William Trent's House: The Oldest Building in Trenton

The house at fifteen Market Street is the oldest building in Trenton, and the man who built it in seventeen nineteen was a study in colonial ambition. William Trent had started as a merchant in Philadelphia. He moved goods, extended credit, cultivated relationships with the powerful. By the time he acquired eight hundred acres from the heirs of Mahlon Stacy in seventeen fourteen, he was wealthy enough to build himself a proper Georgian manor on the banks of the Delaware.

The house he raised is a two-and-a-half-story brick structure with a five-bay facade and a hip roof crowned by a central cupola. For seventeen nineteen New Jersey, it was imposing. The design followed the Early Georgian style then fashionable in England, symmetrical, restrained, expensive in its materials and its proportions.

Trent laid out the town that would carry his name in seventeen twenty. Within months, he had a courthouse, a jail, and enough residents that the place began to feel permanent. He did not live to see it thrive in the way he imagined; he died in seventeen twenty-four, just a few years after the town took shape.

The house passed through various hands over the following two centuries, serving at different points as the residence of three New Jersey governors. By nineteen twenty-nine, Edward Stokes donated it to the city with the requirement that it be restored. It opened as a museum in nineteen thirty-six and has remained one ever since, the oldest evidence of the merchant who decided a river town should bear his name.