Elizabeth Haddon

Elizabeth Haddon (May 25, 1680 – March 30, 1762) was an American pioneer. She was the founder of Haddon Township and Haddonfield, New Jersey.

Elizabeth Haddon was born in Southwark, London, England, May 25, 1680. Her Quaker father, John Haddon, bought a 500-acre (2 km²) tract of land in Gloucester County in the English colony of West Jersey to escape religious persecution. However, poor health kept him from settling there.

Title page illustration for an 1864 edition of Tales of a Wayside Inn

Haddon, a single woman, set sail from Southwark to the New World in 1701 without her family. She married John Estaugh (1676–1742), a Quaker minister, on the banks of the Cooper's Creek, Newton Township, on December 1, 1702.

Their courtship was described, fancifully, by Lydia Maria Child in "The Youthful Emigrant. A True Story of the Early Settlement of New Jersey," first published on May 21, 1845 in the New-York Daily Tribune. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow drew on Child's account in writing "Elizabeth," a poem in the third volume of his Tales of a Wayside Inn.

Haddon and John had no children, but they brought her sister's son, Ebenezer Hopkins, to America from Southwark when he was about five, and raised him as their son and heir. Ebenezer was the son of Benjamin and Sarah (Haddon) Hopkins, and the grandson of William and Katheryn Hopkins. Ebenezer was the founder of the Hopkins family of Haddonfield, New Jersey.

Elizabeth died at her Haddonfield home at the age of 82 on March 30, 1762.She was buried in an unmarked grave in the Burial Ground of the Haddonfield Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers).