William Trent House

The William Trent House is an excellent example of an early Georgian house, built in 1719 as the summer home of William Trent, a wealthy Philadelphia-based shipping merchant. The William Trent House was strategically significant in the Revolutionary War as it sat at the Falls of the Delaware, a key river crossing in Trenton. Hessian troops occupied it before Washington’s attack in December 1776, Continental artillery fired on it, and it later served as an encampment site for American and French forces marching to Yorktown in 1781. 

In 1778, Colonel John Cox, a Patriot and deputy quartermaster general, bought the property. Under Cox, the estate—renamed Bloomsbury—became a staging ground for Continental and French forces. The site lies along the Washington-Rochambeau Revolutionary Route National Historic Trail.