The December updates on the Hopewell Valley History Project site focused on providing convenient access to the materials on the site for new visitors from a talk and video.
Other items include:
- History Project Site Index page and Town Index pages
- Hopewell Borough History Briefs page – History Project briefs
- Historical Maps index page and Panoramic Aerials pages for Hopewell and Pennington
- About the Hopewell Valley History Project page and History Project Events & News page
By the numbers, we finished the month with 184 files in the Archives, including 80 documents and 104 maps and aerials. The Image Gallery now has 1692 files, and the Pamphlet Collection has 138 files in 7 categories for 3 towns. The interactive History Map includes 775 addresses with 102 historic places in Hopewell Borough. Please keep the materials coming!
Snowy Days in Hopewell
Two posts featured family photos of ladies with fine hats on snowy days in Hopewell at the turn of the last century. These explored both familiar structures and gaps in the streetscapes, courtesy of photos from the Bob Gantz collection.
Snowy Day in Hopewell in the Early 1900s shows the then-empty northeast corner of East Broad Street and North Greenwood Avenue, previously the home of Cook’s Block and later the home of the Hopewell National Bank.
Snowy Day in Hopewell in the 1910s shows the end of Blackwell Avenue at the corner with Railroad Place, across the street from the train station. This one lot was the home of some now-forgotten and some still-remembered names, including Andy Wyckoff’s Meat Market, the Hopewell Post Office, Carballal’s, Selmar’s, and Mollica’s luncheonettes and ice cream stores, Angeline’s Clothing, and even Hopewell Auto Parts.
Panoramic Aerials
A new Panoramic Aerials page includes aerial views for both Hopewell and Pennington.
Some of the Hopewell scenes are full 180 degree panoramas shot from a drone, so you can see all the way along the length of the streets, from horizon to horizon. Others are historic aerials shot over our towns, some looking straight down, and some overlooking at an angle. And they are low enough that you can clearly see the streets and buildings and cars.
There are set up with a panoramic viewer, so you can easily explore into the scenes – zooming in and out to see the details, and panning over the scene to “walk” along the streets.
The “Frog War” in Hopewell
The story of The Frog War in Hopewell is explained in an article kindly contributed by railroad historian John Kilbride, “The Mercer & Somerset Railroad and a Frog War,” that details this conflict between the ambitions of two railroad companies to connect train lines across New Jersey.
History Project Talk – and Video
See the new History Project Site Index for a breakdown of the different types of materials hosted on the site, and the associated web interfaces used to explore them. These were discussed in a new talk, Sharing Information on the Web: The Hopewell Valley History Project.
Also, the video of an earlier History Project talk, has been posted by the Pennington Public Library. This talk from May 17, 2020 works through an extended example of using the materials on the site for researching the Hopewell Public Library.
