
Touched by the first rays of sunshine shortly after dawn, the Peter Mott House awaits the opening-day crowd on Oct. 13, 2001. See more event photos.
LAWNSIDE, N.J. (Oct. 14, 2001) — On an afternoon so brilliant with sunlight that some of the arriving guests suggested God Himself was smiling down, the Peter Mott House was officially dedicated yesterday as an Underground Railroad historic site and museum.
The ceremony, which officially opened the house as a public museum, capped an effort that began in 1989 to save the collapsing wooden structure from demolition and restore it as a memorial to this community’s historic involvement in the nineteenth-century fight against slavery.
In 1994 the site was officially recognized and added to both the State and National Registers of Historic Places.

Monument to Freedom
Linda Waller, President of the Lawnside Historical Society specifically created in 1990 to save the Mott House, hailed it as “a monument to freedom.”
“The Underground Railroad was a system committed to the human desire for freedom,” she told a standing-room-only crowd in the small amphitheater area behind the historic building. “Every man and every woman wants to be free, and that’s what we celebrate here today.”
“This is a very happy day,” she continued. “So many people have come forward with artifacts and stories to share and bits of information from their families that have really helped turn the idea of creating a museum in Lawnside into a reality.”
Helped Slaves Escape
Constructed 156 years ago, the two-story clapboard house was the home of a free black farmer and businessman who, in the pre-Civil War era, helped runaway slaves make their way north toward freedom through southern New Jersey.
Despite the presence of numerous state and local government officials, the real celebrity of the day was Clarence Still, the local historian and descendant of eighteenth-century abolitionist William Still, who prevented the demolition of the property in 1989 and set in motion the efforts that became today’s grand opening.
Recovering from an illness that has made his walk unsteady and requires him to use a wheelchair, Still’s mere arrival at the site caused a stir in the crowd.
‘Eagle Eye’
State Senator Wayne R. Bryant, who helped the Lawnside historian walk to the microphone, called Still the “eagle eye.”
“This is the man without whom the building behind us would have been buried in the ground and forgotten,” said Sen. Bryant. “He had the vision, and that vision has become fact because of a decade of support and work by so many other people.”
“When I woke up this morning,” said Still, the founding President of the Lawnside Historical Society, “I said, ‘This is a blessed day — because I’m still here and also because this is our opening day.'”
Then, instead of dwelling on the work completed, he asked the crowd to look toward the work that needs to be done to make the museum a dynamic historic site. “Our work is really just beginning,” he said. “We’re going to need more people to come out and volunteer their services with us.”

Lawnside Mayor Mark K. Bryant noted, “Our community is so enriched by the presence of the Peter Mott House. It adds an element of tourism to Lawnside that we’ve not had before, and we’re looking to build on that.”
John Seitter, Executive Director of the Camden County Historical Society (CCHS), characterized the new museum as “a magnificent achievement.” CCHS operates an extensive museum and research library in Camden. It also operates and interprets Pomona Hall, a restored eighteenth-century mansion that was once the centerpiece of a local plantation worked by enslaved Africans. CCHS is among those who have loaned artifacts for use in the Mott House.
‘Importance New Resource’
Seitter, who has been lobbying for better coordination among the county’s historical and cultural institutions, said the Peter Mott House was “an important new resource for all organizations seeking to interpret and celebrate the rich multicultural history of this region.”
WHO WAS PETER MOTT?
And Why Does His House Matter?
Born around 1810 in slave-holding Delaware, Peter Mott made his way across the Delaware River to New Jersey as young man.
There, ten miles east of the river city of Camden, he settled in a remote and heavily-wooded rural community called “Free Haven” that later changed its name to Lawnside. He married Elizabeth Ann Thomas in 1833. She had been born in Virginia before coming to Free Haven.
Self-Made Man
A self-made man, Mott built a house, established a small farm, provided trade services in nearby towns, and engaged in other local businesses. Meanwhile, he and his wife risked everything to help fugitive slaves move through New Jersey toward northern states and Canada where they would be beyond the legal reach of their former owners.

County records show that Mott eventually bought and sold a considerable amount of property in the area. In about 1844, he constructed a two-story house from which he ran his farm. On census records, he listed himself as a farmer, a plasterer and a laborer.
He was also an ordained minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the first superintendent of the Sunday School at Free Haven’s Mount Pisgah AME Church — a congregation that today remains a central institution of Lawnside.
Local Oral History
Oral stories passed down through generations of Lawnside families indicate that Mott harbored runaway slaves on his farm and then ferried them in his horse-drawn wagon to their next stops in the Quaker communities of Haddonfield and Moorestown.
Attended by a doctor from nearby Haddonfield, Mott died in Free Haven on Nov. 28, 1881, and was buried in the cemetery of Mt. Pisgah Church.
His house, now a museum, is the oldest structure in Lawnside and a historic site with rare qualities.
As Lawnside Historical Society President Linda Waller explained:
“One of the most important aspects of this property is that it was built and owned by a free black man in the 19th century and was involved in the Underground Railroad.”
Very Rare Site
“It is very rare that you find an African-American Underground Railroad site — property owned by a person of color and in an African-Amerian community. That just makes this that much more powerful; I’m not sure that there is any other place exactly like this in the United States.”
“Peter Mott and others like him felt compelled to say ‘I freed myself but I need to help others to freedom’ and he and they did that at great risk to themselves,” Ms. Waller said.
“When a New Jersey Historic Preservation officer inspected the house in 1989, she said it is a rare surviving example of a black man’s home in a free community in the 19th century. That fact that it had two stories indicated to her that Peter Mott was a man of means. He was a businessman who had a lot to lose. But there is a scripture that says “To whom much is given, much is required,’ and he probably felt that commitment.
Slave-Catching Bounty Hunters
Oral stories recount how slave-catching bounty hunters roamed the the area in search of runaways but were consistently frustrated or thwarted by local residents in the all-black community.
“His property was pretty extensive at the time and a lot of it was wooded,” said Ms. Waller. “In fact, we were always taught in school that one of the things that made this community so amenable to fugitives back then was that it was in such a densely wooded area.
Now that the Mott House was open as a museum, she said, the next phase of the Lawnside Historical Society’s program was to seek out academically-trained historians who could help with in-depth research about the Motts and the period in which they lived.
Haddonfield and Lawnside
“Local historical organizations — like the Haddonfield Historical Society and the Camden County Historical Society — have already been wonderful to us,” Ms. Waller said. “Haddonfield and Lawnside have always been very interrelated because many of the people here worked there and many of the people there were Quakers who actively opposed slavery.
“Haddonfield has some great documents from the era,” she explained. “My sister found her husband’s great grandmother listed in records from the Quaker ‘Mothers’ Meeting.’ The Quaker women would come and meet here with newly freed women and talk about issues like homemaking and scripture reading and sewing and singing. They would distribute small allotments of soap and fabric. Some of the women took meticulous notes of these meetings that are still on file in Haddonfield.
“We need to systematically locate all the documents like this that can shed further light on what daily life was really like back then,” she said. “Our goal is to make this piece of history a living reality in our museum.”