Mary Lou Diecker has been writing about Matawan, New Jersey, and The Burrowes Mansion since the early 1950s when she was appointed the student reporter to The Matawan Journal regarding Matawan High School activities. She never received a byline, nor did she ever meet any members of the Benjamin F.S. Brown family who owned & published The Journal and its sister publication, The Keyport Weekly. (The Browns worked out of their Keyport offices, but lived in the Burrowes Mansion on Main Street, Matawan.) She never visited the newspaper offices or met any of the Brown family until 30 years later when she was working in the Matawan Joint Free Public Library on Main Street, Matawan, doing regular staff work and specializing in writing and printing the library’s monthly newsletter.
In 1975 Mary Lou was appointed Public Relations Director for the Matawan Bicentennial Commission and throughout 1976 she conducted a yearlong newspaper campaign promoting Matawan’s amazing award-winning programs featuring the reenactment of the raid on the Burrowes Mansion during the Revolutionary War. In 1977 she was commissioned to write what became her first book, The Burrowes Mansion of Matawan New Jersey. It was during that time that Mary Lou had the honor and privilege of meeting and interviewing J. Mabel Brown and her sister, Mildred Brown Herrick, and visiting The Burrowes Mansion, still owned and occupied by the Brown Family. The family would ultimately sell The Mansion to the Borough of Matawan for use as a working museum and headquarters for the Matawan Historical Society, the role it enjoys to this day.
In 2023 Mary Lou was invited to recreate the Colonial Tea Room that occupied the Mansion in the early 1930s, be its lead docent using an original script of her devising, and — the greatest honor of them all — write a second edition of her book expanding it to bring the reader up to date from 1976 to the present. This Second Edition commemorates the 300th (Tricentennial) Anniversary of the construction of The Burrowes Mansion in 1723. She spent the next year working on that book with the researcher, writer and multi-faceted Historical Society Board member, Barry C. Orr. The new “little old book” debuted at a delightful, standing-room-only, book signing held at The Mansion in April 2024.
She has always worked in a public relations position where writing has been a regular part of the job. During her Matawan Library years, she had also been a volunteer staff writer for the New Jersey Libraries Association’s magazine with her own monthly column, “Speaking Periodically.”
In the 1980s and ’90s, she served as the public Relations Coordinator for Monmouth Medical Center’s highly successful and powerful fund-raising auxiliaries and branches, helping them produce their various fundraising galas and again writing their monthly newsletters and all their publicity. She freelanced outside of work for decades, writing for periodicals from journals geared to professional nurses, to women’s magazines including the “true confessions” stories. She had a lot of fun with those purportedly true stories but also enjoyed creating happy endings to them all. (And they paid by the word!) She loved going into the Matawan Journal offices with the delightful and popular society writer, Barry Kamm, just after J. Mabel Brown had closed the newspaper’s doors forever in the early ’70s. How amazing that she would return to that repurposed building in around 2018 as a student of Tai Chi.
Mary Lou writes every day but never enough. She thanks Barry C. Orr (Chair, MHS Museum Committee) and Mark Chidichimo (MHS Board member and Genealogist) for urging her to write for this website and editing her words to fit. She also thanks Steve Steinberg of Stone Mountain Printing, printer of the Second Edition of The Burrowes Mansion of Matawan New Jersey, for the outstanding work done on this project.