Barclay Farmstead Museum - Cherry Hill, NJ
N 39° 54.305 W 074° 59.890
18S E 500156 N 4417222
This present 3-story, 11 room brick farmhouse was built in 1824. Now this house is used as a museum, a showplace for changing exhibits, a meeting place for various organizations and a center for educational programs. Very reasonable visiting hours.
Waymark Code: WM6ZR4
Location: New Jersey, United States
Date Posted: 08/10/2009
Views: 11
Step back in time at the Barclay Farmstead, an historical oasis in the heart of bustling Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Built in 1816 by a Quaker farmer, Joseph Thorn, the farmhouse and surrounding 32-acre property offers visitors an opportunity to observe and participate in the agrarian lifestyle that once dominated the South Jersey landscape.
This house has really been restored nicely, outside and especially the inside, to reflect how life might have been in the early 19th century. In 1974, it was a run down wreck. One of the volunteers (a really nice woman who gave me a one-on-one personal tour)told me a weird old caretaker back then ran the place. We rode bikes here back then but I don't remember seeing him. Today, it is a living history museum. One of the rooms has been set up to reflect the Victorian age, circa 1888, I would estimate. The other rooms show a tea room set for guests in a parlor, a kitchen with a table set with various foods and implements of that age, and various bedrooms. Children from our public schools (5th graders) spend a day here at the museum. When the children come into the house, they don aprons and act as their Quaker counter parts might have in the 1800s. The volunteers on these days are dressed in period garb to make this "time-travel" effect complete. When I was in 5th grade, this house and area was still a mess so we were not afforded this unique educational opportunity.
"Historic Barclay Farmstead, Cherry Hill’s “Living Heritage,” offers visitors an opportunity to observe and participate in Early American Quaker farm life. The centerpiece of the property is a restored, fully furnished federal-style brick farmhouse built in 1816 by Joseph Thorn for his family of eight. In 1826, Joseph W. Cooper, a sixth-generation descendant of the founder of Camden and the owner of Camden’s Cooper Ferry, acquired the 168-acre property as a retreat to escape the city’s hot summer days. Eventually, “Chestnut Grove Farm,” as it came to be known, was passed along to Joseph Cooper’s great-granddaughter, Helen Champion Barclay, who sold more than 100 acres of the property to developer Bob Scarborough in the 1950s, resulting in the surrounding Barclay Farm development. Helen Barclay sold the remaining 32 acres of the Farmstead property to the Township of Cherry Hill in 1974, where it has since been maintained as a park and history museum.
Now listed in the National and New Jersey Registers of Historic Places, the Barclay Farmstead offers public tours, programs & events throughout the year. The Farmstead is also home to Cherry Hill Township’s unique “Living History Education Program,” through which costumed guides educate visiting school groups about early 19th century Quaker farm life and demonstrate traditional crafts such as spinning and weaving, blacksmithing, quilting and more. A true treasure of the past, the Farmstead is owned and maintained by the Township of Cherry Hill, with the assistance of the Friends of Barclay Farmstead, a volunteer organization devoted to continuing restoration and support of historic programming.
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