Memorial to Revolutionary War patriots shines anew in Brooklyn

Editorial

As dusk approaches Saturday, there will burn in Brooklyn a light that honors America's first war dead and recalls New York City's role as the resting place for most of the patriots who died in the Revolutionary War....

...Neighbors banded together and formed the Fort Greene Park Conservancy under the leadership of Ruth Goldstein, a New Yorker par excellence. For almost four decades, Goldstein pressed the powers that be to reclaim the monument. Talk about dedication to a cause.

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City late in getting F’Greene monument ready for big day

By Mike McLaughlin
The Brooklyn Paper

The city has had 100 years to prepare for next month’s Prison Ship Martyrs Monument centennial, but workers are still racing to restore the centerpiece of Fort Greene Park to its former glory in time for the big day.

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By Amy Crawford
Brooklyn Daily Eagle

FORT GREENE -- Between 1776 and 1783, as the British occupied New York, 16 ships anchored offshore from what is now the Brooklyn Navy Yard held thousands of Revolutionary War prisoners in cramped, squalid conditions. Over those seven years, some 11,500 died. Their bodies were buried in shallow graves or thrown overboard, only to wash up in Brooklyn, where they were collected and interred beneath a wooden memorial.

In the 1840s, Walt Whitman, who was then the editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, campaigned for a more fitting monument to “the prison ship martyrs.”