The Last Man Out of Ellis Island

A Girl From Cork

Ellis Island sits in New York Harbor, about a mile from the southern tip of Manhattan, in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty. And before it took in immigrants, it held something very different. The Navy kept a powder magazine there. A storehouse for gunpowder and ammunition.

I'll tell you, as a sailor, "magazine" is a word that gets your attention aboard ship. It's where the danger lives. So there's something strange about this. America's most famous gateway started out as a place to store explosives.

In 1890, Congress ordered the powder moved out. The island was rebuilt as a federal immigration station. Until then, the states had handled new arrivals. Now Washington would decide who got in.

The station opened on January 1st, 1892. The very first person processed was a seventeen-year-old girl from County Cork, Ireland. Her name was Annie Moore. She had crossed the Atlantic in steerage aboard the steamship Nevada. Steerage was the cheapest space on a ship, crowded and below decks. Twelve days at sea. She came with her two younger brothers, to join their parents in New York.

The commissioner of immigration for the port, Colonel John B. Weber, handed her a ten-dollar gold piece to mark the moment.

By the end of that first year, more than four hundred thousand people had followed her through.

Five years later, the whole place was gone.

Fire, Then a Palace

The first buildings on the island were made of wood. In June of 1897, a fire swept through them and burned them to the ground. Everyone on the island got out. No lives were lost. But immigration records reaching back to 1855 went up in smoke.

For more than three years, new arrivals were processed at the Barge Office, on the tip of Manhattan. And the Treasury Department, which ran immigration then, made one rule for what came next. Every new building on that island had to be fireproof.

On December 17th, 1900, the new main building opened. Brick and limestone, with towers at the corners. That first day, inspectors examined two thousand, two hundred fifty-one immigrants.

But that was nothing. In 1907, about one point two million people came through. And on a single day, April 17th, 1907, eleven thousand, seven hundred forty-seven immigrants passed through the Registry Room. That record has never been broken.

They came from Italy and Russia, from Poland and Hungary, from Greece, Ireland, Germany and Scandinavia. Most of them were poor. Many spoke no English. They had sold almost everything they owned for a ticket.

And now everything came down to a few hours on one small island. What waited for them at the top of the stairs?

The Six-Second Exam

First- and second-class passengers were usually checked on board their ships. Ellis Island was for the people in steerage. A ferry carried them from the big ships to the island, and they climbed the stairs to the Registry Room, the Great Hall.

But the exam had already started.

Doctors from the United States Public Health Service were watching them climb, looking for signs of disease. Those doctors sometimes had only six seconds to size up each person. People called it the six-second exam.

If a doctor saw something wrong, he made a mark in chalk on the person's coat. A single letter. "B" meant back problems. "F" meant face. "H" meant heart. A chalk mark pulled you out of line for a closer look.

The disease the doctors feared most was trachoma, an eye infection that spreads easily and can cause blindness. To check for it, they flipped back each person's eyelids. Sometimes with their fingers. Sometimes with a buttonhook, a little metal hook made for fastening shoe buttons. Immigrants remembered that part for the rest of their lives.

Then came the legal inspector, at a high desk with the ship's passenger list. Your name. Your hometown. Your work. Where are you going? How much money do you have?

For most people, it took three to five hours. And for most, it ended well. Only about two percent were turned away, most often for contagious disease, or because officials thought they couldn't support themselves.

Two percent sounds small. But it was tens of thousands of people, sent back across the ocean. Some families were split apart right there on the island. That's why some immigrants called it the Island of Tears.

The crowds seemed like they would never end. But they were about to.

The Doors Narrow

When World War One broke out in Europe in 1914, immigration fell off sharply. The island found other work. It became a Navy way station, a hospital for wounded servicemen, and a place to hold so-called enemy aliens, citizens of countries America was at war with.

After the war, Congress moved to cut immigration for good. In 1921, it set up quotas, fixed limits on how many people could come from each country every year. Then came the Immigration Act of 1924. It cut the limits further, and it required immigrants to get a visa, official permission to enter, from an American consulate before they ever sailed.

That one change moved most of the checking overseas. The great crowds stopped coming. Ellis Island became mostly a place for detention and deportation, for holding people and sending them out of the country.

The front door was turning into a waiting room for people on their way out. So who was left inside?

Who Was Left Inside

During World War Two, the island changed again. A Coast Guard training station opened there in 1939. By May of 1942, about a thousand German, Italian and Japanese nationals were being held there as enemy aliens. In 1943, most immigration offices moved to Manhattan. The detention stayed.

By 1953, the island held two hundred thirty-seven detainees. It took two hundred fifty employees to run the place. More staff than people being held. It made less and less sense to keep the lights on.

And somewhere in Brooklyn, a Norwegian sailor was about to become part of the story.

A merchant seaman works on commercial ships that carry cargo, not on a navy warship. A foreign sailor could stay ashore in the United States for up to twenty-nine days. Arne Peterssen had been here about six months when officers picked him up in Brooklyn and sent him to the island.

Here's where the Navy veteran in me has to be honest. Thousands of sailors have stretched a liberty a little too far. Liberty is what we call time ashore. Twenty-nine days stretched into six months is a lot of stretching. But any sailor understands the pull of a city after a long time at sea.

Which brings us back to that ferry.

Waving Goodbye

November 12th, 1954. The Immigration and Naturalization Service removed the last detainees from Ellis Island.

Sixty-two years. More than twelve million people. The busiest front door in American history.

And the very last one out was Arne Peterssen.

He was paroled, and told to sign onto a ship and leave the country by December. Photographers caught him on the ferry. And he waved goodbye.

That was the picture America saw. But what happened to him next stayed a mystery for decades. Then genealogist Megan Smolenyak traced him through the records, all the way back to his hearing that November.

He had asked to leave the country on his own. He told the officer he had been a seaman for thirty years. And then he said, "this is the first time I have ever overstayed my shore leave."

It wasn't. Just a year earlier, in December of 1953, he had done the exact same thing. All told, he had overstayed his shore leave at least four times.

And that December deadline? He missed it. He was finally deported in February of 1955, aboard the ship Stockholm. He went home to Norway, and he died there in 1981, just days after his seventy-fifth birthday.

On November 29th, 1954, the ferry named Ellis Island made its last run. For years, the island sat rotting in the harbor. Then, in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson made it part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument. On September 10th, 1990, the main building reopened as a museum of immigration.

The Park Service estimates that about four in ten Americans can trace an ancestor through that door. It started with a girl from Cork, holding a gold coin. It ended with a sailor from Norway. Everyone else came in between.

As a Navy veteran, I know the feeling of coming into port after a long time at sea and seeing land again. For twelve million people, that first sight was this harbor. Whatever came next, they never forgot it.

One Norwegian sailor on a ferry, his hand in the air, waving goodbye, with nobody left in line behind him.

Tomorrow: five brothers from Waterloo, Iowa, ask the Navy for one thing, to serve together, so what happens when the Navy says yes? The Daily Muster is supported by Parcaut Supply Co. If this one stayed with you, subscribe so tomorrow's muster finds you. Muster's done. Fair winds. I'm Ed Parcaut, and I'll see you tomorrow.