It Happened in Hillsborough: Revenuers Raid on the Sourland Mountain

Perhaps it was merely a coincidence that the US Treasury Department's alcohol tax unit chose the day
after St. Patrick's Day, Thursday, March 18, 1948, to descend on the Sourland Mountain in Hillsborough.
The six agents from the Newark office were hoping to catch bootleggers in the act of operating their
still. Finding no one present at the isolated farm near present-day Pirozzi Lane, they conducted a four-
hour stakeout of the property, hoping the tax cheats would arrive.
Revenuers Raid on the Sourland Mountain

In the end, the revenuers had to settle for finding one of the largest illegal stills ever discovered in New
Jersey. Walter E. Brown, the Treasury Department's North District investigator who directed the raid,
said the still could produce enough booze to cheat the Feds out of $3,000 to $4,000 in tax revenue
DAILY!

The mushroom-type columns used in the distilling process were some of the largest he had ever seen.
Add to that the three 10,000-gallon vats - two of which were filled with sugar mash - and you get an idea
of the size of the bootlegging operation.

The property had been sold by Pasquale Pirozzi only 14 months prior to the raid. He told the
investigators that, in hindsight, it was obvious that the purchaser used an assumed name. Investigators
believed that the still had been shut down for the winter because of the poor roads leading to the farm,
and had only just started producing again. There was a four-room bungalow on the property, but it
showed no signs of habitation other than the remnants of a salad!

Unfortunately, none of the newspapers that covered this story in 1948 did any follow-up, so it is
assumed that the bootleggers, having learned of the raid, moved on and were never caught.
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Gregory Gillette has been writing about local history for 20 years, starting with his Courier News column
“Gillette on Hillsborough” and continuing today with a Facebook page of the same name. A recipient of
the Somerset County Cultural and Heritage Commission History Award for Education/Leadership in
2018, he was named as Hillsborough’s first Local Historian in 2025.