HOW TO GO
The Trenton Bicentennial Dinner Dance will be 5 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 27, with period dancers.
Tickets for the buffet dinner will be $2o per person (there will be a cash bar) and can be obtained at the Barn-n-Bunk, B-SAFE Driving Education LLC, and the Trenton government building.
The Grand Celebration will happen the weekend of June 17-19, and organizers want it to be memorable and loaded with history. Many possibilities are pending. People with ideas to share can call city officials.
Michael Pearce, who founded Trenton in 1816, will be present, in a way, when the city has a dinner dance Feb. 27 to celebrate its exact birthdate.
Pearce himself is buried in the city’s Founder’s Park near the center of town, but a man dressed as him will attend the dance at Barn-n-Bunk in Trenton. The dance also will feature people in period costumes doing dances of the time.
The dance “will be done to jump-start getting people to start thinking about the 200th year, but also as a fund-raiser, to help generate some money for the committee and so forth,” said City Manager John Jones, one of the top organizers.
Tickets for the 5 p.m. buffet dinner will be $20 per person, with a cash bar.
Meanwhile, at Trenton’s Grand Celebration the weekend of June 17-19, Pearce’s great-great-great, great-grandson, Peter Jenks, will be in town that weekend from Winston-Salem, N.C., enjoying the ambiance of the city his ancestor founded.
“The really big deal is going to be June 17, 18 and 19 next year, and that will include a variety of things — a parade, a carnival, just a general celebration of the community,” said Economic Development Director James Foster. Officials have feelers out, hoping to draw a band of national stature to perform.
Jenks, 70, recently retired as a teacher of social studies, history and geography, and since his retirement began studying his ancestry. He visited Trenton a couple years ago after learning of his ancestral link with the town, which Pearce originally named Bloomfield, after a New Jersey governor.
“There was almost a migration of people from a small area in New Jersey, that settled in the Trenton area, all of them kind-of related to each other, from their time back in New Jersey,” Jenks said.
Bloomfield’s was changed in the 1830s because there was another post office in Ohio named Bloomfield, so Trenton was chosen, in honor of New Jersey, where Pearce and other settlers had come from.
Trenton “is an interesting place,” Jenks said. He likes the fact that the original graveyard where his relative is buried hasn’t been moved, and remains at the center of town, and the original crossroads still exist.
“It’s been really interesting to revisit American history through relatives that I never knew I had,” said Jenks, who also is a first cousin to Daniel Boone, five or six times removed.
President James Madison, the country’s fourth commander in chief, was leading the nation, and Indiana was 10 months from becoming the 19th state when the plan for Bloomfield was created. Officials want to have events loaded with history. They also hope to build a pavilion at Trenton Community Park, to go with the amphitheater-style seating that already exists.
“The Trenton Historical Society is preparing an update to the 1966 history, which was written for the Sesquicentennial,” Foster said. “So that will be available next year, too.”
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