There was a
walk nearly broad enough for a cart to travel around it, where night
and day, two British or Hessian guards walked their weary rounds. The
yard was surrounded by a close board fence, nine feet high. 'In the
suffocating heat of summer,' says Wm. Dunlap, 'I saw every narrow
aperture of these stone walls filled with human heads, face above
face, seeking a portion of the external air.'
"While the gaol fever was raging in the summer of 1777, the prisoners
were let out in companies of twenty, for half an hour at a time, to
breathe fresh air, and inside they were so crowded, that they divided
their numbers into squads of six each. No. 1 stood for ten minutes as
close to the windows as they could, and then No. 2 took their places,
and so on.
"Seats there were none, and their beds were but straw, intermixed with
vermin.
"For many days the dead-cart visited the prison every morning, into
which eight or ten corpses were flung or piled up, like sticks of
wood, and dumped into ditches in the outskirts of the city."
Silas Talbot says: "A New York gentleman keeps a window shutter that
was used as a checkerboard in the Sugar House. The prisoners daily
unhinged it, and played on it."
Many years ago a small pamphlet was printed in New York to prove that
some of the American prisoners who died in the Old Sugar House were
buried in Trinity church-yard.
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