Thereafter, General George Washington relied heavily upon the Marylanders as one of the few reliable fighting units in the early Continental Army.

"[1] The lineage of this unit is perpetuated by the 175th Infantry Regiment, Maryland Army National Guard.

The Maryland Regiment had joined the Continental Army barely two weeks before the Battle of Long Island.

Stirling led these men (who would come to be known as "The Maryland 400") against Cornwallis' 2,000 British soldiers who were massed around the Old Stone House, a thick-walled fieldstone and brick fortification near today's Fifth Avenue and 3rd Street that had been built in 1699 to withstand Indian raids.

Historian, Thomas Field, writing in 1869, "The Battle of Long Island," called the stand of the Marylanders "an hour more precious to liberty than any other in history."

Four companies of the 1st Maryland stood as the final anchor of the crumbled American front line, and their heroic action not only saved many of their fellows but afforded Washington critical respite to regroup and withdraw his battered troops to Manhattan and continue the struggle for independence.

Today the heroes whom Washington himself lamented lie under the floor of the building that had housed the auto repair shop.

They lie in their unmarked grave miles from a Stanford White monument to their sacrifice in the form of a marble shaft topped with a sphere that stands at the foot of Lookout Hill in Prospect Park.

The Old Stone House survived the battle and in later years became the first clubhouse of the baseball team that came to be known as the Brooklyn Dodgers.

[3] When Major General Nathanael Greene took command of the Southern theater of the war, his army numbered 1482 men present.