The Site 

 

​The William Trent House Museum site is a City of Trenton park of about 2.5 acres. The grounds include large expanses of lawn with mature trees, a kitchen garden and miniature apple orchard, a well (no longer operational) and an ice house from different periods in the site's history, and two parallel rows of cherry trees illustrating the allée of trees that led from the south doors of the historic house to the Delaware River during the 18th century. 

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​The Trent House site is near downtown Trenton, surrounded by State office buildings, parking lots, and highways, as shown in the image to the right.

This area is all that remains of the 1,000 acres originally owned by William Trent. And it is just a fraction of the ancestral homeland of the Lenape people and their forebears who lived across all of what is now New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania, and northern Delaware.

William Trent established the local settlement as “Trent’s Town” and operated several mills and other enterprises in the area. During the years leading up to the American Revolution, Trenton was a promising, if not large, settlement. 

Over the next two centuries, Trenton experienced population and economic growth as an industrial center, attracting immigrants from Europe and African Americans from southern states, before gradual declines in manufacturing and disinvestment policies and practices transformed Trenton's and the Trent House's landscape.

From Google Maps, 1-28-2025

Over the centuries the Trent House has stood in the context of the people who walked Trenton’s streets, worked on Trenton’s land and in its factories, and lived in Trenton’s neighborhoods. 

​​This video, created by Hunter Research, looks back on the three centuries through the medium of maps, with the Trent House as the focal point, to illustrate important eras of change in Trenton’s history.  

The Trent House property is shown on each map outlined in red.