Local Knowledge · 2026-08-20
Why does South Jersey have so many tiny municipalities packed against each other, each with its own name, school arrangement, and tax rate? The answer is three centuries of splitting, and it quietly explains why rents can change by hundreds of dollars when you cross a street.
South Jersey started as a handful of enormous colonial townships inside old Gloucester, Salem, and Burlington counties, sparse farming country organized around ferry landings on the Delaware and market towns like Woodbury, Salem, and Mount Holly. For two centuries the map barely moved. Camden County itself did not exist until 1844, carved out of Gloucester County as the riverfront city boomed.
As railroads pushed out from Camden and Philadelphia in the mid-1800s, crossroads and station stops grew into real towns: Collingswood, Haddon Heights, Pitman, Glassboro. Each new center of population wanted services the sprawling rural township could not deliver, and the pressure to break away built.
Then came the 1890s and the phenomenon New Jersey historians literally call boroughitis. State law made it easy for any community to incorporate as its own borough, and school funding rules made it profitable. Dozens of new municipalities peeled off within a few years, some barely a square mile. Much of the crazy-quilt map of Camden and Gloucester counties dates to this one decade.
The splits were rarely about geography. They were about taxes, schools, liquor licenses, and who controlled them, which is why the borders often ignore any natural boundary and run down the middle of a road.
The last transformation came after World War II: highways, the bridges to Philadelphia, and tract development turned farm townships like Cherry Hill (Delaware Township until 1961), Mt Laurel, and Washington Township into full suburbs within a generation, while the older rail boroughs stayed frozen at their Victorian size.
For a landlord this history is oddly practical. Every one of those old splits left behind its own school district, tax rate, rental licensing regime, and housing stock vintage, which is why identical twins on opposite sides of a municipal line rent for different money and inspect under different rules. It is also why we manage town by town rather than treating South Jersey as one market. Three centuries of splitting means there is no such thing as an average South Jersey rental.
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