Living in Independence Place
Independence Place sits between Old Port Republic Road and Smithville Boulevard in Smithville, Galloway Township — come off Moss Mill Road to Old Port and turn onto Revere Way. The streets carry Revolutionary names: Revere Way, Saratoga Place, Stonewall Drive, Constitution Drive, Cornwall Drive. Somebody named this neighborhood with a history book open, which fits a corner of the township whose whole identity is built around the Historic Towne a few minutes up the road.
The first thing that separates it: Smithville Elementary School sits directly across Old Port Republic Road from the neighborhood. Not a short drive — across the street. For a family with young children that is a different daily life than a bus route, and it is the kind of thing that holds a neighborhood's value through soft markets because there is always a buyer for whom it is the deciding factor. Nothing else in the Galloway run sits this close to a school.
The second: these are detached single-family homes, which is unusual for this end of the township. Almost everything else under the Smithville umbrella — Quail Hollow, Surrey Station, Mallards Landing — is attached townhomes and condos. If you want Smithville's location and Smithville's amenity set but you want your own walls and your own yard, this is the pocket that does it. Two-story homes, three bedrooms, two full baths, with attached two-car garages and fenced rear yards on lots around fifty-nine by one hundred twenty-eight feet.
The fee structure is simpler here than anywhere else in Smithville, and that is worth understanding. Independence Place homes carry the Towne of Historic Smithville association fee and nothing stacked on top of it — one monthly charge, billed monthly, on the lower end of what you will find anywhere in the township. Compare that to the attached communities nearby, where the number on a listing sheet is routinely two separate association fees added together and entered inconsistently into a single MLS field. Here there is one fee and one board.
What it buys is the full Smithville amenity set: swimming pools, a fitness center, clubhouses, tennis and basketball courts, playgrounds and walking trails, with the Four Seasons Active Adult Recreation Center at the neighborhood's eastern edge and the Historic Towne itself — sixty-plus shops, restaurants and a year-round festival calendar — a short run north. Stockton University and AtlantiCare are minutes away, with Atlantic City and the beaches a straightforward drive.
Inside, the plans favor flexibility: cathedral ceilings in the main living space, a wood-burning fireplace in the family room, second-floor laundry, and on some homes a first-floor bedroom with a full bath — which handles a parent moving in, a guest suite or a home office without stairs. Natural gas forced-air heat, central air, public water and public sewer, crawl space foundations. At twenty-five-plus years the roofs and mechanicals vary from replaced-recently to due, so read each home on its own. To see everything Galloway has on the market at once, work down from the Galloway Township homes page.
