For fifty years, the room on the first floor of Moorestown's Community House held the town's card catalog. Kids did homework there. Retirees checked out mysteries. Then, in 1976, the library moved out and the room became something quieter, mostly used for cocktail hours before weddings in the ballroom next door.
This past December, the same room reopened with a different kind of counter. Community House Brewery, a King's Road Brewing Co. taproom built into the space once known as "the Library," started pouring flights where card catalogs used to sit. The building at 16 East Main Street hasn't changed its address or its mission since 1926. It has just changed what fills the room.
The room that used to check out books
The Community House itself is not new to Moorestown residents. It's the mansion where a huge share of the town has gotten married, the venue with the grand ballroom and the wraparound lawn, funded in part by a $250,000 donation from Eldridge Reeves Johnson, the Camden-based founder of the Victor Talking Machine Co. What's new is what's happening in the room the nonprofit calls the Library, which served as Moorestown's actual public library from 1926 until 1976 before becoming an event space that seats anywhere from 70 to 120 guests depending on setup.
King's Road converted that same footprint into a working taproom. Township planning documents put the brewery's daily average at 55 customers with a hard cap of 90, numbers that track closely with the room's old event capacity. The bones didn't move. The bar did.
What used to be underneath
Below the Library sits the part of this story that surprises even longtime residents: a basement that once held Moorestown's indoor pool. Generations of kids in town learned to swim there before the pool went dark in 2017. For years afterward, the space sat unused while the Community House board tried to figure out what an empty pool basement was good for.
The answer turned out to be brewing tanks. King's Road now ferments and brews directly beneath the taproom, in the same footprint where lifeguards once watched over Saturday morning swim lessons. A tent out back, roughly 30 by 40 feet, gives the operation outdoor seating that borrows the same lawn space the Community House has used for wedding cocktail hours for decades.
Current taproom hours
| Day | Hours |
|---|---|
| Monday to Thursday | 3 p.m. to 10 p.m. |
| Friday and Saturday | Noon to 10 p.m. |
| Sunday | Noon to 8 p.m. |
Those are the hours the brewery filed with the township, and they're worth having on hand if you're planning a Main Street evening that starts with dinner and ends with a nightcap that doesn't require driving to Haddonfield or Medford.
Why a college has a stake in the tanks
The other detail that separates this taproom from a standard bar opening is the sign above the entrance describing it as an "education-based" microbrewery, a distinction organizers say makes it the first of its kind in New Jersey. Rowan College at Burlington County partnered with King's Road and the Community House from the start, and RCBC's craft-brewing certificate coursework launched its first classes last fall, with students getting hands-on time at the same stainless tanks serving the public.
Haynes Hendrickson, vice president of the Community House's board of trustees, has framed the arrangement as more than a lease. The educational partnership, he's said, helps the nonprofit deliver on the same mission it was founded on a century ago: bringing people into the building for a reason bigger than any single event. That's the through-line here. The Community House didn't rent out dead space to a random tenant. It found a tenant whose presence reinforces what the building has always been for.
The same playbook that remade Kings Highway
King's Road isn't a stranger to South Jersey. The company opened its first taproom in Haddonfield in December 2017, marking the borough's first legal beer sale since 1873, and added a second location in Medford four years later. Bob Hochgertel, one of the company's co-owners, has pointed to a simple mechanic behind what King's Road did for downtown Haddonfield: staying open before dinner and after dinner keeps the surrounding storefronts open too.
"I am confident this can be another amazing asset for Main Street."
That's Moorestown's mayor at the time, Nicole Gillespie, speaking when the partnership was first announced. The bet is that Community House Brewery does for Main Street what King's Road already did on Kings Highway, giving downtown a reason for foot traffic to linger past the dinner rush instead of clearing out by 8 p.m.
Why Main Street took until 2021
Longtime residents know Moorestown's relationship with alcohol sales has always been complicated. The township prohibited liquor sales outright starting in 1915, and ballot measures to lift that ban failed in 1935, 1953 and again in 2007. The first real crack came in 2011, when voters approved liquor sales specifically in and around Moorestown Mall, a shift we've covered before as the mall reinvents itself around healthcare, housing and entertainment tenants.
What often gets missed is that the 2011 referendum only applied to the mall corridor. Downtown Main Street had to wait another decade. It wasn't until 2021 that the township council approved a separate ordinance permitting breweries, distilleries and wine tasting rooms in the downtown district, the exact zoning change that made a taproom inside the Community House legally possible in the first place. Two different votes, ten years apart, opened two different parts of town to two very different kinds of businesses.
The address hasn't changed since 1926
Walk into Community House Brewery today and you're standing in a room that has spent a century doing the same job under different names. It lent books. It hosted cocktail hours. Now it pours pints, with Rowan College students working the tanks below in a basement that used to smell like chlorine instead of hops. The building's mission, described on its own site as strengthening the community by giving people a place to gather, hasn't moved an inch. Only the plumbing has changed.
If you've lived in Moorestown long enough to remember swim lessons in that basement or afternoons in that library, the new taproom is worth a visit for the nostalgia alone. If you're newer to town, it's simply one more reason a Main Street evening now has a natural place to land after dinner.
Curious what else has shifted on Main Street lately, or wondering what a home in Moorestown is actually worth in today's market? Dream Home by Steven keeps a close eye on both the town's daily rhythms and its real estate trends. Reach out anytime to request a free market valuation and get a read on where your Moorestown property stands.
