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If Stanley Kaplan and Manhattan Beach Neighbors Have Their Way, Revolutionary War Heroine Will Make History Again
A fixture in Women’s History Month observances, Margaret Cochran Corbin, may soon make history again, if City Tech retiree Stanley Kaplan and his Manhattan Beach neighbors have their way.
Corbin was the first American woman to receive a disability pension from the United States military as a wounded soldier in the Revolutionary War. Kaplan is a retired senior college laboratory technician with the architectural technology department and continues to remain active with the College, handling special projects for his old department and the School of Technology & Design.
More than two centuries ago, women frequently worked with their fathers, husbands and other men during the Revolutionary War, but did so in behind-the-scenes, non-combatant jobs like cooking, laundry and tending to the wounded. When Margaret Corbin’s husband was suddenly killed during the British attack on Fort Washington (New York City) in November 1776, she joined the men on the front lines as a gunner and took full charge of a cannon to help battle the British. She herself eventually was severely wounded, taken prisoner and later released when the British paroled wounded soldiers and sent them home.
In addition to receiving a government pension by an act of the Continental Congress in 1779, Margaret Corbin was recognized as “the first American woman to be wounded and to take a soldier’s part in the War for Liberty.” Buried in an obscure grave following her death in 1800 at age 49, she eventually was re-interred with other soldiers behind the Old Cadet Chapel at the West Point Military Academy, where the Daughters of the American Revolution later erected a monument in her memory.
Stanley Kaplan has been a loud and persistent voice in the Manhattan Beach section of Brooklyn for the renaming of Corbin Place for Margaret rather than for Austin Corbin (no know relationship), its current namesake and a late 19th century railroad magnate and president of the Long Island Railroad.
Corbin Place is a short two blocks away from the nearby Holocaust Memorial in a neighborhood with a largely Jewish population. The renaming effort got underway when it was recently revealed that Austin Corbin was both an outspoken anti-Semite in his day and also president of the American Society of the Suppression of the Jews.
This revelation led to well-organized efforts to rename the thoroughfare. And while streets are renamed all the time, doing so creates problems with things such as mail delivery, home ownership deeds and drivers licenses, and the delivery of emergency services by firemen, EMS drivers and other people unfamiliar with the new name. But such problems will be eliminated if Corbin Place remains Corbin Place in honor of Margaret instead of Austin.
“Things are progressing nicely for the renaming,” says Kaplan, “with its recent approval by a wide margin on the part of Community Board No. 15. I believe the whole business also will require City Council approval before Margaret Corbin makes history again.”
04/04/07
