Old Burial Hill
Town of Huntington, Suffolk County, New York
Marker Inscription
Vandalized by American Loyalist Benj. Thompson, later Count Rumford to build Fort Golgotha 1782 after hostilities ceased.
The Story
During the Revolutionary War, British-occupied Long Island suffered under harsh Loyalist rule, and Huntington's old burial ground became the scene of one of its most notorious indignities. In 1782, after the fighting had largely ended, the Loyalist officer Benjamin Thompson—the brilliant, opportunistic scientist later ennobled in Europe as Count Rumford—ordered a fort built directly atop this hill of graves. Soldiers reportedly tore up headstones to raise the earthworks, and the grim outpost earned the biblical name Fort Golgotha, the 'place of the skull.' The desecration outraged townspeople and became a lasting emblem of wartime occupation on Long Island.
Why it matters
This quiet hilltop captures how the Revolution's final months still brought hardship to occupied communities, and how the memory of a desecrated burial ground helped forge local identity and grievance in the new nation.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
For most of the Revolutionary War, Long Island was not a battlefield so much as occupied ground. After the British won the Battle of Long Island in the late summer of 1776, the whole island fell under royal military control and stayed there until the war's very end. Huntington, out along the North Shore, spent those years living under an occupying army — quartering soldiers, surrendering supplies, and answering to Loyalist authority rather than the Patriot committees that governed much of the rebelling colonies.
By 1782 the shooting war was essentially over. The decisive fighting had wound down after the American and French victory at Yorktown the previous autumn, and both sides were waiting on the peace negotiations that would end the war in 1783. Yet occupation did not lift the moment the muskets went quiet. British forces held their posts, and communities like Huntington remained under military rule during that long, uneasy interval between the last battle and the final treaty.
It is in that in-between season — after hostilities had ceased but before independence was secured — that this quiet hilltop earned its dark reputation.
People & events
The man at the center of the story is Benjamin Thompson, a figure who does not fit any simple label. Born in Massachusetts, he sided with the Crown and served the British as a Loyalist officer. Later, in Europe, the same restless mind would make him one of the notable scientific thinkers of his age, studying heat and energy, and he would be honored with the title by which history often remembers him: Count Rumford.
In 1782, Thompson set his soldiers to building a fortification on Huntington's old burial ground — the town's hill of graves. According to the marker and to local memory, the work desecrated the cemetery, with headstones reportedly pulled up and put to use in the earthworks. To a town that had buried generations there, it was a profound insult, and the name that stuck to the place said everything: Fort Golgotha, borrowed from the biblical hill called "the place of the skull."
What sharpened the outrage was the timing. This was not a fort thrown up in the heat of a campaign, when necessity might excuse hard choices. It came after the fighting had already stopped — an act that struck townspeople less as wartime defense than as a needless indignity imposed by an occupying power that had not yet gone home.
Its place in the American story
The Revolution is usually remembered through its great battles and founding documents, but for many ordinary Americans the war was something quieter and grinding: years of living under an army that was not their own. Occupied Long Island is one of the clearest windows into that experience, and Huntington's desecrated burial hill is one of its sharpest emblems.
The episode is also a reminder that a war does not end cleanly on a single day. In the long gap between the last major fighting and the signing of peace, the machinery of occupation kept running, and communities still bore its weight. A fort raised over graves in 1782 captures that stubborn afterlife of conflict better than almost any set-piece battle could.
There is a human complexity here, too. Benjamin Thompson would go on to international fame and a noble title, celebrated for his intellect. Standing on this hill, you are reminded that the people who shaped this era were not tidy heroes and villains, and that the new nation's memory was built as much on grievances like this one as on triumphs.
If you visit
Come expecting a place that trades on atmosphere rather than spectacle. This is an old burial hill in the middle of a Long Island town, and much of its power is in the contrast between how ordinary it looks and how heavy its story is. Give yourself a few minutes to simply stand and take in the rise of ground where the fort once sat.
Let your eye settle on the oldest, weathered headstones and the lay of the land itself. You won't find the fort — it's long gone — but the hill remains the same piece of earth that soldiers reshaped in 1782, and knowing what happened here changes how a quiet cemetery feels underfoot. Read the marker slowly; it says a great deal in very few words.
It makes a thoughtful stop on a North Shore history route, easily paired with Huntington's other colonial and Revolutionary sites for an afternoon spent close to the ground of the occupation. Treat it as you would any active cemetery — walk gently, keep to the paths, and let the place speak for itself.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Benjamin Thompson (Count Rumford)
Related events
- · Construction of Fort Golgotha (1782)
- · British occupation of Long Island
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Nathaniel Whitman
Town of Huntington, NY
Nathaniel Whitman (1732–1804) served as an officer in the Huntington militia during the American Revolution, one of the citizen-soldiers who defended Long Island's towns in a war fought close to home. After the British victory at the 1776 Battle of Long Island, the region fell under a harsh occupation that made local militia service both perilous and essential. His home and grave mark the life of one of the many ordinary patriots whose service rarely reached the history books.
Minuteman Statue
Westport, CT
In April 1777 a British column struck inland to destroy Continental supplies at Danbury, and Connecticut's militia and Continentals rushed to meet them. In the running fights that followed, General David Wooster was mortally wounded and Colonel Abraham Gould was among the more than one hundred who fell defending their state. This Minuteman statue in Westport honors those patriots and the citizen-soldiers who turned out to resist the raid.
General George Washington Tablet
New York, NY
In the spring of 1790, barely a year into his presidency and with the new federal government still finding its footing in nearby New York City, George Washington set out on a tour of Long Island, riding its country roads to see the land and meet the citizens of the young republic. This tablet marks one stretch of that journey through what is now Queens. It was placed in 1934 by the Matinecock Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, part of a nationwide effort in that era to fix the memory of the founding generation onto the everyday landscape.
Burr-Nash House
Westport, CT
Built in 1740, this Westport house went up when coastal Connecticut was a landscape of farms, ferries, and busy post roads. Its marker records that Capt. Thomas Nash raised it for Zachariah Burr, a member of the prominent Burr family, and that by the time of the Revolution it served as an inn—one of the taverns where travelers, news, and sometimes soldiers passed through. Roadside inns like this were the social hubs of 18th-century New England.