On the morning after the battle, Colonel Adam Hubley of the 10th Pennsylvania wrote that he sent Major Caleb North with four horsemen onto the field to count their dead bodies, while the enemy’s dead had been taken away. The two or three British dead are believed to be buried at the Church of St. Peter-in-the-Great Valley. Two days later, Hubley wrote that their dead, fifty-two brave fellows all killed by the sword and bayonet, were buried the next day in the field of battle. Local civilians buried the fallen at the fence line in two rows of twenty-six, and tradition holds that another soldier was found two weeks later in nearby woods and buried where he lay, making the burial place that of fifty-three American soldiers. The battle raged mostly on the neighboring farms of the Pearce family and Ezekiel Bowen. Forty-four-year-old Major Cromwell Pearce of the Chester County militia was away from his house on September 20, but his thirty-seven-year-old wife Margaret was home with at least two of their six children, five-year-old Cromwell Jr. and thirteen-month-old Marmaduke. Forty years later, forty-five-year-old Colonel Cromwell Pearce Jr., a hero of the War of 1812 and High Sheriff of Chester County, helped lead the effort to preserve the grave of the Paoli dead, then a mound marked only by a few stones and slowly disappearing into the land. On July 4, 1817, a committee of patriotic citizens and veterans was formed to raise funds to mark the grave and protect it with a wall. A white marble monument was purchased in Philadelphia and finished under the direction of architect William Strickland, and Doctor William Darlington of Chester County provided the inscription text. In early September 1817, the committee, including Anthony Wayne’s son Isaac, placed the monument and built a stone wall with their own hands. On September 20, the fortieth anniversary of the battle, it was dedicated. Among the Revolutionary War veterans present was eighty-two-year-old Reverend David Jones, chaplain of Wayne’s brigade and a survivor of Paoli. The 1817 monument is one of the three oldest known Revolutionary War monuments in the United States and has marked the Paoli grave for more than one hundred eighty-five years. The large cannons flanking the Paoli grave are two of the oldest surviving examples of American-made artillery. Cast by order of Congress in 1777 at Warwick Furnace in northern Chester County, they were meant for use in fortifications or on ships. It is believed they were thrown into French Creek during the British invasion of 1777 and were discovered there in the late nineteenth century.