The Old Barracks: Stone, Soldiers, and a Long War

The stone building on Barrack Street went up in seventeen fifty-eight because the colonists were tired of soldiers in their homes. The French and Indian War had dragged on for years, and British troops were quartered in private houses throughout Trenton, sleeping in settlers' beds, eating their food, wearing out their welcome. The colonial assembly finally agreed to fund a dedicated barracks. The result was a U-shaped stone structure capable of housing roughly three hundred men, built to last and built to keep the soldiers out of civilians' parlors.

It worked until seventeen seventy-six, when the barracks acquired new tenants: Hessian soldiers fighting on behalf of the British Crown. The Hessians, hired from the German principality of Hesse-Cassel, had established their winter quarters here by fall of that year. They were professional soldiers, well-trained and well-equipped, and they did not expect what came next.

On the night of December twenty-fifth into the early hours of December twenty-sixth, seventeen seventy-six, George Washington crossed the Delaware River nine miles to the north with twenty-four hundred men. By eight in the morning the following day, the battle was over. The Hessian garrison was captured, their commander Johann Rall killed in the fighting. The barracks that had housed them became, for the remainder of the war, a Continental Army facility, and eventually a military hospital.

The building was sold after the Revolution, lived other lives as private residences and a home for elderly women, and finally came under state protection in nineteen fourteen. It stands today as the last surviving colonial barracks in New Jersey, the same stone walls that watched both sides of a revolution come and go.