Jacob Ruopp, Trentonʼs First Fallen Police Officer

Gravemarker for
Jacob Ruopp (1819–1875)

Jacob Ruopp, born December 31, 1819, was the first of Trenton's police officers to be killed in the line of duty. At a quarter past midnight on June 6, 1875, he and fellow officer Louis Hartmann came upon two rowdy men at the corner of Broad Street and Hamilton Avenue.

The officers told them the hour was early and it was time to go home, but one of the men, James Keenan, refused and struggled with the officers when they sought to arrest him for drunk and disorderly conduct. He subsequently pulled a handgun from his pocket and fired two shots, one of which struck Ruopp in the abdomen.

Hartmann and Ruopp took the suspect to the police station where he was booked and sent to the county jail, and Ruopp was sent home to be attended by a doctor. After twice probing the wound with medical instruments, several doctors were unable to locate the bullet, leading them to express their opinion that he was not likely to recover.

Ruopp succumbed to his injuries on June 14 and was interred in Section H, Lot 54-55, on June 16. The city's common council passed a resolution recognizing the fallen officer for the "faithful discharge of his duties" and voted in favor of paying the undertaker's bill for his funeral.

Keenan was indicted for murder, but convicted of manslaughter. After serving a ten-year sentence in state prison, he moved to Philadelphia and made a living selling produce, and where he also became a temperance advocate.

David W. Lenox and the Tugboat Adriatic

David W. Lenox
1822–1911

After spending much of his early life as a seafarer, David W. Lenox (1822–1911) and his brother William M. Lenox engaged in the steam-powered transport of cargo and timber rafts on the Delaware River between Trenton and Philadelphia. This proved a lucrative enterprise but the timber lands to the north were eventually depleted while the railroads took much of the cargo traffic.

The story may have ended there but for two newspaper articles: one in the Daily State Gazette on December 21, 1909, and the other days after his death in the Daily True American on February 23, 1911.

At the start of the Civil War, Lenox chartered his steam-powered tugboat Adriatic to the U.S. Government. The tug was sent to Fort Monroe, Virginia, where it remained for the duration of the war, and it was from this vantage point that he was thrice an eyewitness to history.

Samuel W. Gordon, Barber, Messenger and Antiques Dealer

Celtic Cross monument on the
Gordon lot

Samuel W. Gordon, an African-American, was born in Philadelphia on October 25, 1845. He learned barbering as a teenager, a trade in which he engaged throughout his life, and soon moved to Washington, D.C., where in addition to being a barber he was a messenger for the U.S. Supreme Court. While there he frequently shaved Abraham Lincoln and, as he must have been pleased to recollect, had the honor of accompanying the president on the occasion of his delivering his address at Gettysburg.

Coming to Trenton, for 46 years he served as the private messenger for 15 governors—Joseph D. Bedle, George B. McClellan, George C. Ludlow, Leon Abbett, Robert S. Green, George T. Werts, John W. Griggs, Foster M. Voorhees, Franklin Murphy, Edward C. Stokes, John F. Fort, Woodrow Wilson, James F. Fielder, Walter E. Edge, and Edward I. Edwards—from 1875 to 1920.

When Woodrow Wilson was elected president and left the governor's office for the White House, however, he invited him to return to Washington, but Gordon thought better of it and declined the invitation. That turned out to be a good decision for during his service to the governors he took an interest in antiques, first as a collector and later a dealer, and became a recognized authority in the field.

Charles Conrad Abbott, Archaeologist and Naturalist

Charles Conrad Abbott
ca.1900

Charles Conrad Abbott (1843-1919) was educated at the Trenton Academy and obtained his medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania. He never practiced medicine, however, and instead engaged in archaeology and natural history.

Abbott made his home along the bluff overlooking the marshlands south of Trenton and it was here that he unearthed man-made implements in the "glacial gravels" of the marsh. In The Stone Age in New Jersey, published in 1872, and Primitive Industry: or, Illustrations of the Handiwork, in stone, bone and clay, of the Native Races of the Northern Atlantic Seaboard of America, published in 1881, he noted that a cache of stone axes had been unearthed during the excavation of the receiving vault at Riverview Cemetery in 1859 and elsewhere along the bluff about the same time.

As "assistant in the field" of Harvard University's Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, his collection of stone implements was placed in the museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and added to yearly until it reached some 20,000 specimens. The journal Science observed at the time that it was "one of the most important series of its kind ever brought together, and one which archaeologists will consult for all time to come."

James Francis Armstrong, Revolutionary War Soldier, Chaplain

Ledger marking the grave of
James Francis Armstrong (1750-1816)

James Francis Armstrong was born on April 3, 1750, in West Nottingham, Maryland. His father, an elder in the Presbyterian church, sent him to the academy of Rev. John Blair at Fagg's Manor near New Londonderry, Pennsylvania, for his preparatory education. He subsequently entered the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) from which he graduated in 1773, then pursued theological study under the college's president, Rev. Dr. John Witherspoon.

He was accepted as a candidate for the ministry by the Presbytery of New Brunswick at the beginning of the American Revolution, but the presence of British troops near the town necessitated his examination being transferred to the Presbytery of New Castle. Even so, he took up a musket and joined as a private in the First Regiment, Hunterdon County, New Jersey Militia, but was shortly thereafter ordained a minister and appointed a chaplain assigned to the Continental Army's Second Brigade, Maryland. He served to the end of the war.

Armstrong was minister to the church at Elizabethtown in 1782 and 1783, and it was there that he met and married Susannah Livingston, the service being conducted by Witherspoon. He became pastor for thirty years of the First Presbyterian Church in Trenton in 1786.