A 171-year-old church in Voorhees that once sheltered abolitionist meetings and gave Walt Whitman a place to recover from a stroke is now on the market for $455,000 — and the people who know it best say there is nothing stopping a buyer from tearing it down.
The Glendale Methodist Episcopal Church, sitting at the corner of Haddonfield-Berlin and White Horse roads, is the only surviving building from the old settlement of Glendale, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer. Keller Williams Realty has the 1,800-square-foot property listed, which includes a sanctuary, basement and kitchenette, built in 1855 on land that Quaker Alexander Cooper donated to three church trustees that same year. Glendale residents helped build the structure on the condition that its lower level double as a schoolroom and meeting place, and that schoolroom went on to host abolitionist meetings before the Civil War — making it one of Camden County’s oldest standing public school buildings as well.
Walt Whitman spent months recovering from a paralytic stroke inside the church, writing poetry and bathing in a creek behind it, per the same Inquirer report. The building is listed on both the New Jersey and National Registers of Historic Places, a distinction architect Margaret Westfield herself nominated it for back in 1995. But that status, as the article notes, offers protection mainly from federally funded projects — it does not stop a private buyer from altering or even demolishing a 19th-century landmark.
A Preservationist’s Warning
Westfield, a Woodbury-based preservation architect who has overseen grants and crafted a preservation plan for the building, did not mince words. “Honestly, this building is one of the most significant buildings in South Jersey,” she said, according to the same report. “It needs somebody to come in and save it.”…