306 HISTORY OF BROOKLYN.

the use of the sick sailors. After that the garden began to go to decay, until, at the close of the Revolution, when the British left Brooklyn, little of it remained but the name. The principal disease among the sick was the scurvy, and they were buried from these hospitals, in the neighboring ground, and that, afterwards, of Hezekiah B. Pierrepont, to the number of twelve and fifteen a day.1 For many years afterwards, the remains of these poor fellows were from time to time, disinterred by the caving clown of the brow of the bill all along this portion of the shore. On the banks of the river, a little east of the easterly line of the continuation of Furman street, and between Pacific and Warren streets, as now laid out, was a knoll of land, where several hundred British sailors and soldiers were buried in regular rows. The heads of the westernmost row were exposed to the lashing of the waves of the East River, by which they were beaten off from the trunks. On this knoll, thus enriched, a superior quality of asparagus was afterwards raised for the New York markets.

Furman, from whose manuscripts we gain many of these facts, states that the old house, afterwards occupied by Selah Strong, Esq., and which stood in what is now known as Strong Place, just behind Christ Church, was built and inhabited by an English Colonel Thornely, at the desire of the Cornells, with whom he had become quite intimate during the Revolution, and who sold him the land on which it was erected. These Cornells were among the most respectable citizens of old Brooklyn, and, as Furman says, “all staunch King and Church men.” Whitehead Cornell, a native of Queens County, came to Brooklyn about the middle of the last century, and married into the old Seabring family, who occupied a portion of the Lubbertson property, near Red Hook, as described on pages 63-67. By this marriage and probably, also, by purchase,2 he be-

1 Mr. William Furman used to relate that he saw ten or twelve bodies buried in one grave, from the British hospitals, on the Livingston place. His son: the historian of Brooklyn, also states, in his MSS., that by their teeth they appear all to have been young or middle-aged men; and that a negro man belonging to Mr. William Cornell, the subsequent owner of the place, made considerable money by disposing of the teeth, which he found on these burial spots, to the dentists in New York city. Artificial teeth, it Must be remembered, were not then known.

2 The Seabrings, who were Whigs, left the Island with, or shortly after the depart-