A small stone engraved “N. Richardson of Staddard Eng died 1760” may mark the only identified grave on Mount Independence, though Richardson’s identity and the meaning of the 1760 date remain unknown, especially since Mount Independence was first built by the Northern Department of the American Army in 1776 as a defense against the British. At least dozens of soldiers, and perhaps many more, died there between July 1776 and November 1777 and were buried far from home in several unmarked cemeteries on the mount. The dead included Americans, British, Germans, Canadians, and Native Americans on both sides, many lost to disease and others brought back as casualties from the July 7, 1777, battles at Hubbardton, Vermont, and Fort Ann, New York. During the first months of American occupation, from July through September 1776, those who died received military funerals in which fellow soldiers wrapped the bodies in blankets, auctioned personal effects, and sent the money to the deceased’s family, but as deaths increased, burials became rushed and haphazard with little formality. Lieutenant Jonathan Burton recorded on October 4, 1776, that “this Day there was two men Buried from our Regt.,” and the Reverend Ammi Robbins, chaplain of Colonel Charles Burrall’s Connecticut State Regiment in the First Brigade, wrote of witnessing a military funeral on the evening of September 8, 1776, with swords and arms inverted, others stepping slowly with arms folded across their breast to the beat of the muffled drum.
