Hightstown, New Jersey is a small borough of 5,900 people in Mercer County. Hightstown is withing commuting distance of Manhattan and is in the Raritan Valley. Hightstown has an historic district with over 70 buildings from the 19th Century. At the heart of the district is the Civil War monument. The monument was erected in 1875 to honor those men from the county who had served in the Union army during the Civil War. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act provided a grant for Hightstown to clean the monument about a decade ago. The monument is surrounded by four Brooke cannons. There is a small triangle of land where the memorial was erected.
You may ask yourself why the borough’s name is spelled so oddly. It did not get its name from it being on a local heights. Instead it was named after the first English settler family headed by John and Mary Hight!
The triangle is well maintained and is a gathering place for Memorial Day and Veterans Day activities. The circular enclosure is planted with many flowers including roses.
When the monument was dedicated in 1875, Sergeant Edward T. Green gave the valedictory saying that it was erected to honor “the memory of soldiers…who received their death wounds upon bloody fields of battle – not in gallantly defending their native land from the attack of foreign enemies, but in repelling an effort to destroy our government institutions, made by our misguided and rebellious Southern fellow citizens.”
Green was a Princeton graduate who became a lawyer in the late 1850s. After the Civil War he returned to practice law in Trenton and was later appointed a Federal judge.
The four Brooke Rifles were manufactured in the Confederacy during the Civil War. They were placed in coastal forts or on ships. It appears that these cannons were captured by Union forces during the war. The were likely cast at the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond, Virginia. The cannons weight 1,100 pounds each. John Mercer Brooke designed them.
In 1978, a collector in Manassas, Virginia offered Hightstown $4,000 for all four of the cannons to return them to the south. This created a stir in the community with many people realizing there was little written about the monument or the cannons. People had sort of taken them for granted.
