Trenton Makes: The Industrial City and Its Slogan

The sign on the Lower Trenton Bridge reads: Trenton Makes, The World Takes. It has been there since nineteen thirty-five, lit in neon for most of that time, now LED, visible from every lane of traffic crossing between New Jersey and Pennsylvania. It is one of the most recognizable pieces of industrial-era civic signage in America, and it came out of a moment when the claim was genuinely true.

By most accounts the slogan originated in nineteen ten. The Trenton Chamber of Commerce held a contest to capture the city's identity in a phrase. A lumber dealer and state senator named S. Roy Heath is credited with those five words. For decades, the boast was not hyperbole.

Trenton at its peak was a factory city of extraordinary range. Roebling's wire works were here. Pottery manufacturers ran kilns across entire neighborhoods. Rubber manufacturing, steel, textiles, electrical components, the list went on. The completion of the Delaware and Raritan Canal in the eighteen thirties had connected the city to both Philadelphia and New York, and the railroad arrived in the same decade, making Trenton a pivot point in the industrial Northeast.

At its height the city was called the Staffordshire of America, after the English pottery district. Dozens of kilns produced everything from bathroom fixtures to fine china.

The bridge that carries the slogan was completed in nineteen twenty-eight. The sign followed seven years later, a piece of civic chest-thumping at a moment when the Depression was hollowing out factories everywhere. By the nineteen seventies, manufacturing had largely collapsed and the sign meant something more melancholy than it once had. It still stands. The world still takes, just not as much from here as it once did.