Van Wyck Homestead Museum

New York

Under the highway ramps and a shopping mall parking lot lies the largest identified burial ground of American Revolutionary War soldiers in the country.

historicalmilitary

The old Dutch house beside Route 9 was headquarters for the Fishkill Supply Depot, ordered into being by George Washington in 1775. It fed and armed about four thousand troops holding the Hudson Valley. Two thousand more soldiers camped on seventy acres around the house, with an artillery park for repairing cannons, a blacksmith shop, barracks and stables. The British watched it but never attacked. Hundreds of people died there anyway, of wounds, hypothermia, dysentery and smallpox, across seven years that included stretches of starvation. That makes the ground the largest burial site of American Revolutionary War soldiers identified anywhere in the United States. In 2007 archaeologists ran ground penetrating radar across the southern end of the property and found hundreds of graves. Much of the rest of the depot was built over in the 1970s, when the Dutchess Mall went up and highway ramps went through. The Van Wyck house is the last structure of the depot still standing.

This is the first of 3 parts. The rest runs about 2 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.

What this was written from
It is the largest burial ground of American Revolutionary War soldiers identified in the United States.

Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Nearby, on the same roads

  • Fishkill Creek 5.7 mi The kill in Fishkill has nothing to do with killing fish. It is just Dutch for creek.
  • Washington's Headquarters State Historic Site 6.5 mi The medal that became the Purple Heart was handed out to its first three recipients on this front lawn.
  • Bykenhulle 7.4 mi To get into the old chicken coop, you tip a carved wooden liquor bottle into a shot glass and a peephole opens.
  • Moodna Creek 8.2 mi At Salisbury Mills, the longest railroad trestle east of the Mississippi crosses this creek nearly two hundred feet overhead.
  • Newburgh (town), New York 8.4 mi An Ice Age boulder that county officials twice promised to protect was jackhammered into rubble one June morning, and nobody had been told.
  • Chadwick Lake 9.8 mi A lake became a town's water supply by about a hundred votes, after neighbors argued that piped water would end the countryside.