Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument

The Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument is a war memorial at Fort Greene Park, in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. It commemorates more than 11,500 American prisoners of war who died in captivity aboard sixteen British prison ships during the American Revolutionary War. The remains of a small fraction of those who died on the ships are interred in a crypt beneath its base. The ships included HMS Jersey, Scorpion, Hope, Falmouth, Stromboli, Hunter, and others.

Their remains were first gathered and interred in 1808. In 1867 landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, designers of Central Park and Prospect Park, were engaged to prepare a new design for Washington Park as well as a new crypt for the remains of the prison ship martyrs. In 1873, after development near the Brooklyn Navy Yard uncovered the remains, they were moved and re-interred in a crypt beneath a small monument.