Underhill Burying Ground
Village of Mill Neck, Nassau County, New York
Marker Inscription
Founded by Captain John Underhill. Born Warwickshire, England, 1597. Arrived in Boston, Massachusetts, 1630. Died Matinecock, Long Island, 1672. Erected by Myron C. Taylor in honor of his mother Mary Morgan Underhill Taylor, 1953.
The Story
This quiet burying ground on Long Island's Gold Coast holds the grave of Captain John Underhill, one of the more colorful figures of early colonial New England and New Netherland. Born in England near the close of the sixteenth century, he crossed the Atlantic in 1630 during the great Puritan migration and spent the next four decades as a soldier, magistrate, and frontier settler before ending his days at Matinecock. The bronze plaque itself is a twentieth-century tribute: industrialist and diplomat Myron C. Taylor placed it in 1953 to honor his mother, an Underhill descendant, tying a modern family to its seventeenth-century roots.
Why it matters
The site links the earliest generation of English settlement on Long Island to the way later Americans chose to remember and memorialize their colonial ancestry, making one family's lineage a small window onto three centuries of the nation's story.
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Related people
- · Captain John Underhill
- · Myron C. Taylor
- · Mary Morgan Underhill Taylor
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Killingworth
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Here on the north shore of Long Island once stood "Killingworth," the estate of Captain John Underhill (1597–1672), a soldier who arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and became one of colonial New England's most consequential — and controversial — military commanders. Underhill led English forces in the Pequot War of the 1630s, later served the Dutch in their wars against Native peoples around New Netherland, and eventually settled on Long Island, where he held public office and lived out his final years. The house is gone, but his grave endures in the nearby Underhill Burying Ground, tying this quiet Nassau County ground to the earliest, most turbulent decades of European colonization.
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