Cedarville, NJ

Cedarville is an unincorporated community and census-designated place within Lawrence Township in Cumberland County, New Jersey. The village received its name in 1806, after earlier settlement grew around saw and grist mills along Cedar Creek. Farming and oystering shaped the surrounding Delaware Bayshore, and Lawrence Township, incorporated in 1885, still includes Cedarville along with Centre Grove and Bay Point. The 2020 census counted 702 residents in the CDP.

Cedarville is also the address of the Lawrence Township Historical Society, which keeps local records, artifacts, and stories in a building on Mulford Avenue. Roads through the village lead into a landscape of farms, tidal marshes, waterways, and bayshore communities, while Millville and the rest of Cumberland County provide the larger service area. The township’s dry status is another unusual piece of local civic history. Cedarville feels less like a separate municipality than the old village at the heart of a broad rural township, where mill sites, oyster grounds, farm fields, and the Delaware Bay all belong to the same local map.