ROCHESTER, N.Y. — Nearly 80 Revolutionary War patriots are buried at Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester and some of their stories reveal a dark chapter of the war.
One-third of all battles in the Revolutionary War were fought in New York State, many were to the east and south, but the Sullivan Expedition marched straight through part of our region.
During the revolution, Native American tribes in this region sided with the British and loyalists, thinking they’d have the best chance to save their lands if they were successful.
In response, George Washington sent nearly 5,000 troops — led by General John Sullivan — to destroy Haudenosaunee villages, crops and lands. It was called Sullivan’s Expedition. “The colonists were complaining about the Indians raiding their villages so, Sullivan’s job was to go out and clear out the Indians, force them all back into the old Fort Niagara is where they ended up being,” explains David Foster, a member of the Son’s of the American Revolution.
During the expedition, Sullivan sent Lt. Thomas Boyd on a scouting mission to find and inspect Chenussio, one of the most powerful Seneca towns in the Genesee River Valley. Although his orders instructed him to take only a handful of men, Boyd took 26 soldiers with him, including Sergeant Michael Parker and an Oneida guide named Thaosagwat.
During the mission, the scouting party was spotted, “they were encircled and trapped, about 14 or so escaped,” Foster explains. The rest were killed. Boyd and Parker were captured, interrogated by loyalists, then turned over to the Senecas.
“They were given to the Seneca Chief Little Beard, and he took them over to Chenussio near Geneseo,” Foster says.
The tree they were brought to still stands tall in Livingston County. It’s known as the torture tree — it’s where Parker and Boyd died. What happened there is too graphic to fully describe. “They were tortured to death in retribution of what Sullivan did to all the Iroquois villages when he went through and was clearing it out,” Foster says.
Their remains were found the next day and buried near the tree by fellow soldiers but in the early 1900s, they were moved to Mount Hope Cemetery where a monument stands in honor of all who were killed in the ambush.
In 1927, the Livingston County Historical Society dedicated a shrine to Boyd, Parker, Thaosagwat, and the 12 others of the killed in the ambush, thousands of people attended.
“As the 250th awakening of the Revolutionary War is happening, more and more of the stories and more and more of the deeper history of it is coming out,” Foster says.
When the Sullivan Expedition was over, more than 40 Haudenosaunee villages had been destroyed along with hundreds of thousands of bushels of crops and thousands of acres of farmland.
The torture tree still stands: The story of two Revolutionary War soldiers killed near Geneseo during Sullivan’s Expedition WHEC.com.
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