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History Is Her Fort

Small relics tell the story of British strongholds from the Revolution

By Molly McCarthy | Staff Writer

A spent musketball embedded in a clear plastic block hangs from a wall in a church foyer. A red sandstone headstone of a long-dead soldier rests in the garden wall of a Victorian estate. And a corner of a back lawn rises into a grassy mound half the size of a tennis court.

They are hints of history, the subtlest traces of a dramatic episode in Long Island's past when American patriots, thirsting for independence, took up arms against their English rulers. They are reminders of the British forts that once dotted the Island's coastline.

Fort Franklin. Fort Slongo. Fort Setauket. Fort St. George. Sag Harbor Fort. Patriot raiders from Connecticut, slinking ashore from swift-moving whaleboats, targeted these strategic strongholds in hopes of weakening the enemy's grip on Long Island.

None of the forts has survived. Some, like Sag Harbor Fort and Fort St. George in Mastic, are marked by a simple stone monument or brass plaque. At Sag Harbor, a boulder placed in 1902 reads: ``A British Fort near this spot was captured by the Americans under Lieut. Col. Meigs at the Battle of Sag Harbor, May 23, 1777.'' Tourists must take the monument's word that something important once happened there.

But there are other spots that boast more than a plaque or monument -- that betray slight signs of a turbulent time.

Nearly 200 years after Maj. Benjamin Tallmadge led a raid on Fort Slongo, Helen Gurland was scanning real-estate listings for a new home. She was intrigued by an ad for a Fort Salonga ranch with a ``historic site on the property.''

The ``historic site'' turned out to be the remains of Fort Slongo. On Oct. 3, 1781, Tallmadge and his men killed two British soldiers, captured 21 more and burned the stockaded fort to the ground.

``It's not much of anything to look at,'' said Gurland, a science teacher at Friends Academy in Locust Valley who has lived in her ranch home since 1971. ``It was really the house, in the end, and not the fort that made me buy it.''

Bordered by a few trees and bushes, the fort's remnants are snuggled in a corner of Gurland's backyard. Rising about two feet from the rolling lawn, the sides of the embankment form a flat-top square. A small garden grows in its center.

But a dense stand of trees blocks any view of the nearby Long Island Sound. Gurland doesn't even bother bringing students to see it. ``They'd stand there and say, `Where's the fort?'''

Still, Gurland visited the Library of Congress to see the crude map Tallmadge used to find the fort. ``The accounts say the rebels landed at Crab Meadow Beach, but that's an awfully long walk,'' Gurland says. Then she points out a depression in the woods behind the fort. ``That could be the ravine they're talking about where the rebels came up.''

About 10 miles east of Gurland's home, a half-dozen worshippers gather for a noon service in The Caroline Church of Brookhaven, a 269-year-old building on the edge of Setauket's village green. Sitting on soft, red cushions in bright white pews, the parishioners recite the Lord's Prayer led by the church rector. In the summer of 1777, British soldiers, praying to God and the king, worshipped where the parishioners now stand.

The soldiers at Fort Setauket didn't have far to walk to reach the Caroline Church, then an Anglican church named for King George II's wife. It was only a few yards across the village green from the Presbyterian Church the British converted into a fortified outpost.

Rebels attacked the fort in August, 1777. But the Patriots soon retreated when word came that British ships were en route from Huntington. Although the Presbyterian Church burned after being struck by lightning several years after the war, the Caroline Church endured.

``Many of the congregants had to leave Long Island after the war because they were considered traitors,'' said David Elling, the Caroline's junior warden. ``I'm eternally grateful to them for all their hardships. The church is there because of all the sacrifices those people went through.''

During a renovation in the 1930s, a musketball was extracted from one of the church walls. The flattened chunk of lead was encased in plastic and hung in the foyer. The gold-lettered inscription reads: ``Found embedded in church wall near Southwest corner in 1936. Doubtless a relic of Battle of Setauket of 1777.''

Elling says the legacy is probably more doubtful than doubtless. ``It could have been left 50 years later by a boy shooting at squirrels with his grandfather's gun. There is just no way of proving it.''

At least two raids were carried out at Fort Franklin, situated on a high bluff on the western edge of Lloyd Neck with a clear view of Oyster Bay and Cold Spring Harbors. The first attack, run by Tallmadge in September, 1779, was an overwhelming success, although the fort was left intact. The second, tried two years later with a French garrison, was a bust.

A century after Tallmadge's victory, workers unearthed a cache of relics while digging a foundation for a summer mansion. They recovered musket shot and cannonballs and found the gravestone of a Loyalist soldier in a nearby field. All were built into the mansion's garden wall.

``As for other visible remains, there's really nothing,'' said Robert MacKay, director of the Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities. ``There are two embankments left that form the inner courtyard, but they had to cut into the berms during the restoration. They replaced it with clean fill. They're a little too perfect looking.''

But, perhaps the most striking reminder of Fort Franklin is the site's commanding view. ``It's one of the most dramatic views on Long Island,'' says MacKay. ``If you think about the Revolution and the way the channel hugs the Lloyd Neck shore, you can control the channel and, hence, control the two harbors. And that was the raison d'etre for Fort Franklin.''

Gathering up what remains of these few forts would make for a rather anemic exhibition. Yet the legacies are enriched by the people who come across them year after year. Nudged by a small remembrance of the past, they wonder what those days must have been like when war ruled Long Island.

Pushing a lawnmower over her misshapen back lawn this past summer, Gurland was struck by an idea. ``I was thinking that this fall, on the anniversary of the battle, I should invite the neighborhood over for a get-together in the backyard,'' she said. ``Many of them have never even seen the fort.''