Seeking Brooklyn’s Lost Mass Grave

The New York Times ^ | August 25, 2012 | JUSTIN BURKE

[Pharmboy]

CONFIDENT Bob Furman suspects that up to 256 Revolutionary soldiers lie under this lot in Gowanus.
Dave Sanders for The New York Times

NOTHING is visible at the intersection of Third Avenue and Eighth Street in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn to indicate that anything extraordinary is there. The artisanal-pie place on one corner and the auto body shops across the way suggest it is merely another spot in the city where grit is giving way to gentrification. But if a small group of history enthusiasts are right, this particular corner of Kings County is hallowed ground.

HEROIC Kim Maier, executive director of the Old Stone
House, a Revolutionary War educational center in Park
Slope, describes the self-sacrifice of the First Maryland
Regiment in the Battle of Brooklyn as an act of great valor.
Dave Sanders for The New York Times

They believe that there is a mass grave a few dozen yards to the east of the intersection that contains the remains of American heroes: soldiers from the First Maryland Regiment under Col. William Smallwood, which saved Washington’s army during the Battle of Brooklyn on Aug. 27, 1776. Their burial site, these advocates say, deserves the same level of veneration accorded the military cemeteries at Gettysburg and Normandy.

The leader of the find-the-Marylanders group is Bob Furman, a Brooklyn historian and president of the Brooklyn Preservation Council, a nonprofit organization dedicated to maintaining brownstone Brooklyn’s look and feel. “The evidence is quite strong,” Mr. Furman said. “I’m confident enough that I tell everyone I know.”

But Mr. Furman has no way to test his theory. Right now, the site he is targeting is a vacant, concrete-covered lot studded with weeds and surrounded by a chain-link fence.

[SunkenCiv]

GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach	join list or digest view topics view or post blog bookmark post a topic subscribe
Thanks Pharmboy. Just adding to the catalog, not sending a general distribution. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.

[Pharmboy]

Thanks for the link...for everyone else, here it is:

And when any of you might be in Alexandria, Christ Church still has the pew set where General Washington and the family would attend church there. Not to miss for any Washington afficianados...

[Pharmboy]

Great stuff, TS...yes, I you grew up in that nabe. Always trust the locals...

[Pharmboy]

Great stuff, TS...yes, I knew you grew up in that nabe. Always trust the locals...

[Pharmboy]

Indeed...what you say is acknowledged in the books I have read on the war. And yes, they did have more training than many others RevWar soldiers, but they also had guts, guts, guts.

They do not call this state "The Old Line State" for nothing...

[AnalogReigns]

I have a direct patriot ancestor who died on a Brooklyn prison ship. Another who fought with Francis Marion in S. Carolina.

Thanks for posting this.