Success! Ironworks and Academy Listed

Hunter Research is proud to announce the successful listing of two historic properties on the New Jersey and National Registers of Historic Places. 

Working with Connolly & Hickey Historical Architects for the Town of Boonton, Hunter Research detailed the archaeological potential of the Boonton Ironworks Historic District through the use of historic maps, photographs, GIS, and historical and archaeological research.  This site includes the remains of an important, fully integrated ironworks that underwent the conversion from charcoal to coal furnaces in the mid-19th-century. At its peak in the 1860s the ironworks employed over 600 workers and was producing 200,000 kegs of nails a day.  The district also includes elements of the Morris Canal, which supplied charcoal, coal, iron ore and water power to the early ironworks and the Morris & Essex Railroad, which supplied the works with iron and coal later in its history. 

The Mount Pleasant School, also known as the Richwood Academy, was built in 1870 in Harrison Township in Gloucester County. The schoolhouse is an excellent example of a two-story, two-room schoolhouse. It represents a model type of rural and small town school that was popular in New Jersey during the mid- to late 19th century.  The building features two exterior doors that could serve as separate entrances to upstairs and downstairs classrooms and featured minimal ornamentation in a vernacular Greek Revival style.  Of note are two fluted, cast-iron, interior columns that have structural and aesthetic characteristics.

Dead Center

Cemetery, burial ground, graveyard – what is the difference? Each refers to hallowed ground harboring our discarded human shells. As we go about our daily lives, these places of final repose may seem like fixtures in the landscape – pillars of the community that never change. But study any burying ground in depth and you will be struck by how transient such places are, how fleeting the afterlife can be.

In recent years, Hunter Research has specialized in the study of cemeteries – documenting them in their current state; remote-sensing them to delineate their boundaries and pinpoint graves; excavating them to make way for development; and making recommendations as to how best to preserve them for future generations. Yet, the physical fabric of all cemeteries – the memorials above ground and the bodily remains below – inexorably fades and its management is but a tale of short-term maintenance to stave off long-term decay.

Over the past two years, with funding support from the New Jersey Historic Trust, Hunter Research has completed preservation plans for two of downtown Trenton’s most venerable graveyards, both now closed for burying: the First Presbyterian Cemetery on East State Street and the non-sectarian Mercer Cemetery across from the Trenton train station. We have wrestled mightily with the challenge of how to protect and honor these cemeteries in the face of erosion by the weather and pollution, and damage from vandalism and neglect.

The First Presbyterian and Mercer Cemeteries are quite different. The First Presbyterian Cemetery was in use from the late 1720s until around 1900, and today sports roughly 200 grave markers and 16 monuments, although in excess of 500 interments are thought to have been made over the centuries. Many of the grave markers have been moved from their original locations. The Mercer Cemetery was established in the early 1840s, filled up rapidly in the later 19th century and burying continued intermittently into the 1970s. There are close to 3,000 grave markers and monuments and most are in their original locations.

The two preservation plans are founded on a comprehensive documentation exercise, including a conditions assessment of each grave marker and monument, that resulted in the creation of a cemetery-specific geographic information system (CGIS). The ultimate goal of each CGIS is to make the cemetery data accessible online in the form of a geodatabase and an interactive map. Each plan uses the CGIS as a basis for formulating prioritized treatment recommendations for the preservation and maintenance of the cemetery and for deriving rough cost estimates for their repair and restoration. The Mercer Cemetery study also includes a heritage tourism plan which considers the feasibility of incorporating the cemetery into Trenton’s plans for revitalizing the city around its history assets.

Both preservation plans are currently under client and New Jersey Historic Trust review, but will hopefully be accessible on our website within a few months. We acknowledge the considerable assistance of Schnabel Conservation, LLC and Horsley Archaeological Prospection, LLC in our study of the First Presbyterian Cemetery, and of Schnabel Conservation, LLC, Clarke Caton Hintz, Hargrove International, Inc. and Richard F. Veit, Ph.D. in our study of Mercer Cemetery.

Tilting at Windmills on the Maurice River

Today, wind power means arrays of giant, three-pronged turbines strung along hillsides or protruding from the ocean floor. Historically, along the eastern seaboard of North America, windmills were also not uncommon in the landscape, the power of air currents being used to grind grain grown in nearby farm fields.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, several windmills were once ranged along the banks of the Maurice River in Cumberland County, southern New Jersey, each one rotating on a large wooden post to capture in its sails the power of the prevailing nor’easter gales. None of these windmills survive today, although their former existence is witnessed on historic maps and in old documents and photographs.

Over the winter of 2021-22, a team of Hunter Research archaeologists, surveying the left bank of the Maurice River just below Leesburg in advance of a proposed commercial marine support facility for offshore wind power development, found evidence of a mid-18th-century peg, or sunken post, windmill. The remains were vestigial, to say the least, consisting of a sizeable hole, 8.5 feet deep and between 8 and 9 feet in diameter, containing the rotted imprint of a 2-foot-square timber post, along with other subsurface structural traces nearby. Associated artifacts, including a “Georgius II Rex” half penny dated 1735, along with documentary evidence, suggest that the windmill was most likely built and operated by members of the Peterson family, who were among the first Swedish settlers to take up residence in the Maurice River valley in the early 1700s.

The proposed development project will thankfully avoid what still remains of the windmill and its site will be marked with an interpretive sign.