1st Maryland Regiment - Battle of Brooklyn

Battle of Brooklyn

The Maryland Regiment had joined the Continental Army barely two weeks before the Battle of Brooklyn. Unlike most of Washington's Army, the Maryland contingent had been well drilled at home and were so well equipped – they even had bayonets, a rarity for the Army – that the Regiment was known at home as the Dandy Fifth, and to the rest of the Army as "macaronis", the then current word for dandies. When the British under Cornwallis surprised the Americans by circling around their rear, Lord Stirling ordered all forces, other than the Marylanders, who were outside the fortified position on Brooklyn Heights to retreat there. Then Stirling led the 400 Maryland men against Cornwallis' 2,000 who were massed around the Old Stone House, a thick-walled fieldstone and brick fortification near today's Fifth Avenue and 3rd Street that had been built in 1699 to withstand Indian raids.

In fierce fighting, the Marylanders charged the British forces six times to give their comrades time to make their way to safety with the rest of Washington's army in the Heights. Twice they managed to drive the British from the house, but as more British reinforcements arrived and the Marylanders casualties mounted, they finally had to give up the assault and try to get to safety themselves. Only Major Gist and nine others managed to reach the American lines. Of the others, 256 lay dead in front of the Old Stone House and more than 100 were wounded/and or captured. The bravery of the Maryland Regiment earned them the name "immortals". The dead were buried in a farm field. The gravesite is located on what is now Third Avenue between 7th and 8th Streets. Until the widening of Third Avenue in 1910, the site was marked by a tablet that read: "Burial place of ye 256 Maryland soldiers who fell in ye combat at ye Cortelyou House on ye 27th day of August 1776."

Over time, the farm became the site of a Red Devil paint factory, and the burial grounds became part of a factory courtyard open to the sky because of a deed restriction relating to the grave. More time passed. The paint factory gave way to an auto repair shop and the courtyard was roofed over. Today the heroes whom Washington himself lamented lie under the floor of the building that had housed the auto repair shop. They lie in their unmarked grave miles from a Stanford White monument to their sacrifice in the form of a marble shaft topped with a sphere that stands at the foot of Lookout Hill in Prospect Park. It was erected in 1895 as a gift of the Maryland Society of the Sons of the American Revolution. The Old Stone House survived the battle and in later years became the first clubhouse of the baseball team that came to be known as the Brooklyn Dodgers. It was destroyed in the 1890s, and rebuilt in the 1930s.

Source: The Battle of Brooklyn 1776 by John J. Gallagher (Sarpedon Publishers, 1995)