About the Property Reports Collection

– View the Historic Property Reports (separate site) –

The Historic Property Reports Collection include two sets of documentation on historic properties: Hopewell area Cultural Resource Survey documentation, and Historic Property Briefs documented using research by the History Project.

The materials are organized by town (e.g., HwBoro, PennBoro, HwTwp), and category. The files are named for convenient sorting and searching, and so begin with the street, house number, and date, and also include a description of the historical use of the property (e.g., “Chocolate_Factory”). This is the same format used in the Image Galley for property files (e.g., for the Hopewell Borough property image album, organized by street and number).

There are currently over 60 property reports in the collection, in 2 categories across 3 towns. The collection categories are:

Property-Brief – Hopewell History Property Briefs with reports on individual properties based on research conducted by the History Project. Typically includes a summary chronology, historical images, and extracts from documents and newspaper articles.
Site-Survey – Extracted entries for individual properties from the Cultural Resource Survey reports, especially from the 1984-85 survey of Hopewell Borough. (Also some grouped entries for small towns.)

Hopewell Valley Cultural Resource Surveys

The N. J. Historic Preservation Office has digitized five Cultural Resource surveys (aka Historic Sites surveys) of the Hopewell area, with documentation on individual historic buildings and streets in Hopewell Township, Hopewell Borough, and Pennington Borough (click for large PDF documents):

1985 Hopewell Borough survey (207 pages, with 54 buildings and 56 streetscapes)
1985 Pennington Borough survey (509 pages, ~77+ properties)
1985 Hopewell Township surve y – Part 2 – Part 3 (1121 pages, 72 roads, ~350 properties)
2003 Hopewell Township survey (453 pages, 45 properties, 124 buildings)
2016 Pennington Borough survey (416 pages, 131 buildings)

The base 1985 survey includes documentation on historic sites up to 1875, with discussions of their history and architecture, and associated photographs. The later follow-up surveys then add new information, particularly to aid in registering our historic landmarks.

The survey forms typically include a photo of the property from the time of the survey, a general architectural and historical description, and an explanation of the historical significance of the property.

We have developed two additional documents to help make sense of this incredible volume of material, with an overview of the contents of each survey and indexes to the included sites:

Hopewell Area Cultural Resource Surveys (1985 – 2016) – Contents of each survey
Hopewell Borough 1985 Cultural Resource Survey – Index of buildings and streets

We also have run text recognition on these PDF documents so they are searchable, although be aware that the processing of these old typewritten documents is not exact, and therefore some of the text has not been identified correctly.