Princeton Battlefield State Park

By the end of 1776 the American cause was reeling. Washington had lost New York and been chased across New Jersey, his army shrinking as enlistments expired. His stunning night crossing of the Delaware and the capture of the Hessian garrison at Trenton on December 26 changed the mood, and on the night of January 2, 1777, he slipped his army out of Trenton around the British force under Lord Cornwallis, leaving campfires burning to fool the enemy, and marched toward Princeton.

At dawn on January 3, part of Washington's army under General Hugh Mercer met a British column near Clarke's orchard. The fighting was fierce and close. Mercer was surrounded, bayoneted repeatedly, and mortally wounded, and his men began to give way. As the American line wavered, Washington rode forward into the smoke, rallying the retreating troops and leading a counterattack in person, at one point so close to the British line that an aide covered his eyes, certain the general would be killed. Washington emerged unhurt, the British broke, and the Americans swept on into the town of Princeton itself. The twin victories at Trenton and Princeton restored American morale and convinced many, at home and abroad, that the fight could still be won.

The white clapboard farmhouse near the meadow's edge is the Thomas Clarke House, built in 1772 by a Quaker farmer just a few years before the battle swept across his land. After the fighting, the dying General Mercer was carried to this house, where he was tended for nine days before he succumbed to his wounds. The house survives as a museum of the battle and of eighteenth-century farm life, and it welcomes visitors during its open seasons.

At the far side of the field stands the park's most striking landmark, a row of tall Ionic columns known as the Colonnade. These graceful stone pillars once fronted a Philadelphia mansion; when that building was demolished, the columns were saved and re-erected here in the 1900s as a memorial, framing the burial site where American and British soldiers who fell in the battle lie together. The classical colonnade rising from the open grass gives the battlefield an unexpected, almost temple-like solemnity.

The battlefield occupies the gentle, rolling terrain of central New Jersey's inner coastal plain, where farm fields, hedgerows, and stands of oak and hickory have shaped the land for centuries. Long before the Revolution, this country was home to the Lenape people, whose descendants remain part of New Jersey today, and whose trails and river crossings laced the region the colonists later farmed and fought over.

Just beyond the open field lies the Institute Woods, a large wooded preserve linked to the Institute for Advanced Study. Its shaded trails wind through mature forest and along the Stony Brook, making the battlefield a fine spot to combine a walk through history with a genuinely peaceful ramble in the woods. Together the meadow and the forest give the park a range far greater than its size suggests.

For all its history, the park is also a living green space. Red-tailed hawks circle the open field, bluebirds and swallows work the meadow edges, and the Institute Woods is a well-known spot for spring warblers and other migrating songbirds. Deer, foxes, and rabbits move between the field and the trees, and the Stony Brook draws herons and other water birds.

Spring and fall are the loveliest times to visit, when the trees leaf out or turn color and the walking is easy. Summer brings green fields and long light, though the open meadow offers little shade in the heat of the day. Winter has a stark power all its own, the bare oaks and the cold quiet echoing the January morning of the battle itself, when Washington's ragged army fought across this very ground.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.