Author: Sarah Nicell

Archaeologists have nearly wrapped up their analysis of artifacts found at Cherry Hill’s Croft Farm, a historic Underground Railroad site where items have accumulated over thousands of years.

That catalog includes 6,300 ceramic fragments, hundreds of bones, and belongings of the Lenni-Lenape Indigenous people who once inhabited the land along the Cooper River.

In February, Cherry Hill Township invited the public to spectate the dig at Croft Farm, a property purchased by Cherry Hill in 1985 and since added to the National Register of Historic Places. It sits at a dead end behind a playground and a dog park, and Megan Brown, deputy chief of staff for Cherry Hill Mayor David Fleisher, said lifelong residents tend to not know it exists.

The township recruited PS&S, an architectural firm headquartered in Somerset County, a year before the February dig to oversee cultural resource management at the site, triggered by renovations to preserve a building there.

Upgrades to the Kay-Evans House, an 18th-century home at Croft Farm that once served as a stop along the Underground Railroad, are funded in part by a $638,000 grant from the New Jersey Historic Trust, which requires work to ensure the safety of historic artifacts found there. Those items will become Cherry Hill Township property.

Brown said the artifacts collected could find their way into public displays on the first floor of the house.

“We do tell the history, but kind of more as a whispering,” Brown said. “We’re going to start really yelling about it.”

Hundreds of ceramics

Croft Farm has housed generations of people living along the Cooper River, and artifacts like ceramics help archaeologists identify lifestyle and socioeconomic changes over time.

The land at Croft Farm was purchased by the Kay family in the early 18th century, and around 1750, Quaker Isaac Kay built an early version of the building now known as the Kay-Evans House, which today houses the Cherry Hill Recreation Department.

In the 19th century, the Evans family moved onto the property and expanded the home. Like other Quakers, owner Thomas Evans and his son Josiah were members of the New Jersey Abolition Society who pushed to end slavery and support the Underground Railroad, according to the township’s online history of Croft Farm.

Matthew Tomaso, the senior director of cultural resources for PS&S, said the firm found material spanning from the 18th century to the early 20th century. About 1,000 artifacts come from the 18th and 19th centuries, including when the Evans family helped operate the Underground Railroad.

Matthew Kraemer, a PS&S archaeologist on the project, said the type of ceramics discovered on the site varied by time period, from 18th-century Staffordshire slipware to more creamware, pearl ware, earthenware, and whiteware as time went on.

The ceramics, buried by time, were not found in one piece. Tomaso said his team sorted through thousands of tiny fragments to assemble 359 vessels.

Kraemer said he is looking at how the ceramics change through time, since a transition from simple to fancy bowls could indicate shifting values among the Quakers, traditionally known for their modesty.

The location where the ceramics are found matters, too. Since enslaved people often used backyards as outdoor kitchens, Kraemer said, finding ceramics outside the house is telling, since that tradition likely continued as formerly enslaved people fled northward.

“If we find a higher proportion of hollowware in the backyard, then we know this could further indicate, from an archaeological point of view, involvement in the Underground Railroad,” Kraemer said.

The Croft Farm site is known as a former home to previously enslaved people, including Joshua Saddler, who founded nearby Saddlertown, a Black settlement in what is today Haddon Township.

‘An awful lot of butchering’

Chelsea Carriere, another archaeologist at PS&S, said she had not expected to find so many animal remains, since nearby water typically makes bones degrade faster.

But Carriere ended up with a stash of 480 bone fragments showing human alteration, or bones with burn or cooking marks.

So far, she has identified goat, cow, sheep, rodent, and turtle bones, along with a raccoon scapula, clearly chopped, and animals likely trapped and hunted, like rabbits. While historical documents show pigs lived on the property, Carriere did not find many pig bones, though she said it could be that the animals were butchered elsewhere or were cooked in a way that did not make for good preservation.

“We can dive into what the recipes of the time were and see if there’s any correlation between the cut marks we’re seeing and what kind of foods were typically cooked or fashionable during certain periods,” Carriere said.

The team also found bones in the Kay-Evans House basement, which Tomaso said was strange, since people did not usually throw away organic waste indoors.

Studying those remains will help Carriere determine how the people living there butchered and prepared their food, and how the Evans family lived off the land. Bones with rough, choppy markings could indicate at-home butchery by a novice, while clean cuts imply meat purchased from a local butcher.

“You would kind of expect to see a change there where people might be having more access to store-bought cuts of meat in the 19th century during the Evans family’s occupation,” Tomaso said. “And one of the things I think is really interesting … is that it seems like they’re doing an awful lot of butchering right there on the property.”

Over 4,500 years

Most of the recently found artifacts came from the last 300 years, but some items go back further, including ones PS&S archaeologists have not disturbed at Croft Farm.

“We now know that it was probably reoccupied over about 4,500 years or more,” Tomaso said. “So that’s kind of cool.”

Before white settlers came to Croft Farm in the late 17th century, the Lenni-Lenape Indigenous people are known to have lived on the land. Tomaso said artifacts from the Indigenous people are deeper in the ground, and seemingly less intact.

But based on the site’s location and proximity to water, Tomaso said, he suspects Native American tribes used the land for thousands of years, though not continuously. PS&S has bolstered that timeline with the Indigenous artifacts its team managed to find, including triangular projectile points typical of the Woodland Period long before the arrival of white colonists.

The absence of some typical artifacts caught Tomaso’s eye, too. The Croft Farm site had very few glass and liquor bottles, and few smoking apparatuses, and Tomaso said the team is still trying to figure out why.

“I think that these guys might have been practicing temperance, which would have been common for the Evans period, really uncommon for the Kays, even among Quakers,” Tomaso said. “Because 18th century, basically, people just drank all the time. For example, beer was not considered an alcoholic beverage.”

Once the project is wrapped up and the data compiled, PS&S will report its findings to the state, Tomaso said.

In the meantime, Brown said, Cherry Hill is working toward awarding a bid for construction at the Kay-Evans House and finding ways to increase the public’s awareness of the Croft Farm property.

“You can really just kind of disappear from Cherry Hill in this location,” Brown said. “It’s really beautiful and we’re really just looking forward to having people take more advantage of it and having people get to understand it better.”

BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir, a Hindu temple on the eastern border of Cherry Hill, is preparing for a major facelift.

The Cherry Hill Township Zoning Board approved site plans last week during a 4½-hour meeting for an 18,330-square-foot expansion that would transform BAPS Cherry Hill’s exterior and add a gym, lobby, prayer hall, improved Sunday school rooms, new parking spaces, and more.

More steps will have to be made before construction can begin, but this approval is a major move forward after what zoning officials say took more than a year of planning.

BAPS Inc., an international religious nonprofit, has more than 100 temples across the U.S., including eight in New Jersey. Cherry Hill Township approved a zoning variance back in 2002 to allow a former vacant warehouse building on an 11-acre property at 1 Carnegie Plaza, acquired by a real estate company for $1.9 million and conveyed to BAPS, to become a Hindu temple despite the lot being zoned Industrial Restricted. The temple is run by BAPS Cherry Hill, a limited liability company.

Decades have passed since BAPS Cherry Hill opened, and the mandir, a Hindu place of worship that neighbors King’s Christian School and Remington & Vernick Engineers, still looks like a warehouse.

But the new plans propose a more decorative exterior, including the addition of three shikharas, tall spires on the roof that would reach 58 feet at their highest. Aavart Patel, the project’s architect, said the change matches more traditional styles of Hindu architecture.

The current zoning rules put the building’s maximum height at 35 feet, but BAPS Cherry Hill’s lawyer, Damien Del Duca, sought a variance allowing for the boost.

“Metaphysically, the shikhara represents the spiritual connection between the earthly realm and the divine,” Del Duca wrote in a March letter. “It guides the eyes to move from the earth upwards toward the sky — representing heaven.”

Del Duca and BAPS did not return requests for comment about the projected cost of the expansion, but Del Duca said during the zoning board meeting that the temple had raised the necessary funds for the project.

Riya Patel, a BAPS Cherry Hill volunteer and youth coordinator, testified during the zoning meeting that the temple’s current structure poses a problem for its youth classes and group activities.

“It still serves as this warehouse layout,” Patel said. “So talking about some of our weekly activities, a lot of the space that we have doesn’t have much utility.”

Neel Patel, a lead volunteer and national coordinator for BAPS, has attended BAPS Cherry Hill for the last 22 years. He said the temple has 400 to 500 worshipers on an average Sunday and offers scriptural studies, language learning, music, and sports programming for attendees from kindergarten age to adults.

The new additions would mean educational and sports programs could take place in designated classrooms and a gymnasium rather than in the current dining hall, makeshift spaces, or outside on the warehouse loading dock, which the temple converted into a basketball court. The addition of about two dozen parking spaces will accommodate extra visitors during the high holidays.

Under the current site plans, the building’s footprint would only expand about 3,000 square feet, and the remaining 15,000 square feet of additions come in the form of a second story to accommodate classrooms, offices, and the new gym.

Anand Bhatt with Arna Engineering, the project’s civil engineer, said the project will be completed in one phase, and the mandir will remain open throughout the process since construction will be limited to weekdays. The temple has little foot traffic except on Sunday.

‘A space where I can express my religious freedoms’

The BAPS location in Cherry Hill came to be in 2002 when Rishi Realty acquired the vacant warehouse space from Graphic Controls Corp. for $1.9 million and quickly conveyed ownership to BAPS.

Although the property is zoned industrial and accompanied by surrounding commercial businesses, the temple faces a residential neighborhood, Point of Woods, in Cherry Hill.

Three neighbors attended the zoning board meeting via Zoom last week to voice their concerns, mostly regarding the desire to protect the property’s wetlands and limit lighting at night.

Jody and Jenn DeMarco, who live across from the BAPS parking lot and its wooded area, asked the zoning board to deny the application unless the front facade of the new temple is reoriented to face away from their neighborhood.

“It’s a matter of preference, not a matter of necessity, that they are putting this giant variance that impacts our neighborhood negatively facing our property,” Jenn DeMarco said.

In 2012, BAPS Cherry Hill received violations from the township and the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection for illegally removing trees in a wetland without proper permits, but BAPS Cherry Hill said in its zoning application that the organization remediated the issue by planting more trees.

BAPS representatives said at the zoning board meeting that they would follow N.J. DEP’s rules and make sure any lighting above the height maximum of 35 feet turns off by 10 p.m. Plus, BAPS Cherry Hill doesn’t anticipate increased visitor volume after the renovations, and they don’t plan to add any additional seating for its Sunday services.

Another Cherry Hill resident, Deepak Chhatwal, said he was excited about the upcoming changes.

“I’m very happy that there’ll be an organization and a space where I can express my religious freedoms, and there will be a better space for myself and my family and other neighbors who are practicing the Hindu faith.”

The six zoning board members who attended the meeting approved the site plans unanimously.

Brian Bauerle, the township’s chief of staff, said Cherry Hill still has to adopt a resolution confirming the decision and its conditions of approval at a future meeting on an undecided date.

As for BAPS Cherry Hill, the nonprofit will have to update its site plans based on the new approvals and satisfy remaining compliance items, which Bauerle said can take weeks to months. Then, the Department of Community Development can issue a zoning permit allowing BAPS to apply for construction permits.