120 HIGH STREET, MOUNT HOLLY, BURLINGTON COUNTY, NEW JERSEY
The Burlington County Courthouse is a late eighteenth-century civic building completed in 1796. Built as a two and one half story, L-shaped brick structure laid in Flemish bond, it pairs a low stone foundation with a moulded brick water table, signaling attention to both permanence and finish. The architect is identified in the National Register documentation as Samuel Lewis of Philadelphia, with construction attributed to Michael Rush, linking the courthouse to a broader regional culture of trained design and ambitious building craft.
From the exterior, keystones emphasize the window heads, while the main entrance is treated as a formal frontispiece with an arched opening and paneled double doors, a ceremonial threshold for a working courthouse. Above, a hip roof rises to an octagonal cupola, and a box cornice with shaped dentils sharpens the roofline against the sky. The historic photographs and meticulous drawings reinforce this structure as a study in composed classical language, moving from the front elevation to the main cornice and cupola cornice with the same disciplined logic.
Inside, the measured drawings in the Mouldings One gallery turn the courthouse into an architectural tour of edge, profile, and joinery. The stair hall cornices and the mouldings framing doors and windows are recorded to show how classical edges and layered profiles enrich every passage and ascent, forming a continuous sequence of formal order. The stair is treated as a civic theater: the elevation, tread, and stringer details, and the newel posts and balusters were crafted by masterful hands where small moulded shifts create refinement from floor to floor.
