A Hundred Years Free: Lawnside Marks Its Centennial

There is a modest frame house on Gloucester Pike, two stories of weathered clapboard set back from the road, that has stood longer than the town around it has had a name. To drive past it at forty miles an hour is to see almost nothing. To stop and understand it is to see nearly everything — the whole arc of how a corner of Camden County became the first self-governing Black municipality north of the Mason-Dixon Line, and why, in this centennial year, its survival is not something anyone here takes for granted.

This is the Peter Mott House, the oldest standing residence in Lawnside, and the man who built it was a freeborn Black farmer, carpenter and preacher who did dangerous work in plain sight. Peter Mott was a stationmaster on the Underground Railroad. In the decades before the Civil War, men and women who had freed themselves from bondage moved north through a network of hiding places and trusted hands, and Mott’s house was one of those hands. He and his wife Eliza did this at a time when doing it could cost everything. That house is not a museum piece invented to fill a plaque. It is the physical evidence of courage.

Free Haven, and a gavel of their own

You cannot tell Lawnside’s story without going back further than Mott. The community began around 1840 as a settlement founded by abolitionists as a haven for freed and escaped slaves. It was called Free Haven then — a name that says out loud what the place was for. Over the generations it went by other names: Snow Hill, Denton, Lawnton, and at last, in 1907, Lawnside. And then came the moment this whole year is built around. On March 23, 1926, Lawnside was incorporated as its own borough, and within weeks its residents voted in a special election to govern themselves — making this small South Jersey town the only historically African American incorporated municipality in the northern United States.

That is the milestone the borough is celebrating this year. The centennial began back in March and has unspooled across 2026 in a way that reflects how the town sees itself — not as a relic but as a living community. On Juneteenth, the borough joined with the New Jersey Historical Commission to dedicate an official New Jersey Black Heritage Trail marker, tying the town’s hundred years of home rule to the longer story of freedom it was born from. The programming has been built in partnership with more than thirty community leaders, organizations and businesses. It is, in the truest sense, a town telling its own history in its own words.

Where the past collides with the present

And here is where the past collides with the present, as it so often does when we are careless with what we’ve inherited. Even as Lawnside celebrates a century, the Peter Mott House sits in the path of an anxiety no centennial banner can wave away: a New Jersey Turnpike widening project that has residents uneasy about how close the modern world intends to press against their oldest landmark. Preservationists in the borough have watched the plans with the wary eye of people who have seen this movie before. The house has already survived neglect; the Lawnside Historical Society has spent years raising money simply to keep its roof and its bones sound.

A story loses its anchor when the actual house — the actual walls that hid actual people running toward freedom — is gone. You cannot rebuild that.Henry Whitaker

So on this Sunday in the middle of the centennial summer, the invitation is simple. Drive down to Lawnside. Stand in front of the Peter Mott House. Let the size of it surprise you — how small it is for how much it holds. Then consider that a hundred years of self-government grew out of that soil, and that the people who live there now are asking only that the country they helped build take care not to pave over the very thing that made them. A town that freed itself has earned that much.

Based on reporting from NJ Spotlight News, WHYY, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Front Runner New Jersey, the New Jersey League of Municipalities, and the Peter Mott House / Lawnside Historical Society.