It Happened in Hillsborough: The McKinley Bronze

Newark has Christopher Columbus, Martin Luther King, Jr. Albert Einstein, and Declaration signer
John Witherspoon lives on in Princeton. In Morristown, you can find George Washington, and in
Hoboken, Frank Sinatra. Lou Costello, bat in hand, looks ready to begin his famous routine in Memorial
Park in Paterson. I am, of course, referring to statues of prominent public figures on display in New
Jersey towns. And at one time, Hillsborough was also on this list, with a larger-than-life bronze  
representation of an American president.

The McKinley Bronze

Tobacco magnate James B. Duke was a great admirer of America’s 25 th president, William McKinley.
Sometime in 1906, Duke contacted Italian-American sculptor Gaetano Trentanove to commission a
larger-than-life tribute to the president, who was assassinated in September 1901. The sculpture was
based on a favorite portrait of McKinley that hung in Duke's New York office and was cast in Florence,
Italy, in January 1907. It was intended to be displayed at Duke's Hillsborough, New Jersey, estate, on the
site of the large greenhouses built between 1909 and 1912.

The casting of the bronze was an event in itself, with the American Consul in Italy and other dignitaries
present. The McKinley statue arrived in Hillsborough later that year and was eventually placed on a
sixteen-foot marble-and-granite base, where it stood for more than 50 years. In 1958, Doris Duke formed Duke Gardens, Inc. to transform the greenhouses into what would become
the famous display gardens. William McKinley did not fit into her plans. She began looking for someone
who would accept the statue as a donation. She was even willing to pay shipping costs. In March of
1960, the city council of Niles, Ohio - McKinley's birthplace - accepted the donation.                

Transportation arrangements took seven months. On October 11, 1960, an oversized railcar was moved
onto the private siding off the South Branch Railroad, which runs through the Duke Estate. The marble
and granite base was divided into five segments, and McKinley himself was lowered intact into an open  
gondola.

Having stood in front of Niles High School since the early 1960s, the McKinley bronze has been in its
third location since 2013: the new Niles McKinley High School.

While Hillsborough currently has no statues of prominent Americans, a statue of a Hillsborough native
resides in Newark… but we will leave that for another day!

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Gregory Gillette has been writing about local history for 20 years, starting with his Courier News column
“Gillette on Hillsborough” and continuing today with a Facebook page of the same name. He was named
as Hillsborough’s first Local Historian in 2025.