Even in the most redeveloped urban landscape...

As seen from Route 29 running alongside the Delaware River, the downtown Trenton skyline is changing quite a bit these days.  The cluster of State office buildings on South Warren Street, dominated by the Hughes Justice Complex, is being supplemented by the ongoing construction of a new Taxation Building directly in front of the Labor & Industry Building on John Fitch Way. 

Remarkably, prior to construction, some fairly substantial traces of Native American occupation were found on the site of the new Taxation Building.  Several pits and hearths and numerous artifacts, dating mostly from 400 to 700 years ago, were documented by a Hunter Research archaeological team working over the winter of 2018-2019.

This location, on a floodplain terrace at the mouth of Assunpink Creek, would have been a choice spot in the landscape for local Lenape inhabitants and their forebears, and ample evidence of a sprawling Indian presence once existed here.  Now largely destroyed by urban development, occasional pockets of intact archaeological remains still survive – one such pocket was sampled right there in what used to the forecourt of the Labor & Industry Building.

Documenting Our Dead

Over the past three years, as a result of a number of project assignments, Hunter Research has been developing a new specialty in cemetery recordation.  This expertise has grown out of two challenging endeavors completed for the Greater New Jersey Conference of the United Methodist Church.  This work entailed researching and field-inventorying seven “orphan” Methodist cemeteries scattered across New Jersey and resulted in the creation of a cemetery-specific geographic information system (CGIS) for each burial ground.  The CGIS allows users to identify through an interactive map the locations of memorialized individuals within a cemetery.  Also accessible through the CGIS are photographs of grave markers and monuments linked to the memorialized individuals and relevant web links to www.findagrave.com.  The CGIS is a tool of immense potential benefit to cemetery managers and persons intent on pinpointing the whereabouts of a particular memorialized individual, be they relatives, friends, researchers or the merely curious.  We are presently applying this same methodology in a study of the Pennington African Cemetery in Pennington, New Jersey.

Signing on to Seneca Village

Hunter Research, with the expert assistance of graphic designer Douglas Scott, has just recently concluded a year-long project assisting the Central Park Conservancy in developing historic interpretive signage for the site of Seneca Village, a predominantly African-American settlement occupied from the mid-1820s up until the time when Central Park was created in the late 1850s. A three-sided kiosk, three introductory signs and a network of 16 free-standing panels were installed and unveiled in mid-October, informing the public of the former existence of this once-vibrant community. These signs are a gentle reminder for Central Park visitors that there was life on this land before Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux got their designer hands on this section of Manhattan for the benefit of modern New Yorkers.