State Teachers College and State Normal School Trenton, N.J., Past, Present, and Future, 1930

The College of New Jersey’s academic tradition reaches back to 1855 when it was established by the state legislature as the New Jersey State Normal School. It was the first state-established teacher training school in the state and the ninth in the nation. Governor Rodman Price promoted the idea of a training institute for New Jersey’s teachers and mobilized support among influential state leaders. Located on Clinton Avenue in Trenton from 1855 until the early 1930s, the Normal School flourished in the latter 1800s, expanding both its academic offerings and physical facilities. In 1925, the first four-year baccalaureate degree program was established. This change marked the beginning of TCNJ’s transition from a normal school to a teachers’ college and was accompanied by a change in physical surroundings. In 1928, a beautiful 210-acre tract of land in Ewing Township, then known as Hillwood Lakes, was purchased as a new site for the College.

Don Carroll Bliss was born on March 9, 1868, to Harriett Prescott and Willis R. Bliss in Corinth, Vermont. He attended Thetford Academy; then Dartmouth College, graduating in 1892, earning a master's degree in 1894, and doctorate in 1913. In 1894, he married Frances Marian McConnell (1870-1953), and they had sons Don C. Bliss, Jr. (1897-1978), and Robert W. Bliss (1905-1928). Robert was a Normal School student who served as its Office Assistant in 1926, and Instructor in English beginning in 1927. Don C. Bliss’s career included a series of school superintendent positions: beginning in Northville, Michigan; then Kearny, New Jersey from 1900 to 1905; Brockton, Massachusetts from 1905 to 1910; Elmira, New York from 1910 to 1912; and Montclair, New Jersey from 1912 to 1923. In the fall of 1923, he became the Principal and first president of New Jersey State Teachers College and State Normal School at Trenton until his retirement in 1930. In 1935, Bliss Hall, a new men’s dormitory at Trenton State was dedicated to him. By 1940, he was living in Biloxi Mississippi, where he died on May 19, 1945, and was buried in Vermont.