This story by Phyllis B. Maguire was published in U.S. 1 Newspaper on May 28, 1997. All rights reserved.
Trenton historian Charles Webster IV gives his grandmother special credit for his career choice. "Someone asked me once where I lived and I said, `North Trenton.' My grandmother slapped me on the arm and said, `No you don't! You live in Top Road!'" It is just the kind of exacting detail and pride of place that Webster loves about the city he can't stop studying.
Since 1992, Charles Webster has been the historian for the Trentoniana Collection at Trenton's Academy Street Public Library. The collection is now being moved into a new larger, climate-controlled room within the library, with a new name, the Local History and Genealogy Section. The move will consolidate materials that are "scattered about in rooms and closets," says Webster, and ensure their preservation, "out of the boiler room" into a more favorable facility. To celebrate the collection's new home, the public is invited to a special Annual Meeting of the Friends of the Library, Tuesday, June 3, when Sally Lane, Trenton's director of tourism, will discuss Trenton industries; Violet Cox will speak on Trenton's families; and Charles Webster will highlight the archives he dotes upon like a father.
"These are my children," says Webster -- whose wife, Carol, is expecting their first child -- of the drawers and boxes of books and files that he manages. "It's like any other parent: you keep your eye on your kids. I started reading the shelves and going through the cabinets the day I got here, and every single day I find something new that excites me." The collection's prized possession is a letter from President-elect George Washington, thanking the Ladies of Trenton for their gracious reception on his way to his first inauguration in New York. There is a handwritten letter by Abraham Lincoln as well, but it is the Trenton memorabilia that makes the section unique. Personal diaries, transcripts of labor disputes, police blotters, business cards, yearbooks, embossed invitations to the Firemen's Balls of the 1850s -- all reside under Webster's watchful eye and form part of his encyclopedic knowledge.
"The collection itself dates back over 300 years," says Webster. "This is the oldest library in New Jersey. It traces its lineage to the Trenton Library Company started in 1750 by Thomas Cadwalader and Benjamin Franklin, and we have books from that original collection."
The expansion of the local history section coincides with what Webster hails as Trenton's current revitalization. "Trenton was a dead city since the early 1960s," he says. "It is just now starting to come to life again after lying dormant for 35 years." Abandoned by industry and the mass exodus to the suburbs, Trenton -- like other cities -- is being rediscovered. According to Webster, Trenton pride is creeping back.
"When I go places outside the city," he says, "or even inside the city, and I start to brag about the fact that I love my city, most people want to take my temperature and check my pulse. But now the people who made Trenton so important are starting to be recognized nationally. Now I'm starting to hear people say, `Yeah, I remember! That happened in Trenton!'"
And Trenton's revival is taking place during a boom time for historical research. "People are thirsting for it," says Webster. "They want to know where their roots are, what drew their family here. People moving into historic districts want to know not just about their houses, but the neighborhood that surrounds them." And thanks to television's History Channel, and programs such as Ken Burns' series on the Civil War and the Brooklyn Bridge, people are becoming more educated. "They get into it a little bit," Webster says, "and the next thing you know, they're history-aholics."
About 40 percent of the visitors to the library's Local History and Genealogy Section come for genealogical research, while the rest delve into Trenton's past and personalities. Webster now receives letters from around the world and fields phone calls from Tokyo executives who are fascinated by the Roeblings. His knowledge of Trenton, its layout and chronology, is astonishing for a man of only 34 -- with some credit due, again, to his astute grandmother.
"She used to tell me about how Trenton used to be," Webster recalls. "But as I got older, that aggravated more than enamored me with history. She always used to tell me how great Trenton was and would never tell me about how great Trenton is." Fortunately, Webster's father, Charles Webster III, passed on to the oldest of his six children his own profound historical perspective.
"My father is a very patriotic man and has always been in touch with his history. He gave me a real sense of who I was and where I came from." Webster remembers his many walks through Trenton as a child with his father, the family trips his father organized to Gettysburg and Valley Forge, the way his father would never pass an historical marker without pulling over to the side of the road.
"My father always took me to the area where our family first came to America -- Deal Island in the Chesapeake. He used to take me to cemeteries there filled with Websters. A few miles away from where our summer house was in southern Delaware was one of the markers for the Mason-Dixon line. My dad would always stop and say, `This is the line people used to fight over in the Civil War, but it's a lot older than that.' And he'd tell us these great stories. My father was a great storyteller, and he still is."
It was his father's father, Charles Webster Jr., who brought the family to Trenton from Maryland in 1946, looking for a job after World War II. Charles IV is the first native-born Trentonian on his father's side, while on his mother's side, his "Top Road" grandmother was the first in her family to be American- and Trenton-born. During the city's industrial heyday, she worked for National Ceramic and Stangel Pottery, while Webster's maternal grandfather made condoms at Young's Rubber, an impressive industrial pedigree on both sides.
Webster's history speciality is the Civil War -- and guess which city General George McClellan is buried in? -- but his favorite era of Trenton history is the latter part of the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution, and its people. "I look up to people like the Roeblings, the Scudders, the movers and shakers. Everybody knew everybody, and we were a real community back then," he says.
And history has given Webster his future as well as his past: he met his wife at the first meeting of a Civil War club he formed with some friends. "I always say a war brought us together," jokes Webster. "We started dating and the rest, as they say, is history." And what Trenton neighborhood do the Websters call home? "South Trenton. It's called Chestnut Park." But then there are those Trentonians, like his grandmother, who are sticklers for neighborhood identity.
"Some people would argue with me about where I live," Webster admits. "I'm right on the border with Deutzville."
-- Phyllis B. Maguire