Drug Treatment Center in Cherry Hill, NJ.

The area now known as Cherry Hill was originally settled by the Lenni-Lenape Native Americans before being displaced by the first settlers from England, namely Quaker followers of William Penn who arrived in the late 17th century. The first settlement was a small cluster of homes named Colestown, in the perimeters of what is now the Colestown Cemetery on the corner of Route 41 (King’s Highway) and Church Road. The municipality was founded on February 25, 1844, in Gloucester County as Delaware Township from half of the area of Waterford Township and became part of Camden County at its creation some two weeks later on March 13, 1844. Portions of the township were taken to form Stockton Township (February 23, 1859) and Merchantville (March 3, 1874). At its territorial peak, Delaware Township included all of modern-day Cherry Hill Township, as well as the neighborhood of North Camden and the municipalities of Merchantville and Pennsauken (including Petty’s Island in the Delaware River).

The township’s population grew rapidly after World War II and continued to increase until the 1980s. Today, the municipality’s population is stable, with new development generally occurring in pockets of custom luxury houses or through the rehabilitation and adaptive reuse of commercial and industrial areas.

Cherry Hill was a 19th-century farm on Kaighn Avenue (Route 38), owned by Abraham Browning. The farm property, named Cherry Hill because of the cherry trees growing on the property, later became the Cherry Hill Inn (now an AMC Theatres Cherry Hill 24 movie theater complex), as well as an RCA office campus (now a shopping center with big-box retailers and Target), and today’s Cherry Hill Towers and Cherry Hill Estates housing developments.