After-Orts #103
It's hard to believe nowadays, the water's so dirty ... but up until about the year 1800 there were tremendous big beds of natural-growth oysters all around Staten Island-- in the Lower Bay, in the Arthur Kill, in the Kill van Kull. Some of the richest beds of oysters in the entire country were out in the lower part of the Lower Bay, the part known as Raritan Bay. Most of them were on shoals, under ten to twenty feet of water. ... Between 1800 and 1820, all but the very deepest of these beds gradually petered out. ... But the Staten Islanders didn't give up. What they did, they began to bring immature oysters from other localities and put them on the best of the old beds and leave them there until they reached market size.... Then they'd rake them up... and send them up the bay to the wholesalers in New York....
At first, the Staten Islanders... bought their seed stocks close by, in bays in New Jersey and Long Island, but the business grew very fast, and in a few years many of them... were making regular trips to Maryland and Virginia.... At that time there were quite a few free Negroes among the oystermen on the Eastern Shore,... and the Staten Island captains occasionally hired gangs of them to make the trip North and help distribute the oysters on the beds.... Late in the eighteen-thirties or early in the eighteen-forties, a number of these men... came up to Staten Island to live. They brought their families, and they settled over here in the Sandy Ground section....
The soil in Sandy Ground is ideal for strawberries. All the white farmers along Bloomingdale Road grew them, and the people in Sandy Ground took it up.... Staten Island strawberries had the reputation of being unusually good, the best on the market, and they brought fancy prices. Most of them went to the big New York hotels. Some of the families in Sandy Ground, strawberries were about as important to them as oysters.
-- George H. Hunter (born 1869, a resident of Sandy Ground from boyhood), as quoted by Joseph Mitchell (1906-1996), in a classic essay, Mr. Hunter's Grave, in The New Yorker, September 14, 1956, later collected in Mitchell’s book The Bottom of the Harbor, and again in his book Up in the Old Hotel (2008)