ST. LOUIS — As we hurtle toward the 250th anniversary of the birth of our nation — and we’ll leave it to you to decide how Vanilla Ice and UFC fighters on the White House lawn fit the occasion — Cubs pitcher Ben Brown doesn’t have to go far to feel a part of history.
He’s not entirely sure, but Brown thinks there’s a pretty good chance George Washington set foot in his childhood home on Long Island. Now that may be as verifiable as young George chopping down the cherry tree, but this much we know for a fact: the good general did come to Brown’s hometown of Setauket, New York, for a very specific purpose.
In 1790, the year after Washington was elected our first president, he came to thank the good citizens of Setauket and a few other hamlets on the north shore of Long Island for risking their lives during the Revolution. Living in their midst were members of what became known as the Culper Ring, which has become known as America’s first spy ring.
“George Washington may or may not have walked through our door one day,’’ Brown said. “I wouldn’t be surprised.
“The home I grew up in was built in the 1750s, so my dad [Jody] had one heck of a challenge. He did a lot of the work himself, fixed up the house, and my mom [JoAnne Wilson-Brown] made it special.
“It was a really cool house. We had a red barn. Four or five fireplaces, not active, but fireplaces. We had a bunch of little outhouses. The rooms were small. Creaky floors. It was really fun. There’s so many little characteristics to the house.’’
Setauket is small — in 2020, it was divided into two CDPs (census designated places), one of them East Setauket, which is where Brown grew up. As of 2020, the population of the hamlet was 3,986. Amazingly, three big-league pitchers hail from there: Steven Matz of the Rays, Anthony Kay of the White Sox and Brown all graduated from Ward Melville High School.
But before the ballplayers were the spies. Somebody told Ben Brown’s wife, Maggie, about ‘‘Turn: Washington’s Spies,’’ a series that originally aired on the AMC network, ran for four seasons and recounted the tale of the spies from Setauket. Maggie became a watcher. That’s a novel way to learn about your husband’s hometown.
One of the principal spies was Caleb Brewster, an officer of the Continental army who grew up in Setauket, was an expert seaman and knew the Long Island Sound well. One of his acquaintances in town was Colonel Benjamin Tallmadge, who became Washington’s chief intelligence officer. Brewster was recruited by Tallmadge to spy on the British, who had occupied New York City as a base of operations.
Couriers traveled back and forth from New York, only 55 miles away, supplying Washington vital information about troop movements. They used coded messages in newspapers, an invisible ink called a “sympathetic strain,” to write between the lines of ordinary-looking letters, and a code book that assigned numbers to the principals. Washington was 711; Caleb Brewster was 725. A woman in town, Anna Strong, was said to have hung a black petticoat on a clothesline, alerting the network that Brewster was in town.
Caleb Brewster’s cousin, Joseph, ran the Brewster House, a tavern and general store which counted British soldiers as its customers. It still stands in town, right down the road from where Brown grew up.
“We live right near Brewster Road,’’ Brown said, another reason why he believes Washington may have stopped in what became the Brown homestead.
Does the name Benedict Arnold jar a memory from an American history class? The Culper Spy Ring is credited with helping to expose the conspiracy between a British major and the man who became synonymous with being a traitor, as Arnold schemed to deliver the fort at West Point to the Brits.
Brown, who is scheduled to start here Saturday night against the Cardinals, never daydreamed about being a spy.
“I was that crazy 10-year-old,’’ he said, “telling my teachers I was gonna play in the big leagues.’’
