The Old Post Office (formerly the Middle Dutch Church)

In 1776, during the Revolutionary War, the occupying British troops converted the 100 x 70 foot damaged and deteriorating building and its neighboring sugar house into a military prison for unruly rebels. An old Times article estimates up to 8,000 prisoners were held here in those years. “When the victims confined to the Middle Dutch church crawled to the windows begging for food, a sentinel, pistol in hand, would turn back the gifts of the charitable. The whole floor of the Church was one caked mass of dead, dying, excrement and vermin,” “supernatural” conditions that probably echoed throughout the entire city, choked off during the occupation years between 1776 to 1783. The building was eventually emptied, “the planking torn up, tan laid down, and a riding-school established for the recruits of the English riding-horse.”