The fight to save part of the Princeton Battlefield went international with two British organizations including a veterans group of the infantry unit that fought there calling on the Institute for Advanced Study to halt its 15-unit faculty housing project.
Representatives of the Battlefields Trust and the Royal Tigers’ Association wrote last week to leaders of the IAS urging them to reconsider building on land seen as historic on both sides of the Atlantic.
“We cannot imagine a worse possible use for this historic property than to develop even a portion of it,” wrote Tony Pollard, a trustee of the Royal Tigers, which is made up veterans who fought with the Royal Leicestershire Regiment. Tracing its roots to 1688, the regiment fought at the battle of Princeton in January 1777, under the name of the 17th Regiment of Foot.
“As proud as we are of the regiment’s role in Princeton,” Mr. Pollard continued, “the Royal Tigers’ Association maintains another link to the battlefield. Some of the men who served in the 17th Regiment of Foot never left Princeton, and remain buried in unmarked graves somewhere on the battlefield.”
Likewise, Howard Simmons, chairman of the Battlefields Trust, a battlefield preservation group, called on the IAS to build somewhere else.
“Without this site, our joint heritage will be poorer,” he wrote.
Both organizations have joined the now 12-member group known as the Save Princeton Coalition, made up of the Princeton Battlefield Society, the New Jersey Sierra Club and others opposed to the IAS development.
For its part, the IAS had no comment this week. The IAS has said on its website that the housing project will take up “a mere seven acres of property opposite Battlefield State Park.” There also will be a 200-foot buffer between the site and the park.
