When a New Jersey pork roll king’s opera house was facing a wrecking ball in the 1970s, art lovers scrambled to rescue a large mural displayed there for decades.
The mural, “George Washington Crossing the Delaware,” was painted by renowned Philadelphia artist George M. Harding in 1921 for the Taylor Opera House in Trenton, a large theater built in 1867 by John Taylor, the founder of Taylor Pork Roll. Art conservators, according to a 1972 New York Times article, took the painting down before demolition, believing it would be displayed in a visitors’ center at Washington Crossing State Park for the nation’s bicentennial in 1976.
The painting was coated in wheat paste and Japanese rice paper, rolled up, then stored, for unknown reasons, in a building at Ringwood State Park, 80 miles north, in Passaic County. If not for a historian with a keen eye, the mural might have been forgotten forever.
“It just sat there, rolled in a dank basement for 50 years, near some Christmas decorations,” said Patricia Millen, a historian and coauthor of the book Images of America: Washington Crossing.
