Immigrant Ships
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The Compass

~ Ellis Island ~

One of our Volunteers has sent in an article on Ellis Island
I hope you will write him and let him know how much his article is appreciated
Contributed by Bill Kerchof

Photo by A. Loeffler; 1905
Donated by Bill Kerchoff

The hundreds of thousands of European emigrants who flooded the principal arrival port of New York after the Civil War overwhelmed the immigration depot that had been established at Castle Garden in 1855. In 1890 Congress authorized a new facility on Ellis Island, near the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor; the complex was opened in 1892, burned in 1897, and was reopened in 1900 in the form seen above. The three steamboats transported immigrants from arriving steamships to the processing depot in Ellis Island. Inside the main building, immigrants were given a medical examination to eliminate the chronically ill, interviewed to eliminate criminals and anarchists, and then assisted in purchasing transportation to their destinations in the U.S. During the height of immigration through Ellis Island, between 1905 and 1914, the facility commonly processed 30,000 immigrants per week. More than 90 percent were admitted; the 5-10 percent considered dangerously ill or undesirable were returned to Europe at the expense of the shipping companies. Ellis Island closed in 1954, after having processed twelve million immigrants during its sixty-two years of operation. Photo by A. Loeffler; 1905. (M.S,M, 85.74.1)

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