Skunk Hollow Research Paper

Skunk Hollow or, “the mountain,” was a free black community from 1806 to 1905. It was a small community of free blacks that was located in the Palisades area. Two years after New Jersey ratified its Gradual Emancipation Act, newly freed slaves settled in a small community known as Skunk Hollow. There were over sixty households in the community known as Skunk Hollow. The Skunk Hollow settlers were more prosperous than other African-American families in the township because most of the Skunk Hollow residents owned property by 1854. Mr. Earnest, Benjamin Charlton and James Oliver were the earliest settlers of Skunk Hollow.
In 1806, Jack Earnest, a freed slave, exchanged $87.50 for five acres near what is now Alpine, New Jersey. The wooded terrain had been deforested by its white owners, and then sold off because of difficulty farming the land with its rock outcroppings, steep hills and swamps. Jack Earnest and

Sanders of St. Charles A.M.E. Zion Church in Sparkill, where many members are descendants of early black settlers. But then the Skunk Hollow community started to fade from the mountaintop in the first decade of the twentieth century, as its men sought jobs in more distant towns and cities. Most of the men of the Hollow worked as laborers on farms and in the little towns in the valley. In 1880, thirteen families lived in the community and in 1885, there were only six. But soon after and for some unknown reason, the Skunk Hollow slowly ceased to exist, after its last inhabitants left around 1910. While large parts were abandoned by 1911, other sections of the Mountain continued to be lived in. Several families stayed there until the Great Depression. Most of the mountain properties were sold for unpaid taxes and the families were evicted. Skunk Hollow was abandoned between 1907 and 1911 with some of the inhabitants moving to Turkey Ridge. While other settled in Closter or