Fort Sullivan: Soldiers Buried After the Battle of Chemung

Within the grounds of old Fort Sullivan, several Continental soldiers were buried on August fourteenth, seventeen seventy-nine, killed the day before at the Battle of Chemung. The battle was part of the Sullivan-Clinton Campaign, a major American offensive against the Iroquois Confederacy and their British-allied Loyalist forces in upstate New York and northern Pennsylvania. General John Sullivan had pushed his army into the Chemung valley with orders from George Washington to lay waste to the Iroquois towns, a campaign that would ultimately destroy many Iroquois towns and crops.

The men buried here were among the first casualties of that advance. Local tradition holds that their graves were later identified from the recollections of a veteran, and skeletons were reportedly found on the site. The fort and its burial ground stand as a marker of the Revolutionary War's violent western theater.