Leesburg, NJ

Leesburg is an unincorporated community and census-designated place in Maurice River Township, Cumberland County, New Jersey. It lies along the Maurice River not far from Delaware Bay, in a landscape of tidal creeks, diked fields, and older river roads. The area was surveyed in the late seventeenth century, and local accounts place Swedish settlement along the Maurice River in the following decades. The Lee brothers established Leesburg around 1795, bringing ship carpentry and river trade into the community's story.

Shipbuilding gave the place an early economic shape. In 1850 James Ward built a marine railway for repairing larger vessels, and later the Leesburg Packing Company operated a seasonal cannery while J.C. Fifield and Son made fertilizer. Those businesses tied the village to waterborne trade, farms, and the working waterfront. The river also sits inside the larger Maurice River corridor, whose shipyards, oyster grounds, and port history reached from Leesburg toward Millville and the Delaware Bay. Today Leesburg remains one of the named villages within Maurice River Township, with its older church, school, roads, and river landscape still forming the local map.