Society of Old Brooklynites remembers the Prison Ship Martyrs on 110th anniversary
For 110 years, the Society of Old Brooklynites has held its annual memorial service in Fort Greene Park to honor a group of heroic American patriots at the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument, which honors the confirmed 11,500 American prisoners of the Revolutionary War who were captured by the British.
Conditions aboard those prison ships were said to have been horrible with almost no food, no medical supplies and a lack of sanitary conditions.
The prisoners died at an alarming rate and the British even buried some in shallow graves in the sand along the shore. Nobody knew about the POWs until years after the war when their bodies and remains would self-exhume along the Brooklyn shoreline.