$100M Development Slated For Sherwin-Williams Superfund Site As Gibbsboro Turns The Page
Dozens of townhomes, several restaurant sites and a new park are coming to a Superfund site being cleaned up in South Jersey as local officials tout a new chapter for the once-polluted property.
Gibbstown officials celebrated the environmental remediation and development underway on the property, where a Sherwin-Williams factory once stood, during an event on Wednesday. Paint and varnish were manufactured at the facility for nearly 130 years until it shut down in 1978, leaving the town with extensive lead and arsenic pollution — and without a key source of jobs and tax revenue.
The cleanup process for part of the former industrial site began earlier this year and is expected to wrap up next spring, Mayor Ed Campbell told Bisnow.
As that work continues, D.R. Horton will begin building 163 market-rate townhomes on nearby land that didn't need to be remediated in early 2025, according to a press release from the borough. The municipality is also seeking a master developer for a restaurant district overlooking Silver Lake. The body of water at the core of the redevelopment project will someday be fronted by a scenic park centered on the six chimneys that remain from the old factory.
In addition, Gibbsboro has also received $750K in congressional funds to convert the historic John Lucas Homestead on Silver Lake into an event space. The original owner of the building constructed in 1856 was a key player in the 19th-century paint industry. The John Lucas Co. merged with Sherwin-Williams in 1930.
The entire redevelopment project has a retail value of $100M, Campbell said.
“It’s a great day for Gibbsboro,” he said. “I’m really excited for the next couple of years.”
The area around Silver Lake is one of three Superfund sites created in 2006 due to pollution from the paint industry. Two have been fully cleaned up. The Environmental Protection Agency has also remediated 40 nearby residential lots and several lakes and streams in recent years.
Developer Robert Scarborough bought the site in 1981 with plans to erect an office park but quickly uncovered the plot’s long history of pollution.
More than 40 years later, part of the third and largest Superfund site should be fully cleaned up sometime in 2025, Campbell said. The EPA will continue working on other sections of it for another two years.
The mayor briefly worked at the Sherwin-Williams factory as an 18-year-old in the summer of 1977 and recalled there being nearly 1,000 people employed at the facility, including his father, who worked there for 37 years. The elder Campbell was one of many Sherwin-Williams employees in Gibbsboro who died of cancer.
The longtime pollution left a lasting legacy in other ways as well. Campbell, first elected to the borough council in 1987, remembered that one of the first calls he got was from a constituent reporting the stream by the Gibbsboro police station was on fire.
The municipality’s tax base peaked around the time the Superfund sites were created in 2006, the mayor said. Environmental concerns plagued the community for years after that, and the tax base has only now crept back to that level.
Sherwin-Williams is providing funding for the lot where restaurant and park patrons will leave their vehicles someday, Campbell said. The company has also helped pay for sewer improvements and trails across Gibbsboro in recent years, he added.
