Burial Pits & Bayonets: The Story of Baylor's Massacre and its Rediscovery in Suburban New Jersey

 

        Around one in the morning on September 28, 1778 just a few miles across the border from New York in northern New Jersey six companies of British infantry stand in silence with bayonets fixed and at the ready.

The redcoats wait in the pitch darkness without a sound.  A number of local Tory guides have led them to this spot on the side of a road in Bergen County.  The redcoats are under the command of Major Turner Staubenzie.  The Major has gained a reputation for brutality and he has ordered that his troops give no quarter and make no sound.

Over the past three years no place in the whole of America has been more ravaged by the War for Independence than New Jersey.  British and American, patriot and loyalist alike, have fought a ceaseless struggle for supremacy and forage all across the Garden State from New York City to Philadelphia.  Both armies have laid waste to the land and occupied and vacated the same towns countless times.  

At the moment General Washing and his Continental Army are deployed in a wide arc across northern New Jersey in outposts stretching from Newark to Morristown.  The American army holds vital strongpoints in Paramus and at New Bridge Landing along the Hackensack River.  And in southern New Jersey the patriots hold key ports along the shore from which they can launch piratical privateer attacks against British shipping.

In the Summer and Fall of 1778 British commanding General Lord Cornwallis is looking to draw Washington’s troops out into open battle somewhere in New Jersey so that his forces can control this vital state once and for all and finally end the internecine guerilla war that has been bleeding his army dry.

In September of 1778 Cornwallis learns through intelligence gained from New Jersey loyalist spies that an entire regiment of Continental troops from Virginia are quartered in half a dozen houses and barns on the site of a tannery along Overkill Road in Old Tappan (present day River Vale) New Jersey.  He also learns that these troops are loosely guarded and that their nearest reinforcements are located over ten miles away at New Bridge along the Hackensack River.  

Map of NJ from American Revolution

        If Cornwallis can destroy these troops then he might be able to drive a wedge between Washington’s forces in Morristown and those along the Hudson River thus crippling the ability of American forces to continue the fight in New Jersey.

The location of the half dozen or so barns and houses is called Haring Farm at the time.  It is the site of a tannery where great stinking vats are used to turn unfinished animal hides into leather.  As the 120 American troops under the command of twenty-six year old George Baylor sleep on the night of September 28, 1778 they have no idea that they are surrounded by the enemy and that for many of them those enormous putrid stone vats in the ground are destined to be their final resting place.

Sometime between 2 and 3 a.m. Major Staubenzie gives the order for his troops to attack.

The British run toward the barns with bayonets fixed and mercilessly stab at the Americans who lay asleep on bales of hay.

Some Continental soldiers are bayoneted over a dozen times in their sleep.  Those who attempt any type of resistance are smoked out when the British begin to torch all the buildings along the side of the road and many are trapped inside and incinerated by the flames.

As the smoke builds and the slaughter continues the Americans beg for mercy but still find themselves skewered on the ends of British bayonets nonetheless.

Standard issue British musket with bayonet

        For over an hour the killing continues.  Some of the Continentals attempt to run but of the approximately 120 soldiers that were asleep in the barns that night over 70 will end up being killed or wounded by the British and nearly all the rest are captured.

Some, like Colonel Baylor, attempt to hide but none are successful.  Baylor crawls up a chimney but he is discovered, pierced by a bayonet and beaten by British soldiers before being dragged out of hiding and becoming a prisoner of war.  Though Baylor will eventually go on to survive his time in captivity he will never fully recover from his wounds and will die a broken man only six years later at the age of thirty-two.

When all is said and done, all of the buildings that were standing at Haring’s tannery are burnt to the ground and American dead and dying litter the ground as the morning sun rises above the horizon.

This British surprise attack has been a complete success but with dozens of American corpses as well as scores of wounded, not to mention upwards of sixty POW’s on their hands, the British have no real way to deal with the seriously wounded or to dispose of the bodies.

Colonel George Baylor

            The American prisoners are forced to march northwards across the state border into Tappan, New York where Cornwallis has plans to convert the Dutch Reformed Church located there into a temporary prison.  But before the Continental prisoners of war begin their march northwards they are forced, at the point of British bayonets, to toss the dead and dying bodies of their comrades into the giant tanning vats.

The dead and wounded American soldiers are stacked one atop another filling these giant stone vats in the ground.  The vats are then covered up with dirt and the victorious British troops with their American prisoners in tow begin their march northward into New York.

For nearly 200 years the site of what will be known to history as Baylor’s Massacre in Bergen County will remain fallow and become overgrown.  Although the Continental Congress will launch an investigation in the immediate aftermath of the massacre the events at Haring’s tannery will quickly become overshadowed less than a month later when an even larger number of Continental troops are slaughtered in a similar bayonet attack farther south in Little Egg Harbor, New Jersey.

Over the course of time the memory of Baylor’s Massacre will survive mostly only in anecdotal form.  It will be passed down through the generations in retellings among the local residents of northern New Jersey but the actual site of the tannery and mass graves will become the stuff of local legend and will remain a mystery for almost two centuries.

However, in the 1960’s all of that changed with the onset of rapid suburban development across Bergen County and the proposed building of condominiums in River Vale, New Jersey.

In 1967 a Mr. Thomas Demarest of Old Tappan New Jersey wrote a letter to the Bergen County Board of Chosen Freeholders in which he claimed to know the possible location of the mass graves from Baylor’s massacre.  In the letter Demarest stated that he had become alarmed upon hearing that the area he believed the mass graves were located in was slated for mass excavation and housing development.  He feared that the site of Baylor’s Massacre might be lost forever.

In July of that year the county commissioned local college students, in conjunction with Demarest himself, to begin exploratory digging on a triangular piece of land formed by the intersection of River Vale Road (formerly Overkill Road) and the Hackensack River that through his study of old maps and knowledge of local history Demarest had concluded might be the possible site of Haring’s tannery and the mass graves from Baylor’s Massacre.

For two weeks the team dug exploratory trenches and struggled with the heat and mosquitoes.  They were beginning to lose hope and their commission from the county was set to expire the next day when Demarest and his amateur archaeological team discovered a human thigh bone.  Around the bone the team was able to unearth buttons and pieces of cloth from a Revolutionary War uniform.

Remains of soldiers discovered in 1967

Within days they were able to unearth the skeletal remains of over a dozen bodies and their discovery quickly gained widespread media attention across New York and New Jersey.  Soon an even larger professional archaeological team was commissioned to dig at the site and all of the mass graves from two centuries ago were excavated and the final resting place of so many brave American patriots was discovered after over two hundred years of rumor and speculation all thanks to the intuition and local knowledge of one man.

Still facing redevelopment, the site of Baylor’s Massacre was made into a county park in 1972 and all of the remains discovered there were once again reinterred at the site.  Today a plaque stands at the exact spot of the mass burials which reads:

“In memory of American soldiers killed during the Revolutionary War in the Baylor Massacre on September 28, 1778.  Tories betrayed their presence to a British force who surrounded the dragoons during the night.  A number of Americans were killed or wounded after they surrendered.”