Waln’s Mill, tucked away on Crosswicks Creek in Upper Freehold Township, Monmouth County, New Jersey, is one of the best-preserved and best-interpreted historic mill sites in the Delaware Valley. The gristmill and the fine Waln family mansion, built in 1774, are the highlights of the historically evocative, County-owned and managed village of Walnford set within a 36-acre tract of timeless countryside.
Restored with painstaking care in the mid-1990s, the mill building contains a remarkable array of late 19th and early 20th-century mill machinery and grist-milling equipment, some of which can be run today using electrical power. To understand how water-powered gristmills were designed and worked, there are few better places to tour than Waln’s Mill.
Hunter Research conducted archaeological investigations at Waln’s Mill in the mid-1990s in conjunction with the mill restoration program with funding support from the Monmouth County Park System and the New Jersey Historic Trust. This work built on excavations conducted more than a decade prior by well-known New Jersey archaeologist, Budd Wilson. Final reporting of both the Hunter Research and Wilson explorations languished until 2019 when funding for report completion was made available by the Friends of the Monmouth County Park System.
A comprehensive report now details the history and archaeology of this fascinating mill site, which has its origins in the mid-1730s and involved three different gristmill buildings (two of them destroyed by fire), a fulling mill and a sawmill. This note is titled “chapter closed,” rather than “book closed,” since the archaeology of Waln’s Mill is still not fully understood and the location of the original 18th-century mill still remains to be pinpointed.