"When we was growing up – course, we don't have winters like we used to – boy, that bay used to freeze up and the wild game and everything would come from Jersey over here," he said. "We used to sleigh ride down the Arthur Kill, and we used to be runnin' away with rabbits, man – opossum, pheasant – oh man, they all used to come across the bay."
William "Pops" Pedro was 100 years old when I met him on that spring day in 1982. As a young assistant editor at City Limits, I was part of a team that interviewed Pedro at Sandy Ground, an African-American enclave on the south shore of Staten Island where he had spent his entire life.
My own family has lived on Staten Island for generations, yet until I met Pops Pedro, I had never been to Sandy Ground. Like most people in New York City's most homogenous and insular borough, I'd scarcely heard of it. Meanwhile, the grassroots Sandy Ground Historical Society had already been working for years to preserve this small but significant slice of black history.
And make no mistake about Sandy Ground's significance: Established in the 1770s, it is widely recognized as the nation's oldest continuously inhabited settlement founded by free blacks. Today, a small museum operated by the historical society bears poignant witness to the community's determination to keep its unique identity alive.
City Limits spoke to Pedro in 1982 for a story about a campaign to place Sandy Ground on the National Register of Historic Places and thereby protect it from encroaching suburban development. Although the registration effort succeeded, historic status was largely symbolic and did little to hold back the developers. As a result, the area's rural character – which was still evident three decades ago – has since been obliterated by a sea of cookie-cutter townhouses.
But other initiatives have provided some genuine safeguards for historic Sandy Ground over the years. In the late 1970s, for example, the Landmarks Preservation Commission granted protective status to the cemetery beside the hamlet's Mount Zion A.M.E. Church. Just last month, the city landmarked the church itself, as well as three surviving 19th-century cottages nearby.
Drawn by news reports of the recent landmark designations, I returned to Sandy Ground on a Sunday afternoon in February. It was my first trip back since that long-ago chat with Pedro.
The Sandy Ground Historical Museum is easy to miss. In fact, I did miss it on my first pass down Woodrow Road, a former country lane that was one of the old town's main thoroughfares. Located in a modest, refurbished house, the museum announces its presence only with a small sign on the fence out front.
Inside, artifacts from more than two centuries of folk life fill four small rooms – from 18th-century property records to ornamental grillwork hammered out in a blacksmith shop that was still operating at Sandy Ground when City Limits first stopped by. (The shop burned down in October 1982, just a few months after our visit.) The museum's most ambitious current exhibit, "Faces of the Underground Railroad," uses locally made quilts to depict prominent figures behind the network of safe houses – including some at Sandy Ground – that sheltered fugitive slaves on their escape route north to Canada.
