Guest post
PAUL SHARROTT
Staten Island Historian
I just came across an article in the New Yorker by Joseph Mitchell, published in1956 about him exploring along the southern part of Staten Island, namely the Sandy Ground community. This man is my alter ego for sure. I grew up in Sandy Ground and since the woods, lakes, turtles, abandoned houses etc. abounded there I became an avid explorer at age 6 and never stopped.
I don’t think there is one square foot of the whole of south end of Staten Island that I didn’t explore; from Sharrotts Road to the Outerbridge Crossing, my footprints are there. One day in 1956 at age ten I was walking from PS4 on Arthur Kill Road on a shortcut path that my brothers and I forged using an old rusty hand held sickle that we found. The path was still very dense and would get overgrown every summer. I had never seen anybody on that pathway since it didn’t really go anywhere usable to anyone else but us Sharrotts, but on this particular day a man came through the woods just ahead of me and actually startled me. I stopped and stepped to the side halfway hidden by some brush and watched from a distance, ready to bolt away if necessary. He was looking closely at the flora and I noticed that he was breaking pieces off and even smelling the wood.
I knew every neighbor living in the area but never saw this man before. I know now that it was in fact Joseph Mitchell.
I was then and to this day I am still an explorer. I had to explore. It’s in my DNA. After all, that’s how and why the Sharrotts came to Staten Island around 1685. I just had to find out why there were deep holes dug in our woods between Sharrotts Road and Claypit Road. I wanted to know why there were huge piles of oyster shells all over the place in the woods.
Who were the Native American Indians whose arrow points I found and collected all through the fifties? Of course I wanted to know why the road just parallel to the road I lived on, Claypit Road, had the same name as my surname, Sharrott.
My explorations led me to find many interesting and sometime very scary, even controversial things, some that to this day are secrets kept safely in my memory bank. As they say, curiosity killed the cat and yes, I was curious but it’s a good thing I’m not a cat. I was shot at three times back then in the fifties. (Yes, they missed.) Once in 1953 while walking through the woods on a pathway heading towards Arthur Kill Road from Claypit Road I came across a very old, very creepy and seemingly abandoned two story farm house with several outbuildings that even back then were rotted to the ground.
As I got closer a strange man quickly stepped out with a shotgun and took aim while yelling something I could not understand at the time. I was probably three hundred feet away when I heard the gun go off, I was already at a dead run heading back the way I had come. I heard the pellets hitting the trees. I made it home safely. I was seven years old and now more curious than ever, so I went back several times at night and we went back one night with my older brother Howard and peeked into a window at the side of the house. There was one kerosene lantern lit in the room and an old truck parked in front of the house. Howard went back about a year later after we learned that the FBI had raided that old house in 1954 and took a photo.
Above is probably the only known photo of the “Still House”.
Turns out that it was the largest still yet operating on the entire east coast and we could actually smell the fumes of fermentation from our house on Claypit Road but never realized where it was coming from. My curiosity brought me back a dozen times after the raid and the house was now abandoned for sure. The still was huge. The people who operated it in that two story farmhouse with a full basement had cut out the floor so that the still would sit on the basement floor and reach all the way up to the second floor. As I said, it was huge. It was also riddled with machine gun bullet holes in neat rows from side to side and top to bottom which the FBI did to render it useless. It was for sure useless now. All around the basement were piles and piles of burlap sacks of hops and barley used in the fermenting process and rats were all over.
I explored that house from basement up and into the attic through a manhole cut into the ceiling in the upstairs bedroom on the right side of the second floor at the top of the stairs.
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1/22/24