Drive Cropwell Road on a Thursday evening in late summer and you will pass a stretch of orange barrels, a stand of oaks, and a gravel lot that looks like nothing in particular. By 6:25, a dozen cars have pulled in. By 6:30, they are gone, swallowed by a wooded loop behind Cherry Hill High School East that does not show up on most maps of the township at all.
That loop has a name. So does the ground around it, and that name predates Cherry Hill itself by more than a century. Most people who live within a mile of this corridor could not tell you either one. That is not a knock on them. It is the whole story of this stretch of road: a place that keeps being useful long after it stops being named.
A Name That Outlived the Township
Before there was a Cherry Hill, there was Delaware Township, carved out of Waterford Township by the New Jersey Legislature in 1844. Delaware Township was mostly farms and mills, organized loosely around a handful of crossroads villages. One of them was Ellisburg, still recognizable today near Route 70. Another was Colestown. A third, sitting off what is now the Kresson and Cropwell corridor, was called Batesville.
Delaware Township kept that name until 1961, when it became Cherry Hill Township. The old village names mostly faded from use once the postwar development boom filled in the farmland between them with subdivisions and shopping centers. Batesville never got its own zip code or its own exit sign. It just became part of Cherry Hill, the way Colestown and Ellisburg did, absorbed into a bigger identity without leaving much of a public trace.
The land itself did not stop being a crossroads. It just started running on a different kind of traffic.
What's Actually Back There
The wooded strip behind Cherry Hill High School East is called Kresson Trails, and it is one of ten trail systems the township has formally adopted, not an informal cut-through or an unofficial dog-walking path. It runs about 3.3 miles of rolling, wooded singletrack, built and maintained through a partnership between Cherry Hill Township and the Jersey Action Riders chapter of the Jersey Off-Road Bicycle Association. There are two ways in: a paved parking area off Cropwell Road at the trail's south end, and a second lot off Kresson Road near the Springdale intersection, which is where the Jersey Action Riders stage their group rides.
It is a smaller, quieter cousin to the trail most people associate with Cherry Hill: the Cooper River and Maria Barnaby Greenwald Trail Loop, a 5.8-mile paved route that draws the township's highest trail ratings and the most reviews on record. Kresson Trails does not try to compete with that. It is built for a different kind of use.
Kresson Trails | Cooper River / Maria Barnaby Greenwald Loop | |
|---|---|---|
Length | About 3.3 miles | 5.8 miles |
Surface | Wooded singletrack, natural terrain | Paved, multi-use path |
Elevation | Roughly 68 feet of gain | Roughly 104 feet of gain |
Typical use | Mountain biking, trail running | Walking, running, road cycling |
Access point | Cropwell Road (south end) or Kresson Road near Springdale | Multiple points along the Cooper River |
If the Cooper River loop is Cherry Hill's front porch trail, the one everybody knows about, Kresson Trails is the back room where the regulars actually gather.
The Weekly Rhythm
The regulars are not casual. There is a schedule here, and it repeats:
- Every Thursday at 6:30 p.m., year-round, the Jersey Action Riders host a group ride open to riders of varying levels.
- On the third Saturday of the month, from April through October, there is a free mountain-bike skills clinic sponsored by Keswick Cycles, running from 9 a.m. to noon.
- On the second Saturday of the month, the volunteer Cherry Hill Trail Crew, working under the township's Environmental Board, meets at the Kresson Road lot near Springdale to do trail maintenance.
None of this is loud. There is no signage on Kresson Road announcing any of it, no banner at the high school entrance. You find out about the Thursday ride the way most people find out about anything real in a place like this: someone who already rides tells you, or you notice the same cars in the same gravel lot at the same time every week and eventually ask.
The Road Is Catching Up
The corridor has been changing in a more visible way this year, and it has nothing to do with trails. Camden County broke ground on a $7.5 million reconstruction of Kresson Road last fall, rebuilding a 2.1-mile stretch between Browning Lane and Cropwell Road, with county officials targeting completion by the end of this August. The project is part of a larger $161 million county program to upgrade roadways and bridges running through 2026, and this particular stretch happens to run past Cherry Hill High School East, the Katz Jewish Community Center, and several houses of worship, meaning the work has touched a lot of daily errands and school pickups over the past year, not just through-traffic.
That is the second thing happening on this old crossroads at once. The road is being rebuilt for the first time in a generation while, a few hundred feet into the trees beside it, a small and steady community keeps meeting on a schedule nobody advertises. Neither project depends on the other. Both are proof that this ground, whatever it is called on a given decade's map, keeps being a place people actually use.
Living With Both at Once
If you are in this corridor right now, the practical version of all this is simple. The Kresson Road work between Browning Lane and Cropwell Road is in its final stretch as of this month, so expect the last of the construction slowdowns to clear up around school arrival and dismissal times near the high school. And if you have never turned into that Kresson Road lot near Springdale on a Thursday evening, it is worth doing once, even if you do not own a mountain bike. Watching a dozen people show up at 6:30 sharp for a trail system most of the township has never heard of tells you something about how this particular stretch of Cherry Hill actually works, underneath whatever name happens to be on the map that year.
Batesville is gone as an official place. The habits that used to define a crossroads, people showing up at the same spot on a repeating schedule because it is worth the trip, never left.
If you are thinking about what it is actually like to live day to day in this part of Cherry Hill, Kresson Road construction, trail culture, school traffic, and all, I am always glad to talk through it. I have spent 26 years working buyers and sellers through corners of Burlington and Camden County that do not always show up clearly on a map, and I would rather tell you the real texture of a place than a version scrubbed for a listing sheet. Reach out to Ronald Palentchar any time. Let's Connect.
