ALBANY, N.Y.– A historical-preservation group working to identify some of the hundreds of soldiers believed buried at a Revolutionary War site in the Hudson Valley has attached names to another three of the fallen, including an officer from Maryland and two German mercenaries who fought for the British.
The Friends of the Fishkill Supply Depot said in a statement last weekend that a researcher studying pension files of American Revolution veterans has identified Capt. Joseph Burgess of the 4th Maryland Regiment as a soldier known to have died at the depot, site of a major Continental Army supply depot throughout most of the war.
Burgess, a native of Anne Arundel County, enlisted in December 1776 and died two years later at Fishkill in Dutchess County, about midway between Albany and Manhattan. He was 41 days shy of his 24th birthday when he died while serving in a regiment comprised of soldiers from Baltimore, Somerset and Anne Arundel counties. The group said he may have seen action at the battles of Brandywine and Germantown in Pennsylvania and Monmouth, New Jersey.
His cause of death remains unknown, said Lance Ashworth, the group’s president.
The preservation group also said historical research uncovered the deaths at the Fishkill Supply Depot of Andreas Keunberg and Conrad Roth, members of a regiment led by Maj. Gen. Friedrich Baron von Riedesel, commander of the German troops fighting alongside the redcoats during the Battles of Saratoga in 1777. Both soldiers were from Germany’s Brunswick province and were taken prisoner when the British surrendered at Saratoga.
Keunberg and Roth fell sick as their regiment was being marched to captivity in Virginia, and both died at Fishkill in December 1778 after being left there for medical care.
So far, the group has identified 87 soldiers who died at Fishkill during the Revolutionary War, most of them from eight of the original 13 colonies. They’ve also identified four Canadians, two African-Americans and one Frenchmen.
“After the surrender at Saratoga, there were British troops at Fishkill, there were these German mercenaries,” Ashworth said. “It was quite a place of importance, and we’re seeing the international scope.”
In 2007, archaeologists rediscovered the supply depot’s cemetery, located on privately owned land along a heavily traveled stretch of Route 9. Volunteer researchers have been going through muster rolls, hospital records and other wartime documents to identify the men known to have been buried at Fishkill. Historians believe the cemetery is the burial place of several hundred soldiers.
