Pennington Profile – Digital Edition Released

The Hopewell Valley History Project and the Pennington Public Library are pleased to announce the release of the new Digital Edition of Margaret J. O’Connell’s comprehensive book, Pennington Profile, A Capsule of State and Nation.

The book, previously out of print, was originally published by Margaret O’Connell in 1966, and was republished by the Pennington Public Library in 1986 with additional images. This new edition includes the full text and photographs from the original books – now reformatted as a digital PDF file so it can be shared online and conveniently searched.

This important book of local history is now freely available for families, students, and researchers as a download on the Hopewell Valley History Project site (HopewellHistoryProject.org/pennington-profile).

Margaret J. O’Connell (1915 – 1971) was a lifelong resident of Pennington. She worked as both a teacher and a principal, including teaching English and history at Hopewell Township Central High School.

Her career was ended by illness, and she wrote Pennington Profile while bed-ridden as a permanent record of her community’s past.

Pennington Profile follows the growth of Pennington from a tiny settlement to a colonial village to a rural town, and then later expanding from a country suburb to a suburbia complex. It also shows the town’s relationship with major trends and national affairs.

Its emphasis throughout is on the stories of people and their daily lives.

The new Digital Edition includes the full text of the original book (325 pages), plus the four sets of annotated photographs from the second edition (108 pages, 193 photos).

The original book and photos were digitized and processed by Douglas Dixon, with additional layout and proofing by Carol A. Errickson.

The Digital Edition replicates the design and layout of the original book. The pages are formatted to standard letter size for convenient reading and printing.

The major structural change was to extract the four separate blocks of photographs from their original locations within the text and combine them together as an appendix at the end of the book.

The Digital Edition of Pennington Profile is available in three versions (click to view or download PDF file):

• Text Only (PDF) – The full text as a smaller download for reading and searching (328 pages, 2 MB)

• Photos Only (PDF) – The four set of photographs, with searchable annotations (112 pages, 193 photos, 40 MB)

• Full Digital Edition (PDF) – Text and photos (436 pages, 42 MB)