacefully picketing for universal suffrage in front of the White House. To mark this exact historical turning point, the veil between 1917 and the present will be torn wide open.
“Our tours (began) with the indigenous Lenape village before moving into the 1682 arrival of the Quakers, their Peace Testimony and the vision of a colony built on equality,” Ell said. “The route then traces Moorestown’s deep history through persecution, the Revolution, slavery, abolitionism and equal suffrage, highlighting how the town led the charge for equality for all. Our skirmish scenes drop guests right into the Revolutionary chapter, capturing just how dangerously divided the town was. By introducing the trolley this year, we are able to take that immersive storytelling even further, reaching incredible historic sites on the edge of town to show the staggering cost of war, exile and true crime right where it happened.”
The walking and trolley tours were brought to the community through the generosity of local sponsors including Michelle Arnold Compass Real Estate, Flynn & Associates, LLC Attorneys at Law, SQS Square Settlements, Brock Hyatt Absolute Home Mortgage, Terri Sullivan & Ted Olsen family, S & C Painting Company, Hanimirian Law Group, LLC, Moorestown Friends School, The French Press and The Cubby Hole.
Gary Ell of the Historical Society of Moorestown portrayed as Samuel Smith, an 18th-century Quaker who purchased the 160-acre property that is the site of the Smith-Cadbury Mansion.
