New Jersey Legislature marks its 250th anniversary at Princeton University

Members of the New Jersey General Assembly and Senate met at Princeton University on February 5, 2026 in the Faculty Room of Nassau Hall for a special ceremonial session recognizing the 250th anniversary of the first official meeting of the New Jersey Legislature.

Nassau Hall was the site of the legislature’s inaugural meeting on August 27, 1776, where its members elected the state’s first governor, William Livingston, and convened on campus through November. The legislature officially moved its chambers to Trenton’s State House when the city became the permanent state capital in 1790.

“Today isn’t simply a change in venue for us — it’s a return home,” Assembly Speaker Craig J. Coughlin said in his opening remarks: “A return to our beginnings, to the place where our legislature first met in 1776 at the dawn of a new and uncertain democracy.”

Today’s state legislators conducted their ceremonial session seated in four banks of benches facing each other in the soaring, wood paneled room, beneath a monumental Charles Willson Peale portrait of George Washington and a portrait of King George II of England.

Afterward, many lawmakers took a moment for celebratory selfies to commemorate the legislature’s return to its first home. The event not only commemorated Princeton’s place in the history of the New Jersey Legislature but also American independence — one of many U.S. Semiquincentennial observances marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.

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