The British Occupation of Flatbush

When people write about history, a lot of times what’s happening at the current moment affects how they see the past. With that in mind, I wanted to let you know that once, for seven years straight, the people of Flatbush were in a way worse #stayhome situation than this one.

It was 1776. A lot happened on a “national level” that year, even though the nation was very new and very small. The people of Flatbush had mixed feelings. There was the Declaration of Independence — that seemed cool! But then the British showed up, stormed the coast of (now-)Brooklyn, and started killing everyone. Which was terrible.

The people of Flatbush weren’t stuck in their homes, necessarily, but after the battle there was nowhere to go and not much to do. The fighting had taken place right in town, beginning in present-day Prospect Lefferts Gardens near the Greenlight bookstore. Then, after the American troops were defeated in what’s now Prospect Park, the invaders walked back into Flatbush to sit put and cause misery until the war somehow ended.

They treated the town like a destroyed battlefield and the people living in it like dead bodies that just happened to be alive. They wandered into vacant houses — emptied out before the battle as families fled in fear — and went about wrecking them. After taking anything of value, they used the homes as stables for their animals, letting their horses sh*t on the floor and eat out of cabinet drawers on top of the family possessions that were left behind. When people came back to their homes they found destruction for destruction’s sake, like their feather mattresses ripped open and all the feathers spilled into their well to soak up the water. Any livestock they had left behind had been killed and eaten with the heads left to rot on Flatbush Ave.

The rest of the livestock had been set free before the battle in order to keep it out of enemy hands. Herding their cattle north towards Queens meant that it wasn’t in Flatbush for the soldiers to eat, but it also meant that Flatbushers (as they were known) couldn’t eat the animals either. Food was scarce, and I’m not talking “the co-op during a pandemic” scarce — there was barely enough to survive. In addition to not having meat, Flatbush’s crops were gone, because the American forces burned most of them to the ground to keep them out of British stomachs.

The British hadn’t taken Brooklyn alone. They were joined by German mercenaries called the Hessians, and together they did everything they could to make things as bad as possible for the people who remained, and those who came back to Flatbush because they didn’t have anywhere else to go. They raped, they stole, and they degraded. 

The man in charge of the Flatbush soldiers was a Flatbush resident himself — Colonel Axtell, who was such a sadistic sicko he could be the head boss in a Quentin Tarantino movie. He, along with the British mayor of NYC from before the war broke out (David Matthews), had their summer homes in Flatbush — just like rich people now have homes in the Hamptons. Axtell loved to have high-ranking officials over for parties, and once or twice rebel forces even tried to crash them and do some murdering of their own. If you want a fascinating read on Axtell and his famous home — which is no longer standing but was located on Bedford Ave between Winthrop and Clarkson — check out historian Suzanne Spellmen’s 4-part deep-dive over on Brownstoner.

While the English continued to ransack Flatbush, raping and pillaging and partying over at Axtell’s house, the rest of Flatbush hunkered down and tried not to starve. There were no more social activities — no visiting neighbors and friends. And no meeting at the general store — all businesses were shut down. There were no crops left to harvest, no animals to tend. The British and Hessians showed up whenever they wanted and took whatever they wanted.

Some Flatbush folks were able to make deals with their English occupiers — deals like “hey can you leave me just two horses so I can still harvest what crops I have left?” But when they did, the British would just go steal their neighbor’s horse. So...resentment grew. 

Then typhoid fever hit. Remember all those cow heads in the street and manure in the house I was talking about? Typhoid is caused by bacteria. But we didn’t know that back then, so all we could do was carry our sick relatives to the Dutch Reformed Church and try to keep them comfortable while they died. 

Things got worse. The Americans weren’t winning. Years went by. Years.

Do you remember the Third Amendment? The people who lived in Flatbush during this time would tell you that you REALLY don’t appreciate your Third Amendment rights. They are:

“No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.” 

Flatbush was being OCCUPIED, and I’m not talking about camping in a city park. The first thing the occupiers had done was to round up the white men of the town, take them into the Dutch Reformed Church, and make them take an oath to the British crown. This meant that the Flatbushers were British protectorates, not prisoners of war — an important distinction when prisoners of war were usually placed in terrifying conditions in prison ships in the East River, literally stacked on top of each other until they got sick and died.

But as British protectorates, Flatbushers were forced by law to house (and feed!!) British and Hessian soldiers. (The British were like “yeah we will totally pay you,” but they did not.) With no warning, you could get a knock on your door and suddenly have a total stranger living with you, probably until the end of the war — whenever that was.

Occasionally, the new stranger wasn’t English or Hessian but an American prisoner of war, spared from a prison ship. These guests were only slightly better than having to house an enemy soldier. First of all, the American prisoners knew about the loyalty oath thing — and just try telling someone who’s now imprisoned for being a Rebel that you are *secretly* a Rebel but also, you took a loyalty oath to the British crown and got to stay in your home. Secondly, most of the American prisoners were modern city people, and Flatbush was a rural village that still used Dutch as its primary language. The prisoners were suspicious and even a little weirded out by these Dutch traitors. 

Years went by — years. The ‘70s turned into the ‘80s.

Soldiers began hacking up people’s fences to use as firewood. Then, their barns. And then, the empty houses.

Black people who were supposedly free under British rule were still living enslaved, even though the men who professed to “own” them had pledged to the British. But where were they going to go? What were they going to do? At least by staying put, they had access to a small supply of food — mostly suppawn, a cornmeal-based porridge at which the American prisoners turned up their noses.

So they all hung out together in their farmhouses, which usually consisted of two or three rooms under a long, sloped roof. The group looked something like: a Dutch husband and wife with several children and perhaps an elderly relative; a man, woman, or child being forced into slavery; and two or three Hessian soldiers or American prisoners. 

Acts of resistance had begun to spring up. The Dutch Reformed Church now had both a British minister and a Dutch one, and the Dutch minister would slip pro-American stuff into his sermon. (Afterall, it was all in Dutch, so any guards attending didn’t know what they were saying “Amen” to.) Meanwhile, the ladies of Flatbush went to work sewing supplies for the Revolutionary Army, including bandages, backpacks, and underwear. 

Some of the richer dudes in town started secretly collecting money to loan to the American forces (yes, loan — they’re rich dudes, what do you want from them), and while some of the money came from their hoards of silver and gold from before the war, it’s said that many of these guys also got money by selling crops and other supplies to the British. It was a controversial move, one that contributed to outsiders thinking Flatbushers were once again acting kinda like traitors. They’re lucky the Ditmas Park Facebook group didn’t exist back then, because there would have been A LOT of fights in the comments.

But they didn’t need social media to breathlessly spread stories about the struggle getting personal, like a story that survives to this day about three brothers who lived in town. Two were on the side of the Brits and the other one was a Rebel prisoner. Prisoners could leave the house as long as they reported back to guards at certain times (kind of like parole), so the British-loyal brothers asked their prisoner brother to meet them at the intersection of Church and Flatbush Aves (then called Cow Lane and the main road) under a giant Linden tree. They begged him to take the oath to the British so he could stop being subjected to their abuse. “I will never do it,” he replied with “a Roman firmness,” according to Flatbush historian Rev. Dr. Strong.

When the winter came in Flatbush, the prisoners and Tories (as the British loyalists were known) found something they could do together, besides go hungry. They ice skated at the Steenbakkery, one of my favorite Flatbush things of all time. A bastardization of a Dutch word meaning “brick kiln,” Steenbakkery was an only-in-Flatbush name for a skatepond that was created when a piece of clay-y earth was dug up to make bricks for Flatbush homes. It was located at the northern tip of the Lefferts Farm, near present-day Empire Blvd. Hanging out at the Steenbakkery was fun for the obvious reasons — skating — but also, it was a place for teenagers to eye each other up and get their flirt on in a time when they no longer had coming out parties, dances, or opportunities to visit with the opposite sex.

After a few Occupation winters sharing the Steenbakkery with the local kids, the guys decided to make things more dangerous and therefore, fun. They cut down a nearby tree, made it into a log, and (pointing up) in the clay muck at the bottom of the pond. When the water completely froze over, about 4 feet of the log extended up over the ice. They then attached ropes to the top of the pole with iron bolts and some kind of crosspiece, and sleds to the ends of the ropes. All that was left was for someone to stand at the center and rotate the pole to spin a whole crew of sledders around in a circle. “It was a sort of a winter merry-go-round,” historian Gertrude Lefferts Vanderbilt wrote, “and to this all the young people far and near were invited.” She continued:

Sometimes they went so swiftly as to be almost lifted from the ice; round and round they flew, happy in their innocent merriment and enjoying it all, as only young people can. They kept it up through all the full moon, and even until the warmer breath of spring began to weaken the ice. They were loath to leave it. The clear air was so invigorating, the motion so exhilarating, the companionship so delightful. Neither history nor tradition ventures to hint, but I myself think that there is not much risk in stating that some of the weddings which came off after the war might have been traced to the meetings on those moonlight nights in the frolics of the young people on the ice pond.

See, the war did end. Something happened that seemed rather far away and then the soldiers left. Businesses opened back up and homes were put back together. Some of the American soldiers stayed and married the Flatbush women they had met. And in the center of town, on the corner of Cow Lane and the main road, a liberty pole was constructed — a popular symbol of freedom. Historian Nedda Allbray writes:

With the British gone, life in Flatbush for most people slowly began to return to normal, but with a difference – they began to recognize themselves as Americans…. If at the end of the war the future seemed bleak to some, others recognized in spite of all that happened Flatbush still had its community and culture…. The public spiritedness that had earlier characterized the town remained. People rebuilt their houses and farms, and most important, the town’s leaders were ready to take on public works.

The town’s leaders were also ready to take advantage of their continued racist and classist supremacy. Still rich from having pledged to the British, they now hastily signed a “Congrats, dude!” letter to General Washington. They began amassing as much power as possible, and in 1783 that meant one thing: enslaving more humans.

As slavery rates in Flatbush grew higher than they ever before, the white people of the town got together and built a school to make sure to keep their children powerful as well. It was the first Erasmus Hall, which was so successful that Southern plantation owners sent their children there. Ending its dependence on slavery would be the next injustice Flatbush would have to overcome.

Collectively, no matter their race, the people of Flatbush considered themselves survivors of the occupation until every last living memory of that time died out. Stories were passed down and once new people started moving to town — well — you weren’t truly an old Flatbush family unless you had a story about the Revolution. The people who lived through it told their children stories of humble contributions, small rebellions, and great sacrifices. I think of them often today.

The liberty pole that the people of Flatbush constructed after the Revolutionary War is shown in the center of this illustration that depicts the corner of Church and Flatbush Aves. The large Linden tree that the famous Flatbush brothers met under is in the far right of the illustration. (Image is from the book The History of the Town of Flatbush, 1842)

This painting depicts the American forces victorious over the Hessians in Trenton, NJ, on December 26, 1776. Unfortunately, the Hessians had trounced the Americans in the much-larger Battle of Brooklyn right before this battle, leading to the occupation of Flatbush. (Image: Library of Congress)

This detail of a 1842 map by Flatbush resident Jeremiah Lott shows where the old Dutch families of Flatbush lived along Flatbush Ave. (Note: Church Ave was called “East Broadway” back then). At the very top, you can see the location of the Steenbakkery, where the young people of Flatbush had some of their best times during the war. (Image: The New York Public Library)

I wrote this article in March 2020 and used primarily the following sources:
Flatbush: A Neighborhood History Guide by Adina Black and Francis Monroe 
Flatbush: The Heart of Brooklyn by Nedda C. Allbray
The History of the Town of Flatbush by Dr. Reverend Thomas M. Strong
The Social History of Flatbush by Gertrude Lefferts Vanderbilt
See more about these and other Flatbush history books in the Books section of this site!

I also used:
Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace
Urban Omnibus
MountVernon.org