On the morning of January 3, 1777, Washington won a signal victory here against the British after fierce fighting in an orchard and through farmland now mostly encompassed by this 75-acre park. General Hugh Mercer, who had served with Washington in the French and Indian Wars, was bayoneted during the battle. Removed with other wounded from both armies to Thomas Clarke's nearby farmhouse, Mercer died nine days later. Today, the original Clarke House is furnished as it would have been at the time of the battle, while a later wing exhibits maps, documents and firearms associated with the Revolution. A carriage barn and smokehouse are also of later date. The Mercer Oak, by tradition a witness to the Battle of Princeton, collapsed in March 2000; an offspring tree, grown from an acorn of the Mercer Oak planted in 1981, now thrives on the battlefield next to the stump of the original. Across the street, an Ionic Colonnade marks the mass burial site of 21 British and 16 Americans killed in the battle.

Just south of the park is the Stony Brook Friends Meeting House (Quaker Road and Princeton Pike), built in 1726 and rebuilt in 1760, after a fire. Some casualties of the battle are buried here in unmarked graves; Richard Stockton, a signer of the Declaration of Independence (see Morven), is also buried in the graveyard.

Back to the Ten Crucial Days