Brooklyn's Marylanders
A State Education Department of New York sign, created in 1952, hangs in front of an American Legion hall at 3rd Avenue and 9th Street, stating that remains of the 1st Maryland Regiment, which engaged the British during the battle at the nearby Old Stone House (which is now a museum) in August 1776 and enabled the main line of US troops to escape relatively undecimated, are buried there. The sign is not quite correct, as some say that evidence points to those remains existing beneath a parking lot a block away at 3rd Avenue and 8th Street.
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. The owners, who say they are interested in developing the property themselves or selling it to someone who will, have rebuffed his inquiries about conducting an archaeological probe on the site. NY Times, 8/26/12
I was heartened to see that the State Education Department sign, which had been sun-faded and illegible, has been given a restoration and new paint job in NY state colors of blue and gold. A few years ago, Forgotten New York did a series on remaining and now-lost State Education signs around town.
The supposed burial site is on a parking lot on 8th Street directly behind the American Legion Hall, part of which has now been developed with a new building. It would be interesting if an archeological dig could be performed to settle the issue for good and all, but that’s less likely now.
Kevin Walsh is the webmaster of the award-winning website Forgotten NY, and the author of the books Forgotten New York (HarperCollins, 2006) and also, with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, Forgotten Queens (Arcadia, 2013)