"Let it be remembered," wrote Thomas Sharp in 1718, "That upon the nineteenth day of September, in the year of our Lord one thousand six hundred and eighty-one, Mark Newby, William Bates, Thomas Thackara, George Goldsmith and Thomas Sharp set sail from the harbor...of Dublin...We took our land in tract together...bounding in the forks of Newton Creek and so over to Cooper's Creek..." Sharp's narrative account of the first permanent European settlement in what is today West Collingswood is the most accurate history of the establishment of Camden County.

Many of the early settlers in late seventeenth and early eighteenth century West Jersey (modern-day South Jersey) were like the Newton Colony people. Quakers, members of the Society of Friends, were persecuted in England for their religious beliefs and way of life. They came, lured by the Concessions and Agreements, a document written in 1677 by proprietors such as William Penn, who owned a large portion of the land in West Jersey and wished to encourage Quaker settlement in the area. The settlement offered the promise of religious freedom, equitable taxation, and representative government.

Quakers were not the first people to arrive on New Jersey's shores. Some 13,000-15,000 years earlier, after a long migration eastward beginning in Asia and leading over the Bering Strait through Alaska and across the American continent, the Paleo-Indians (Old Stone Age peoples), whose descendents eventually became known as the Lenape, had arrived. The Lenape were peace-loving, semi-nomadic people who lived in small family groups along the banks of waterways, spoke an Algonkian language, farmed, hunted, and fished.