The name Mill Hill was applied to the area at last as early as 1821, although as yet relatively little beyond the original mill appears to have been built between Broad Street and the Delaware and Raritan Canal. It was annexed to the City of Trenton in 1851. In 1840, the entire area was incorporated as South Trenton. Variously known as Littleworth, Kingsbury, and Kensington Hill, it was generally thought of as part of a section called Bloomsbury. At this time, it was not a part of the City of Trenton.
Portions of the arch are presently preserved in the Old Barracks and the Trenton Free Public Library.ĭuring the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth, Mill Hill remained relatively undeveloped. On April 21, 1789, when Washington passed through on the way to New York City for his inauguration, he was greeted at a triumphal arch, erected on the bridge over the Assunpink, by a bevy of little girls and young ladies bearing baskets of flowers. The commemorative nature of this battle site was recognized by the citizens of Trenton at an early date. A significant portion of this battlefield, between Front and Livingston Streets, and Broad and Montgomery Streets, has recently been developed by the City of Trenton as a public park. The northern perimeter of Mill Hill was thus the site of one of the three major encounters of the ten-day Trenton-Princeton Campaign. Having managed to elude the British, Washington encamped his army in the mountains around Middlebrook, from which position he was able to control British movements across central New Jersey. In a confrontation there with the British rear guard on the morning of January 3, the Americans were victorious. Meanwhile, he, with the main body of the American Army, slipped away by a back road towards Princeton. When the British encamped for the night on high ground to the north, Washington ordered campfires built up and maintained throughout the night by a rear guard.
On January 2, the Americans repulsed a series of British assaults. The objective was to prevent the British from crossing the only bridge, at what is now Broad Street, or from fording the creek at other points. With the British approaching from the north, Washington decided to establish a stretching from the Delaware approximately a mile up the creek. Already on the National Register as an individual site, this building, after three moves, now stands within the district at the southwest corner of Montgomery and Front Streets. On the night of January 1, he met with his generals at the Douglass House. Washington, fearful of being trapped in Pennsylvania, crossed again tot he New Jersey side of the Delaware. During the following week British troops from New York were sent to Central New Jersey under the command of Lord Cornwallis. Following the successful American raid on Trenton on Christmas night 1776, Washington withdrew to Pennsylvania. Mill Hill was thus still relatively open ground when Washington chose it as a defensive position. Trent himself, however, built his own house south of the creek and replaced Stacy's wooden mill with a more substantial one of stone. The major eighteenth century development of the town named for Trent took place north of the creek at the head of navigation just below the Falls of the Delaware. In the same year, the County of Hunterdon was formed, the Assunpink Creek serving as the boundary between the new county and Burlington to the south. In 1714 this property, along with much of the rest of Stacy's holdings and adjacent lands, was purchased by William Trent of Philadelphia.
By November 1679, when he was visited by the Dutch missionaries, Slayter and Danckers, Stacy had erected a wooden grist mill on the Assunpink (see Assunpink Creek Greenway), at the southeast corner of the present Broad Street crossing of the creek. Mill Hill was among the holdings of the first settler in the vicinity of Trenton, Mahlon Stacy, who arrived at Burlington, New Jersey on the ship "The Shield" in 1678. During the American Revolution, the ground adjacent to the mill was, on January 2, 1777, the site of the Second Battle of Trenton. Indeed, its name refers to its importance as the area's first industrial site, a grist mill, erected in 1679. When reading, keep in mind that any references referring to the 'present' are to a time that is already more than a quarter of a century past.Īlthough Mill Hill presently survives as a middle-class mid-nineteenth century residential district, its historical significance reaches back to the late seventeenth century. A portion of the content on this web page was adapted from a copy of the original nomination document submitted to the National Register in 1977.