PRINCETON, N.J. — The Battle of Princeton, which some historians say changed the course of the Revolutionary War, unfolded on Jan. 3, 1777, when Gen. George Washington rallied his troops to defeat the British Redcoats. The battle was fought in difficult conditions, and though it was fierce, the fighting ended quickly.  Another battle here — just a musket volley from Princeton Battlefield State Park — has raged for years and is now coming to a head. This struggle is over a far more mundane disagreement: a housing development.  The construction site is next to the state park. But the problem, according to preservationists and some historians, is that the site sits on land that happens to be the precise location of the battle’s climactic moment, the spot where Washington staged a daring counterattack.  Instead of bayonet charges and musket fire, this conflict has unleashed more modern means of warfare: legal briefs and wetland studies, public hearings and dueling historical assessments.  “Most of the charge was launched from this property,” said Jim Campi, director of policy and communications for the Civil War Trust, a nonprofit in Washington that advocates preserving battlefields, including those of the Revolutionary War.  “The place where the charge first struck and broke the British lines occurred right where they want to put the development,” he said. “It’s right on top — there’s no sugarcoating it.”  But not everyone agrees, and the conflict over where, exactly, the battle was fought has pitted one of the most august research centers in the country against local and national preservationists. The center, the Institute for Advanced Study, where Albert Einstein worked until his death, wants to build faculty housing on its campus.  The project has raised philosophical questions of how best to honor historic events — whether to preserve the land on which they occurred or to focus instead on education while allowing the land to be put to new uses.  For its part, the institute has enlisted historians who say, in essence, that the Battle of Princeton was sprawled across a huge area. While some fighting may have occurred on the seven acres where the housing development is proposed, there is no evidence that Washington led the decisive charge in that spot.  The location of the long-lost Saw Mill Road, the back way that George Washington used to surprise the British at the Battle of Princeton, is a key point of dispute. A 2010 study claimed to have found it, and placed a crucial battle on a field on which the Institute for Advanced Study wants to build. Some historians say the road’s location is dubious, especially the sudden turn to the northwest that takes it by the development site.  Mark Peterson, the chairman of the history department at the University of California, Berkeley, analyzed a study of the battle on behalf of the institute. The study, commissioned by the Princeton Battlefield Society, a leading opponent of the housing plan, posits that a famous back road to Princeton that Washington’s men took after their victory at the Battle of Trenton traversed the institute’s planned construction site.  “The shooting actually takes place for several miles west of town and through the center of town, where Princeton University is today,” Professor Peterson said. “The idea that this Battlefield Society is saying that this set of acres was the centerpiece of the battle is a misunderstanding on its face of what the whole thing was.”  Theodore J. Crackel, a military historian and the former editor in chief of the Papers of George Washington, a project at the University of Virginia, agreed. “Unless you want to tear down a third of Princeton University’s buildings, where the battle also took place,” he said, “it doesn’t seem that they are ever going to have a definitive answer to this.”  Founded in 1930, the institute, which is not affiliated with Princeton University, was conceived as a sort of academic village — an intellectual oasis where scholars could pursue research in history, mathematics, and the natural and social sciences without the distractions of teaching or the pressure to publish. In recent years, as housing prices in Princeton have soared, some faculty members have been forced to live far from campus.  The institute’s 800-acre campus — nearly three-quarters of which is protected from development — has some housing, though it is primarily for visiting scholars from around the world. The institute also wants to accommodate its 25 full-time faculty members, to enable, as its website explains, “frequent opportunities to personally interact — either intentionally or by chance.”  The institute has already altered its plan in several ways. Instead of 15 single-family houses each on about an acre, as the institute originally proposed, the plan now calls for eight attached townhouses and seven homes on seven acres, thus preserving more open space.  At the suggestion of experts, including two historians, James M. McPherson and David Hackett Fischer, the institute is moving the planned housing farther from the battlefield park’s border, using more natural materials and colors on the facades and creating a screen of vegetation.  Perhaps the most striking adjustment in plans was the institute’s decision to create a 200-foot-wide buffer between the faculty housing and the battlefield park. When combined with adjacent land, it is the equivalent of more than 14 acres adjoining the 74-acre battlefield park that will be protected from future development.  “We believe that, quite apart from the legal issues, that we have always paid attention to what impact the project might have on the battlefield,” said John Masten, the institute’s associate director for finance and administration.  The institute has all the approvals it needs — from Princeton’s planning board, the state Department of Environmental Protection and the Delaware and Raritan Canal Commission — and workers have begun to prepare the site.  Rather than using the project’s link to history to try to stop it, opponents are now turning to land-use law, including the federal Clean Water Act. The housing development, they say, infringes on protected wetlands, though state officials say they have found no evidence of that.  “I firmly believe it’s sacred ground,” said State Senator Kip Bateman, a Republican who has worked with the Princeton Battlefield Society. “Our forefathers fought on that field and died. It should not be developed. I don’t know how the people at the institute can live with themselves. That was one of the battles that turned the Revolution around.’’  The Civil War Trust said the institute rejected an offer last year of $4.5 million for the 22 acres surrounding the housing site. “They said this project was a critical need,” Mr. Campi recalled. “To us, it is astounding that faculty housing is a critical need.” Mr. Masten said the location best suited the institute’s needs.  Professor Peterson acknowledged that preserving vast acres to honor the victims of a battle may make sense in the case of the Civil War, when thousands of men perished in a single conflict, many of them unidentified. In the Battle of Princeton, however, only a few dozen men were killed.  “Most historians aren’t trying to stand in the way of historical commemoration,” he said. “But this one seems so wrongheaded to me in the face of an organization that has really good reasons for doing what it wants to do. This is one of the great centers of learning in the country. I’m not in a position to think that that’s chopped liver.”
A research institute’s plans for a housing development in Princeton, N.J., has drawn criticism from preservationists of a storied battleground.