The February updates on the Hopewell Valley History Project site included new material on Mount Rose, documents on the Lindbergh case and 1932 Hopewell, annotated maps of Titusville and Pennington showing homeowners and businesses from 1860 and 1875, and new panoramic images – plus new tools for viewing panoramas and the other collections.
By the numbers, we finished the month with 203 files in the Archives, including 90 documents and 113 maps and aerials. The Image Gallery now has 1767 files. The new Aerial Panoramas Collection has 15 images for 3 towns. The Pamphlet Collection has 138 files in 7 categories for 3 towns, and the Property Reports Collection has 56 Site Survey reports and 9 Property Briefs. The interactive History Map includes 775 addresses with 102 historic places in Hopewell Borough. Please keep the materials coming!
Explore Mount Rose
We added significant material on Mount Rose due to the kindness of due to the kindness of Sheila Fields, Max Hayden, and Richard Hunter. These included local histories, preservation efforts, and documentation of the historic Mount Rose Distillery and Mount Rose General Store.
- See the Mount Rose History Brief for more on the historic village of Mount Rose (PDF)
- See the Mount Rose Town Index for links to all the available materials and images.
Our Fascination with Lindbergh
Mark Falzini, Archivist at the New Jersey State Police Museum has shared two valuable documents related tot he Lindbergh case.
The first is a report on the NJSPM Lindbergh archives, “Studying the Lindbergh Case: A Guide to the Files and Resources Available at the New Jersey State Police Museum,” which helps explain why this case that so fascinates us, almost ninety years later
The second is an annotated version of 1932 Hopewell Phone Directory compiled by the state police, with local businesses plus numbers for all the newspapers in residence in town. We also have identified at least four organizations and businesses that retained the same phone number from 1932 (or even 1910) up to recent times.
We also have extracted and edited phone listings to create an Annotated 1909 & 1910 Hopewell Bell Telephone Directory, to help find people and businesses, and compare the Hopewell of 1910 to 1932.
Pennington & Titusville Business Maps c1875
Thanks to the work of Bob Lawless we have annotated versions of the 1875 Everts & Stewart maps of both Pennington and Titusville, that list the occupations and businesses of the people and buildings identified on the maps.
See also the Township Maps
Also see Historic Town Maps of Titusville / Washington Crossing for an 1860 Titusville map and annotations from the Lake and Beers Map of Phila. & Trenton.
New 1964 Panoramas, and New Collections Viewer
We’ve added new 1964 aerial images of Hopewell Township, Hopewell Borough, and Pennington Borough, from the Mercer County Tercentenary booklet (1664-1964), courtesy of Dick and Hope Sudlow.
But this expanded into developing a new Aerial Panorama Viewer for exploring these large images (including panning and zooming into the images), which then grew even further into extending the simple Collections Viewer interface to support the other History Project collections.
The new Aerial Panorama Viewer that displays all the available images in a simple table, with thumbnails. Plus when you click on an image in the list, the panorama is displayed in a new image pan/zoom viewer, so you can smoothly display, zoom in and out, and pan around in the image – both on desktop computers and on touch and mobile devices. (Click for more on all the Panoramas.)
The new Panorama Viewer uses the same simple interface as the existing Pamphlet Viewer, to provide a straightforward way to explore a list of files. In fact, the History Collections Viewer app has been extended to provide a similar interface for browsing all the collections on the site (excepting the separate Image Gallery for large albums of photos).
The Collections Viewer web application provides a simple interface to the different collections by displaying all the files in the collection in one table for convenient browsing, searching, and filtering, including a thumbnail preview and information on each file. Simply click on an entry to display the associated file in a new window. (Click for more on viewing the Collections.)
