A new Digital Edition of Margaret J. O’Connell’s comprehensive book, Pennington Profile, is now available as a free digital download, with searchable text and over 190 annotated photos.
Download (PDF) – Text Only – Photos Only – Full Digital Edition
The Hopewell Valley History Project and the Pennington Public Library are pleased to announce the release of the new Digital Edition of Margaret J. O’Connell’s comprehensive book, Pennington Profile, A Capsule of State and Nation.
This new edition includes the full text and photographs from the original book published by Margaret O’Connell in 1966, plus additional photos from the second edition published by the Pennington Public Library in 1986 – now reformatted as a digital PDF file so it can be shared online and conveniently searched.
This important book of local history was out of print, but is now freely available for families, students, and researchers as a download on the Hopewell Valley History Project site (HopewellHistoryProject.org/pennington-profile).
The Book
Margaret J. O’Connell (1915 – 1971) was a lifelong resident of Pennington. She worked as both a teacher and a principal, including teaching English and history at Hopewell Township Central High School.
Her career was ended by illness, and she wrote Pennington Profile while bed-ridden as a permanent record of her community’s past.
Pennington Profile follows the growth of Pennington from a tiny settlement to a colonial village to a rural town, and then later expanding from a country suburb to a suburbia complex. It also shows the town’s relationship with major trends and national affairs.
Its emphasis throughout is on the stories of people and their daily lives.
The Digital Edition
Margaret J. O’Connell completed the first edition of Pennington Profile in 1966. The Pennington Public Library later assumed the copyright and published a second edition in 1986 that added a fourth set of photographs.
This new Digital Edition from 2022 includes the full text of the original book (325 pages), plus the four sets of annotated photographs from the second edition (108 pages, 193 photos). The full Margaret J. O’Connell photograph collection recently has been donated to the Hopewell Valley Historical Society by St. James Church, which also granted permission for the use of the photographs in this edition.
The original book and photos were digitized and processed by Douglas Dixon, with additional layout and proofing by Carol A. Errickson.
The Digital Edition replicates the design and layout of the original book, so the Contents and Index page references are unchanged. The pages are formatted to standard letter size for convenient reading and printing. Minor edits were made to obvious typos, but otherwise the text is unchanged from the original. The flow of text across lines and page boundaries was changed by the use of modern typography instead of manual hyphenation.
The major structural change was to extract the four separate blocks of photographs from their original locations within the text and combine them together as an appendix at the end of the book.
Downloads
The Digital Edition of Pennington Profile is available in three versions (click to view or download PDF file):
- Text Only (PDF) – The full text as a smaller download for reading and searching (328 pages, 2 MB)
- Photos Only (PDF) – The four set of photographs, with searchable annotations (112 pages, 193 photos, 40 MB)
- Full Digital Edition (PDF) – Text and photos (436 pages, 42 MB)
Selected Quotes
Quotes from Pennington Profile
From the Forward:
This is the story of a small town which began as a tiny settlement of about a dozen buildings, became a colonial village, expanded in population and area to the status of a rural town, and then witnessed its own metamorphosis from a country suburb of Trenton to a suburbia complex with a comparative mobile population closely allied by interests and occupations to the Princeton area.
Pennington Profile is unique in several ways. As nearly a possible, it is chronological rather than topical. Its emphasis is on people and human interest incidents which make history live and sparkle. Here, definite effort has been made to show the relationship between aspects of life and happenings in Pennington with major trends and national affairs.
From About the Author:
Margaret J. O’Connell was a lifelong resident of Pennington, New Jersey. She received a B.S. degree in Education from Trenton State Teachers College, and later was one of the first group of three to be granted Masters degrees from that institution. She also attended Rutgers University as a graduate student. She worked as both a teacher and a principal, including teaching English and History at Hopewell Township Central High School. Her career was terminated by illness, and she wrote Pennington Profile while bed-ridden, as a permanent record of her community’s past and its relationship to state and national events and trends.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents of the book, with the sets of annotated photographs combined together as an appendix at the end of the book.
The Book
- Foreword
- I – Settlement In Area
- II – Founding Of Queenstown
- III – Life In Early Colonial Queenstown
- IV – A Colonial Village In Colonial America
- V – The American Revolution
- VI – Post War Era
- VII – The Town During Period Of State And National Development
- VIII – The Civil War
- IX – Period Of Growth And Change
- X – The Gay Nineties
- XI – First Decade Of Twentieth Century
- XII – Era Of Good Times
- XIII – Homefront During World War I
- XIV – Routine During A Short Peaceful Span
- XV – World War II
- XVI – The Town In The 1940’s
- XVII – Events Of The Second Half Of The Twentieth Century
- XVIII – The Soaring Sixties
- Appendix
- Index
Photographs
- Set 1 – 1880s – 1904
- Set 2 – 1904 – 1938
- Set 3 – 1938 – 1966
- Set 4 – 1880s – 1960
