For a community that spends so much time thanking and honoring our veterans and Civil War dead, we certainly forget about our namesake.

Ask the average person on the street for whom Warren County is named, and the most common answer is “Hmmm. I’m not sure.” Most historical experts don’t do a lot better either.

Yet 240 years ago this week at Bunker Hill, 34-year-old Maj. Gen. Dr. Joseph Warren was stuck down in battle during the prime of his life so what we could, well, forget him and move on with this great country that at the time didn’t even include the county here named in his honor.

Warren was the first high-ranking American officer killed in combat, the man behind Paul Revere’s midnight ride, a prominent physician, respected author and a leading voice in early American politics.

“He fell in the glorious struggle for public liberty,” his close friend and mentor Samuel Adams wrote of Warren’s death.

It is also widely believed that Warren used his medical practice — he was indeed the busiest physician in Boston and had spent the day before the battle attending to patients — to spy on the British. His position gave him access to many British loyalists including the children of royal governor Thomas Hutchinson and British General Thomas Gage.

Despite his rank, at the Battle of Bunker Hill — June 17, 1775 — Warren chose to fight as a common soldier while other prominent political leaders fled to the safety of Boston.

“I shall take no command here. I came as a volunteer with my musket to serve under you,” he told Col. William Prescott

When the Americans were running out of ammunition, Prescott ordered his men to retreat, but Warren stayed behind, fighting with the battle of his rifle and bayonet. But it was Warren’s fame that did him in. A British soldier recognized the physician and shot him dead. Warren was buried in a mass grave, but Paul Revere and Sam Adams later exhumed his body. In what was the first case of American forensic investigation, Revere, who was a dentist, was able to identify his friend from an artificial tooth he had implanted in Warren’s jaw.

After his death, Warren was hailed as a national hero, even earning great respect from the British.

“If he had lived, he bid as far as any man to advance himself to the summit of political as well as military affairs and to become the Cromwell of North America,” Thomas Hutchinson wrote of Warren.

Loyalist Peter Oliver wrote in 1782 that had Warren lived, George Washington — now heralded as the Father of Our Country — would have been “an obscurity.”

But instead, Warren has become an obscurity.

The spot where Warren was slain is believed to be where the Bunker Hill monument stands today. Recently, as I was preparing for a talk about Warren, I wanted a video of a Boston College professor walk though the streets near the monument and ask people if they knew who Joseph Warren was. No one did.

At least here in this memorial to an outstanding patriot, let’s keep his memory alive.