Moorestown: a church at one end, a schoolhouse at the other

Drive into Moorestown today and the main street barely registers — a few old storefronts that are now houses, empty, or simply gone, and a party store. But it’s bookended by two buildings that tell you it was once a real place: a classic white church at one end and the old Hunt Schoolhouse at the other.

The town was founded in 1881 by J. Henry Moores, who had spent the middle of the century logging along the Clam River. Like a lot of Missaukee County, this was a lumber settlement first — the river was the highway, the pine was the money, and a camp grew into a village while the timber lasted. When the big pine was gone, so was most of the reason to live out here, and Moorestown thinned the way these towns do, one closed business at a time.

The schoolhouse is the keeper of the story. By 1915 the Hunt School had a student body of ten children, and it kept its doors open until around 1956 before the consolidations that swept up so many one-room schools finally reached it. The fact that it’s still standing — instead of collapsed into a foundation in the brush, the usual fate — is the small miracle here.

Norwich Township itself is a curiosity: a double-sized township running roughly six miles by twelve, with its town hall out in the country and, improbably for a place this empty, a little airport that draws a few flyers in summer. Moorestown is the kind of spot you’d pass through in ninety seconds without realizing that the white church and the old school are the last two witnesses to a town that used to have a main street worth the name.