David M. Griffin of Rocky Point releases book about British on Long Island during Revolutionary War

Historian David M. Griffin stands on a corner in an industrial section of Hempstead Village, surveying an empty lot surrounded by barbed wire. Here, in this unwelcoming spot, a ghastly reminder of a grave period in Long Island’s history was once unearthed — literally.

What exactly occurred here on the corner of Main Street and Union Place? On a December day in 1934, three boys were playing in the lot, in the north end of the village, when Edward Gorman, 9, reached down in the sandy ground for what he thought was a stick. But when he saw what was emerging from the ground, he stopped in horror. As he would later tell a newsreel interviewer, “I said, ‘My gosh, Teddy, it’s a skeleton.’ ”

Edward’s pal Ted Wills ran to the nearby Chevrolet dealership on Main Street. Police were summoned and, according to news accounts, it took four officers to unearth what the kids had stumbled upon: A human skeleton, its skull encased in what appeared to be an iron cage. A 6-inch-long spike protruded from the skull.

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The headline of the front-page story in the next day’s New York Times — right next to articles about the Lindbergh baby kidnapping and a speech by Albert Einstein to the country’s top scientists — reads like the script for a horror movie: Boys Unearth Skeleton in Torture Chamber: Discovery in Hempstead Linked to Pirates.

That last part was conjecture. No one knew who this man was. A search of old court records found nothing about such an execution. Experts called in to examine the skeleton offered other possibilities: A runaway slave. A Native American.

Eventually, careful scholarship found references in the early 1800s to a British soldier having been executed in Hempstead during the Revolutionary War. And now, thanks to Griffin, author of “Chronicles of the British Occupation of Long Island” (History Press), a new book on this largely forgotten time in Long Island’s past, we know his name — and more details about his crime and punishment.

Signal to troops

Griffin, who lives in Rocky Point, is an independent researcher who studies the seven-year period from 1776 to 1783, when Long Island was occupied by the British. To identify the soldier, he scoured muster rolls of the 17th Light Dragoons, the mounted unit that made its winter headquarters in Hempstead during the war, and deduced that the man was Pvt. Robert Silby — who, along with two other members of his unit, had one night broken into the home of a local family. A melee ensued in which the homeowner’s sister was choked, and Silby was shot through the throat.

Rather than putting the other two on trial, Griffin’s research shows, their commanding officer decided that making an example of Silby would send a better message. With great fanfare, the private’s body, encased in iron, was hung on a crossbar — a form of punishment called gibbeting — on the outskirts of the village as a warning to both his own men and to the civilian population of Hempstead. There, the decomposing corpse remained in its iron sarcophagus. And it became a part of local lore for decades.

“Not many people know the story today,” said Griffin, whose first book, in 2017, was about the British forts on Long Island during the Revolution. “They don’t realize the drama that played out here.”

As related in this new volume, it is indeed a dramatic story: one of terror, violence, repression and anarchy. British and Loyalist troops seized crops and livestock, quartered their troops in the homes of the inhabitants, and generally seem to have done just about everything possible to sour relationships with the locals.

The British were eager to protect Long Island’s farms and fields, which provided food and fodder for their army in New York City. They were also alert to the potential of attacks from Patriot forces across Long Island Sound in Connecticut, and thus committed large numbers to its defense — 4,000 of the Crown’s forces were stationed across the length of Long Island.

The Island’s populace — estimated at 28,000 at the time — was divided in its sentiment. At the start of the conflict, what is now Nassau County (then part of Queens) was largely Loyalist — Americans who allied with the Crown — while Suffolk harbored pro-independence feelings. But the actions of the redcoats turned many against the British.

“Before the Revolution, the British were the law-and-order party,” said Natalie Naylor, emeritus professor of history at Hofstra University. “But they lost the political battle, and they lost the allegiance of many who had been Loyalist or neutral on Long Island because of their harsh treatment.”

As Griffin’s book documents, it was a terrifying time for anyone living here.

“This seven-year struggle on Long Island must always be thought of first and foremost as a civil war and a time of great suffering for all inhabitants on the Island, regardless of which side they were on,” Griffin, 53, writes. The Revolution, he adds, “was something that had to be endured.”

Hempstead a military post

On a dreary September morning, Griffin is showing a visitor some of the locations that had particular importance during the occupation, starting with Hempstead, which the British, he said, “had essentially turned into a garrison town.”

Driving north, Griffin picks up Route 107 into modern-day Glen Head. Not far from a car dealership, he pulls over and treads across East Hillside Cemetery to a quiet corner in which stand several rows of graves.

“These are Hessians,” he announces.

Hessians — German mercenaries hired by King George III to help him subdue the rebellious colonies — were feared by the locals when they arrived early in the war. “There were stories that they ate babies,” said Griffin.

But when they established encampments along this part of the North Shore and the local population got to know them, they discovered that aside from their facial hair (uncommon among American and English men at that time), “the Hessians looked and acted like any other human beings,” he said.

Driving east on modern Northern Boulevard, Griffin follows the line of the Hessian and British defenses.

Huntington mayhem

Now he is on the road to Huntington, where — particularly late in the war, when attitudes had hardened on both sides — a number of ugly incidents of the occupation unfolded, including the desecration of graves on a hilltop cemetery in Huntington and the destruction by British troops of the pro-independence Presbyterian Church.

A few miles north is another vestige of the occupation: Lloyd Neck, site of not only Fort Franklin (named after Benjamin’s Loyalist son William) but, nearby, what Griffin terms “the largest refugee camp of the war.”

On what is now the west side of Lloyd Neck, about 800 Loyalists, most of them exiles from Connecticut, lived for much of the war. And although they may have had relative safety near the fort, they, like everyone on Long Island at the time, were haunted by the specter of raiders — roving bands of men who arrived stealthily by whaleboat or horseback at night. Some of the worst atrocities — killings, beatings, robberies — were committed by these raiders.

“A lot of them weren’t Loyalists or Patriots,” Griffin said. “They were just criminals.”

Military discipline

Like Hempstead, Huntington was the site of a British execution.

As Griffin relates in his book, two Loyalist soldiers accused of robbing a Huntington man and beating his family were sentenced by a military court to death (one of the two men had also been involved in the killing of a man in Jerusalem, now Wantagh).

Again, as the commanding officer in Hempstead had done, the British tried to show the population that lawlessness would not be tolerated. The two men, Isaac Algar and Nathaniel Parker, were convicted in a military court and sentenced to hang. Driving east on Main Street out of downtown Huntington, Griffin follows the procession of that day in 1783.

“They started here,” said Griffin, pointing to the area near the current Huntington Town Hall, which was then the center of the British command in Huntington.

With fifes playing and drums beating, a cavalry guard led the way east. They were followed by an ox-drawn cart containing two coffins, behind which the two condemned men marched, according to Griffin’s research. At the site of a small British fortification at what is now Fort Hill Road on the eastern edge of the village, the procession marched up the hill to a large oak tree.

The men were hanged at that spot, which is still the junction of several roads.

There is no record of whether their bodies were left to hang as a warning sign to their fellow soldiers and the civilian population, which was the case with Silby in Hempstead.

Sights and sounds of war

Although long forgotten by 1934, the body that the two boys had dragged out of the dirt and briefly into the headlines apparently had lingered in the public imagination in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Reports from travelers during and immediately after the Revolution often commented on the hideous sight — and sound — of it. The cage that held the body was secured from above with a metal spike.

“The attachment created horror from the sound of metal upon metal, grinding and creaking in the wind,” said Griffin.

Memories of such grisly deeds began vanishing almost as soon as the British left in 1783. Some Loyalists decamped for Canada, while some Long Island Patriots who had fled to Connecticut during the war stayed put on the other side of the Sound. Those who remained were eager to put it all behind them.

Across Long Island, vestiges of the occupation were quickly torn down, filled in and covered over.

“I think a lot of people at the time wanted to forget,” Griffin said.

His book makes a compelling case that we should remember.