A Revolutionary War battlefield in New Jersey is getting a $5 million restoration

The star-spangled makeover of the Princeton Battlefield aims to turn the site into an outdoor classroom and living memorial.

The black powder guns of the American Revolution fell silent in Princeton centuries ago, but the bucolic battlefield has been anything but still as state officials prepare for the war’s landmark anniversary next year.

There’s much to do on the 681-acre tract of fields and forests along Mercer Road, which state officials and several nonprofits want to restore to its 1777 appearance so visitors can gaze upon the land as Washington did when his ragtag band of colonials beat the British and breathed new life into America’s fight for freedom.

Millions in public and private money will fund the multiphase restoration project, which officials want mostly done before the battle’s 250th anniversary festivities on Jan. 3, 2027.

It may be hard to understand the impetus behind spending mountains of cash to unearth ancient roads, rebuild ancient fences, and replant ancient orchards at the National Historic Landmark site — all so it looks just right.

But such work will fling open a window to America’s remarkable past — and nudge Garden Staters into realizing a cornucopia of world-altering events happened just outside their door, according to John Cecil, the assistant commissioner of State Parks, Forests and Historic Sites for the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection.

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“The chance to stand in a place and contemplate what it was like 250 years ago, a place that was seminal, critical, and instrumental to the founding of this country … that’s an invaluable moment,” Cecil told The Jersey Vindicator last week.

“We have to touch people, to grab them by the shirt collar and say, ‘Just take a moment and think about this place, the role of New Jersey, the role of Princeton and the role of Princeton Battlefield in the creation of a country that’s changed the course of human history.’”

Helping the state along in the “Reimagining Princeton” project will be the Princeton Battlefield Society and the American Battlefield Trust, a national nonprofit based in Washington, D.C.

The trust — which spent about $4 million in 2018 to buy 15 battlefield acres from the neighboring Institute for Advanced Study — said on its website it plans to turn this “beloved community asset into an outdoor classroom and living memorial to the brave American soldiers and their British adversaries who fought on this land.”

To do that, the trust will spend about $5 million — including private donations and $2.3 million in secured and anticipated state funding — to restore the land’s colonial aura by removing modern features and rebuilding roads, woodlots, fences, and a long-uprooted wartime orchard.

The group also wants to create a new entrance and parking lot far from the current lot, which now sits on hallowed ground that witnessed some of the battle’s bloodiest moments, Jim Campi of the American Battlefield Trust said in an interview.

“The chance to stand in a place and contemplate what it was like 250 years ago, a place that was seminal, critical, and instrumental to the founding of this country … that’s an invaluable moment.”

John Cecil, assistant commissioner of State Parks, Forests and Historic Sites for the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection

Some of the work, such as installing interpretive markers and a metal topographical map of the battle, is already done. Other bits, including the laborious task of moving the parking area, will have to wait until after the anniversary, he said.

But most will be finished ahead of time.

“We want to get the park in as good shape as we can for the anniversary years,” Campi said. “Those will be big years for visitation. So we want to make sure that when visitors get there, as much is done as possible — and they don’t see a bunch of orange cones and tape up.”

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Mark Texel, administrator for the New Jersey Office of Historic Sites, added that the milestone celebration is the state’s chance to show off its oft-overlooked legacy as the Crossroads of the Revolution.

“We want to raise awareness of New Jersey to the world,” he said. “This is our moment to say we’re not just in the shadow of Valley Forge or Bunker Hill. We are really where this happened.”

“The game is pretty near up”

The Battle of Princeton, which closely followed the Continental Army’s stunning day-after-Christmas victory over the Hessians in Trenton, was one in a string of critical moments during the “Ten Crucial Days” campaign that came to define America’s long struggle for independence.

But before the Trenton triumph, even Washington had been losing faith.

The Americans had been beaten up and tossed into Pennsylvania after a series of disastrous battles throughout New York City and Westchester County in 1776.

The starving army had shrunk to a third of its former strength and numbered just 5,000 poorly equipped, worn-out vets by December of that year.

“The privation of these troops is just as bad as you’ve heard in all the stories,” Mark Maloy, a National Park Service historian and author of Victory or Death: The Battles of Trenton and Princeton, said in an American Battlefield Trust video from 2021.

“No shoes, barefoot, and officers said you could actually follow the path of Washington’s army from the blood in the snow,” he continued. “What was motivating these guys to hang on was just beyond comprehension.”

Congress evacuated Philadelphia and put all its faith in the despondent Washington, who had written in a letter to his brother that, “I think the game is pretty near up.”

“When the commander in chief is talking about how the cause is almost lost, it really shows you how close to defeat they were,” Maloy said.

But all was not lost.

Thomas Paine pumped a shot of adrenaline into the fledgling nation’s heart in late December with his essay The American Crisis, which began with the immortal words, “These are the times that try men’s souls.”

At the same time, Washington concocted one of the most audacious plans in military history: slip across the nearly frozen Delaware and strike the Hessians in Trenton on Dec. 26.

The astounding plan succeeded. But instead of sitting around and waiting for the British to return the favor, Washington stole up to Princeton and struck again, this time hitting a group of Redcoats that was, ironically, headed to attack him in Trenton.

The British initially pushed the Continentals back, prompting Washington himself to ride forward on his pale horse and rally his men amidst the crash of musket fire — at great peril to himself.

The sight steeled the spine of his vulnerable troops, who were seconds from breaking.

“When I saw him brave all the dangers of the field — his important life hanging as it were by a single hair with a thousand deaths flying around him — believe me, I thought not of myself,” one Pennsylvania soldier said, according to Maloy.

With Washington leading the way, the Americans charged across the icy turf of Maxwell’s Field — the same land the battlefield trust bought in 2018 — and sent the Redcoats running.

The victory convinced the British to mostly abandon New Jersey, and Mark Herr of the nonprofit Princeton Battlefield Society said the campaign’s importance can’t be overstated.

“If they hadn’t won at Trenton and if they hadn’t won at Princeton, we’d be singing, ‘God Save the King,’” Herr said.

“We want to raise awareness of New Jersey to the world,” he said. “This is our moment to say we’re not just in the shadow of Valley Forge or Bunker Hill. We are really where this happened.”

Mark Texel, administrator for the New Jersey Office of Historic Sites

“The past is an anchor”

State officials hope the renovations, battle anniversaries and living history demonstrations slated for the coming years spark new interest in American history, which Herr said is critical to understanding the political maelstrom going on today.

“You can’t understand the present and you certainly can’t figure out what to do in the future if you don’t understand what happened in the past,” Herr said.

“The past is an anchor and a beacon at the same time,” he said. “So the very things that they fought over on Jan. 3, 1777 — the right to free speech, the right to practice freely your religion, the right to decide for yourself who’s going to rule you and what the rules are going to be — we’re still arguing about that 250 years later.”