Welcome!
Trenton is renowned as the site of the "Turning Point of the American Revolution"—the victorious attack of
George Washington's Continental Army on a Hessian garrison on December 26, 1776—but the rich history of
New Jersey's capital city spans nearly three and a quarter centuries. Fifteen years after New Jersey became a
British proprietary colony in 1664, Mahlon Stacy and other Quakers established a permanent settlement at
"The Falls of the Delaware"—the head of navigation on the Delaware river, near the mouth of the Assunpink
Creek. The town's namesake, William Trent, built a large country estate at the Falls about 1719, and soon after
began referring to the settlement as "Trent's Town," which eventually evolved into "Trenton."
Owing to its geographical location and plentiful natural resources in the region, including an ample water
supply, Trenton became a manufacturing town early in its history, even before the Industrial Revolution. The
city remained an industrial powerhouse for three centuries. Production of steel, wire rope, porcelain and
pottery, rubber products—and yes—even automobiles, aircraft, and parachutes, earned the city its popular
slogan, "Trenton Makes, the World Takes."
New Jersey vigorously promoted Trenton as a site for the federal capital in the 1780s, ultimately losing the
stakes to a swamp on the Potomac. However, Trenton did become the permanent seat of New Jersey's new
state government in 1790, succeeding twin colonial capitals Burlington and Perth Amboy, which were vestiges
of an early split of the colony into western and eastern divisions. New Jersey's State House, first constructed in
1791–1792 and greatly enlarged over two centuries, is the second oldest state capitol building in continuous use
in the nation and the site of our Friday evening reception.
As befitting Trenton's history, the Program Committee has organized twenty-one sessions centering on the
theme Revolutions in Archives. Whatever the size or nature of our organizations, we all contend with the
challenges, chances, and changes inherent in the global and cultural conversions to digitally inputted, edited,
transmitted, and displayed information. We all face new opportunities and challenges in documenting recent
events, processing public papers, staffing our archives, and educating our young and our publics on history
and the need to preserve it. We all hold in our collections the documents demonstrating change over time—
sometimes revolutionary, sometimes evolutionary—in politics, race, gender, sports, science, housing, religion,
and photography. In Trenton, you can look forward to stimulating sessions on the changes in the big archival
picture and the devils in the digital and historical details.
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Ben Primer, Princeton University