After this battle, and before the capture of Fort Washington, they were brought down to Spuyten Duyvil creek, just at its junction with the Hudson, and were kept there furnishing guards, orderlies and escorts for the movements about the fort. While the Jumel mansion (then the old Morris house) was being used as the American Headquarters, many of Captain Bostwick’s men were frequently on duty about the place as guards and orderlies. The following is a tradition for which the only authority is the stories told by the old soldiers around John Turrill’s fireside many years after: During the engagement of the British with Fort Washington, a sergeant’s guard under the command of David Buell of New Milford, which had been placed at a picket station near the base of Inwood Hill, were separated, by the rapid advance of the Hessians up the Harlem River (a movement, which, but for the quickness of a soldier’s wife at the Morris house, would have resulted in the capture of General Washington), from their regiment across the creek and obliged to fall back to Fort Washington. Being hotly pursued by the advancing enemy, they were forced to take cover under the banks of the Hudson, to avoid the fire of almost an entire regiment. A small party of the Hessians endeavored to cut off their retreat to the fort and one of them succeeded in jumping down the bank in front of the New Milford men. Roger Blaisdell was in the advance, and, as the German stumbled down the bank in front of him, pushed him with a thrust of his bayonet into the river and the party reached temporary safety in Fort Washington. The Fort was soon captured by the British, however, and our New Milford men found themselves in the unfortunate position of prisoners of war. The prisoners, according to the stories told by them afterward, were moved down to a point about where Union Square is now, and were there confined in a barn, for three days, before any food was given them. Then, wagons from the British slaughter-houses arrived, loaded with the hock bones of the cattle killed for the British troops. These wagons having been backed up to the door of the barn, the hock bones were shoveled in on the floor, while the prisoners scrambled for what they could get. It is said that their hunger was so great that they seized the bones and gnawed them as a dog would. They were kept for three days in this barn, and were then conveyed down to that much-dreaded place of confinement, the Old Sugar House Prison, a sugar store-house, which was between Ann and Fulton streets. It was a building with a large central portion, and had two wings which projected on either side of a little courtyard. There were no cellars and the floor was of puncheons (hewn logs eight or ten inches thick) laid loose on the floor timbers. It was very strongly constructed in order that it might sustain the weight of the heavy casks of sugar and molasses which came from the West Indies.