By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
Light snow began to fall Saturday morning over Princeton Battlefield State Park, where a group of volunteers were working to make history more accessible.
”We’re trying to clean it up as best as we can,” said Philadelphia resident Brian Kovacs, vice president of the Princeton Battlefield Society, as he walked over a brush-filled area waiting to be cleared. He and other volunteers — including about a dozen Boy Scouts from Princeton Troop 43 — came out for a cleanup day, the first of two seasonal cleanups that the society has planned this year.
Joe Carney, a Glenwood resident who was breathing hard after a morning spent in the field, said he volunteered out of “a love of history, I guess, the fact that the park needs some help. For me,” he continued,” it’s a labor of love.”
The battlefield, the scene of a pivotal conflict in January 1777 between the British and the American armies, once was farmland.
”Historically, it would have been much more open land at the time of the battle,” said park historian John Mills.
In the morning, the volunteers worked toward the back of the park, on other side of the historic 18th century Clarke House. Boy Scouts like Hamza Mustafa of West Windsor were clearing a road that Washington’s army used to get to the battlefield, known as the Sawmill Road. It is historical nuggets like the road and portions of an old Revolutionary War barn that the society wants people to see when they visit the park.
”So what we wanted to do is give people an opportunity to come out here and to see another historic part of the battlefield that was here, that gives you a kind of a juxtaposition of where Washington would have been,” Mr. Kovacs said. “There’s a lot to see here. And that’s what we’re trying to show.”
Mr. Kovacs, a Montclair native, said he believes the Revolutionary War gets overlooked, because it was a conflict that was not recorded in pictures, like every war since the Civil War. “It’s hard for people to find anything tangible about it,” he said.
Members of the Battlefield Society are respectful of what some consider sacred or hallowed ground, the place that Mr. Kovacs called the turning point of the Revolutionary War and one that has not been lost to development.
”Fortunately there’s enough people who appreciate it for what it is,” Mr. Carney said.
