Nope, I'm not familiar with Clarksboro and Sand Hill, I don't know of William Boen either. This is all in the Mount Holly area? I'm not surprised if it is, so much history in my town.
WOW, you were seriously involved in Timbuctoo! Sure sounds like you've been busy.Yeah, that's an interesting place. My grandfather and my great aunt made mention of the place a few times in some of their stories.
Cudgel:
I would be very interested in hearing about the stories that your grandfather and great aunt recounted to you about Timbuctoo!
Do you live on or near the Washington Street corridor? This is the traditional black neighborhood in Mount Holly. When African Americans first settled here in the very late eighteenth century, locals dubbed the area “Sand Hill” and even today you know you are climbing a grade when you leave the Washington Street-Madison Street intersection and head west towards Hainesport.
It is not surprising that this hillock had a composition of sand. Most antebellum black settlements in southern New Jersey had a similar geology. During the very late eighteenth and into the nineteenth century, as local African Americans received manumission and began to settle in communities as free people, whites usually provided them with the poorest ground that was good for very little else. At that time—and well into the twentieth century in some locations—blacks were marginalized economically, socially, and agriculturally.
During the first half of the nineteenth century, Sand Hill was considerably removed from the town of Mount Holly. With the very poor soil there, African Americans could barely raise subsistence crops to feed their families, let alone produce a surplus for market ventures. The relative isolation of Sand Hill placed the blacks living there at the fringes of white Mount Holly society. The poor quality of the land provided those who purchased lots and tracts from ever realizing a decent return on their purchase it when they sold it some years later.
As part of this fledgling black enclave, missionaries like Delilah Johnson and Robert Evans formed the first congregation of Mount Moriah African Methodist Episcopal Church and the congregants constructed their first edifice along the south side of present-day Marne Highway just to the west of the Mount Holly Bypass. The original cemetery is still there just to the south of the railroad crossing on the bypass. The community of Clarksborough arose around the top of Sand Hill beginning in the 1850s and included such street names as Rose, Chestnut, Arch, Willow, Flibert, and Carlton. Clarksborough had its own nineteenth-century school back on Filbert Street, which has since been razed and replaced with a modern house. A newer early-twentieth-century segregated school still stands on Chestnut and now serves as a church. Its architecture makes the schoolhouse quite a special building.
In 1862, the members of Mount Moriah replaced their church with a new building at the original location. They had no sooner completed the construction work when a cyclone destroyed the new sanctuary. After deciding to build a second new edifice in less than a year, the members relocated their church to present-day Washington Street in the growing community of Clarksborough and the 1863 building is still there today.
One of the big losses to the Clarksborough neighborhood was the demolition of Arabian Hall, which once stood two doors east of St. Paul’s United Methodist Church on Washington Street:
All of the black lodges and fraternal organizations once met in this building and it is a real shame that someone in the community did not recognize its history before demolition occurred.
This is just a partial thumbnail sketch of the black community in Mount Holly. On another occasion, I will relate the story of the freed slave, William Boen.
Best regards,
Jerseyman
