Woodhull's Grave

“Woodhull’s Grave. Nathaniel Woodhull was born at Mastic, Long Island, December 30, 1722. Agriculture was the chief pursuit of his life. He was a major, under Abercrombie, in the attack upon Crown Point and Ticonderoga, and afterward accompanied Bradstreet against Fort Frontenac. He was a colonel, under Amherst, in 1760, and at the close of the campaign he returned home and married Ruth Floyd. He espoused the popular side in the Stamp Act movements, and, possessing the esteem of the people, he was elected, with William Nicoll, a representative of Suffolk county, in the Colonial Assembly in 1769. He represented Suffolk in the first Provincial Congress in 1775, and was elected president of that body. He was appointed a brigadier of militia in August of that year, and in July, 1776, he was summoned home to embody the militia of Suffolk and Queens, to assist in repelling invasion. He was engaged in this service when he ws made a prisoner, cruelly wounded by a British officer, and died of his injuries three weeks afterward, at New Utrecht. His wife, who was with him in his last moments, conveyed his body to Mastic, and there, in a secluded family cemetary, a short distance from his residence, his remains rest. A marble slab marks his grave, and bears the following inscription: ‘In memory of General Nathaniel Woodhull, who, wounded and a prisoner, died on the twentieth of September, 1776, in the fifty-fourth year of his age; regretted by all who knew how to value his many private virtues, and that pure zeal for the rights of his country to which he perished a victim.’"—Lossing, 1851

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