The De Sille House marker commemorates the place where Brigadier General Nathaniel Woodhull died after the Battle of Long Island. Woodhull was born in 1722 into a prominent Long Island family and gained military experience during the French and Indian War, including service in campaigns against French Canada. He later became a substantial landowner and public official. As resistance to Britain intensified, he presided over New York's Provincial Congress and accepted command in the revolutionary militia.

In August 1776, while Washington's main army defended Brooklyn, Woodhull commanded Suffolk and Queens County militia east of the American lines. His assignment was to drive cattle and other livestock away from the advancing British so the animals could not supply the enemy. The work was strategically important but difficult: militia were scattered, orders were unclear, and British control expanded rapidly after the Continental defeat on August 27. Woodhull waited for reinforcements that did not arrive.

British troops captured him near Jamaica on August 28. According to later tradition, an officer struck him repeatedly with a sword after he refused an order to say "God save the King," though details of the encounter remain disputed. What is certain is that Woodhull received severe wounds to his head and arm and became a prisoner. He was moved among makeshift places of confinement at a time when the British were overwhelmed by thousands of American captives.

As infection worsened, Woodhull was transferred by water to the old Nicasius de Sille house at New Utrecht, near today's 84th Street and New Utrecht Avenue. Physicians amputated his injured arm, but the treatment could not save him. His wife reached him before he died on September 20, 1776. His body was returned to the family estate at Mastic for burial. The house that sheltered his final days was demolished in the nineteenth century.

Woodhull's death became part of the Patriot memory of British brutality after the New York campaign. Yet his story also reveals the operational collapse surrounding the Continental defeat: competing authorities, incomplete intelligence, vulnerable militia, and inadequate medical care. His cattle-removal mission shows how armies depended on local food resources, while his captivity foreshadowed the suffering of thousands held in New York prisons and prison ships during the occupation.

In 1916 the General Nathaniel Woodhull Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution placed the tablet near the vanished De Sille house site. Modern streets now cover a rural Dutch settlement landscape, so the marker supplies a rare geographic link to Woodhull's final journey. It does not mark where he was captured or buried; it marks the place of his death, preserving the memory of a civilian leader turned militia general whose wartime service ended in the aftermath of defeat.