Old Stone House

On August 27, 1776, four hundred Marylanders saved the American army by dying at a Dutch farmhouse. The Battle of Brooklyn — the largest battle of the Revolution — had already been lost; Washington's army was fleeing to the forts on Brooklyn Heights with the British behind them. The stone farmhouse on the Gowanus road was held by two thousand British and Hessian troops. The First Maryland Regiment — four hundred men — attacked it six times, took it twice, and held the pursuit long enough for the army to escape. Two hundred fifty-nine of them didn't. Washington watched from a hill and reportedly said, 'Good God, what brave fellows I must this day lose.'

The Maryland 400's sacrifice is the reason the Revolution survived August 1776 — the rear-guard action that held Cornwallis while Washington evacuated to Manhattan. Their bodies were never found; they're presumably still under Park Slope somewhere, in the ground where the farmhouse stood. The house itself — built by Claes Vechte in 1699, two-foot fieldstone walls — was demolished in 1897 and rebuilt in 1933 as a replica on the original foundations, using the original stones.

It's a museum now, in Washington Park in Park Slope, surrounded by the neighborhood that grew over the battlefield. The Marylanders' graves are somewhere under the brownstones; the house is the marker. Brooklyn's oldest battle is also its least visible — a whole engagement buried under a neighborhood, with one rebuilt farmhouse to show where the army was saved.