“Last Call: Taverns and Temperance” includes artifacts from the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and Welch’s Unfermented Wine, forerunner to Welch’s Grape Juice, invented in Vineland.
The Harrison Township Historical Society launched a new series of fall concerts and lectures on Oct. 5 and reopened its featured exhibit, “Last Call: Taverns and Temperance,” at the Old Town Hall Museum in Mullica Hill.
“Last Call” explores the colorful history of local taverns – respectable and notorious – patent medicines, the temperance movement, Prohibition, bootlegging and winemaking through artifacts, images and documents, many of which will be shown for the first time.
The exhibit experience is enhanced by a series of recorded narratives drawn from local history, with tales of “tavern crawls” before the Civil War, a raid on a bootleg still in the Richwood section of Pitman and a story about drunken pigs in Mullica Hill, all accessible by scanning QR codes in the gallery.
The museum is open on Saturdays from 1 to 4 p.m., and the exhibit continues through Dec. 7. Both it and the fall program series are funded in part by the Gloucester County Cultural and Heritage Commission at Rowan College of South Jersey, in partnership with the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, Department of State; the National Endowment for the Arts; and the New Jersey Historical Commission, Department of State.
Old Town Hall Museum is located at 62 S. Main St. in the heart of Mullica Hill’s National Register Historic District. Richwood Academy Cultural Center is at 836 Lambs Road in Richwood.
For information on the society and its exhibitions and programs, visit HarrisonHistorical.com or call (856) 478-4949.
