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):

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:

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.


Collection Viewer

The Collection Viewer web application is designed to explore this documentation for individual properties.

See About the History Project Collections for more on using the Collection Viewer.