Woodstown Borough Hall is located at 25 West Avenue, Woodstown, NJ 08098.
Phone: 856-769-2200.
The earliest settlement in the Woodstown-Pilesgrove [†] area was started by Benjamin Acton, an earlier settler, who built a gristmill on the Salem River and named it Mill Brook in 1695. Acton's millpond still exists and is now known as Memorial Lake. Jeremiah Wood and his son Jachonias, tanners and shoemakers, settled at Mill Brook in 1735 and bought about 1,500 acres in Pilesgrove Township, consisting of much of the land between Mill Brook and Pilesgrove. In 1785, the Society of Friends built a meetinghouse a mile north of Acton's settlement. Houses were built around the mill and the meetinghouse until eventually the two settlements — Mill Brook and Pilesgrove — grew together and became known as Woodstown.
Woodstown became so populous and commercially successful that in 1819 a political movement was initiated to relocate the county seat from the City of Salem to Woodstown, which is almost at the geographic center of Salem County. The movement failed and Salem City remains the county seat.
† Environmental Resource Inventory, Borough of Woodstown, 2005, Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission, www.mansfieldtwp-nj.com, accessed May, 2021.
Nearby Towns: Alloway Twp • Mannington Township • Oldmans Twp • South Harrison Twp • Swedesboro Boro • Woolwich Twp •