Canada -- Description and travel; United States -- Description and travel
Trenton, the capital of New Jersey, is thirty miles from Philadelphia,
a prosperous city with seventy thousand people. The first and most
lasting impression many visitors get of it is of the deep rift cut
into the clays and gravels of the southern part of the town, to let
the Pennsylvania Railroad go through. Here, as everywhere, are
displayed the lavish deposits of the "Trenton gravel" as the railway
passes under the streets, and even under the Delaware and Raritan
Canal, to its depressed station alongside Assunpink Creek of
Revolutionary memory, the chief part of the city spreading far to the
northward. Trenton is as old as Philadelphia, its reputed founder
being Mahlon Stacy, who came up from Burlington Friends' Meeting,
while the settlement was named for William Trent, an early Jersey
law-maker. The Trenton potteries are its chief industry, established
by a colony of Staffordshire potters from England, attracted by its
prolific clay deposits; and the conical kilns, which turn out a
product worth five or six millions of dollars annually, are scattered
at random over the place. Their china ware has been advanced to a high
stage of perfection, and displays exquisite decoration. The Trenton
cracker factories are also famous. The finest building is the State
House, as the Capitol is called, the Delaware River's swift current
bubbling over rocks and among grassy islands out in front of the
grounds. At Broad and Clinton Streets, the intersection of two of the
chief highways, mounted as an ornament upon a drinking-fountain, is
the famous "Swamp Angel" cannon, brought from Charleston harbor after
the Civil War. This was one of the earliest heavy guns made, plain and
rather uncouth-looking, about ten feet long, and rudely constructed in
contrast with the elongated and tapering rifled cannon of to-day, and
it rests upon a conical pile of brownstone. It was the most noted gun
of the Civil War, an eight-inch Parrott rifle, or two-hundred-pounder,
and, when fired, carried a one-hundred-and-fifty-pound projectile
seven thousand yards from a battery on Morris Island into the city of
Charleston, which was then regarded as a prodigious achievement. It is
a muzzle-loader, weighing about eight tons, and burst after firing
thirty-six rounds at Charleston, in August, 1863, the fracture being
plainly seen around the breech.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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