Alexander Douglass House on the Move

The Alexander Douglass House, built around 1760 by Jacob Bright on South Broad Street in Trenton and purchased in 1769 by Alexander Douglass, later a quartermaster to the Continental Army, became the setting for George Washington’s Council of War on the evening of January 2, 1777, after American forces repulsed British and Hessian troops at the Assunpink and before the overnight flanking maneuver that led to the American victory at Princeton the next morning. Douglass lived there until his death in 1836, but the house’s importance went largely unrecognized for years after the Revolution. Acquired by the German Evangelical Lutheran Trinity Church in 1857, it served as a rectory until 1876, when construction of a larger church forced its sale and removal to Centre Street; the front section, believed to have been erected by Douglass around 1800, was moved intact, while most of the rest was dismantled and only partly reassembled, leaving uncertain whether any portion from the Revolutionary era survived. In 1923-24, as Trenton sought to emphasize its role in American independence, a fundraising campaign led by Trenton High School and the Trenton Catholic Club moved and refurbished the building in Mahlon Stacey Park near the State House, with schoolchildren donating coins. In 1976, during the bicentennial effort that created Mill Hill Park, the house was moved again to its present location. More than a century of relocations, remodeling, restoration, and uncertainty over its surviving Revolutionary fabric have left it with a special but somewhat confused place in Trenton’s civic memory.

Trenton, New Jersey · United States