Ellis Island
Between 1905 and 1914, an average of one million immigrants per year arrived in the United States. Immigration officials reviewed about 5,000 immigrants per day during peak times at Ellis Island. Two-thirds of those individuals emigrated from eastern, southern and central Europe. The peak year for immigration at Ellis Island was 1907, with 1,004,756 immigrants processed. The all-time daily high occurred on April 17, 1907, when 11,747 immigrants arrived. After the Immigration Act of 1924 was passed, which greatly restricted immigration and allowed processing at overseas embassies, the only immigrants to pass through the station were those who had problems with their immigration paperwork, displaced persons, and war refugees. Today, over 100 million Americans—about one-third to 40% of the population of the United States—can trace their ancestry to immigrants who arrived in America at Ellis Island before dispersing to points all over the country.
Ellis Island Immigrant Hospital
The original immigration station on Ellis Island opened January 1, 1892, and processed 700 people that first day. In September of that year, the Hamburg-America steamer S.S. "Moravia" arrived at with several confirmed cases of cholera. Every ship arriving in the port of New York was held at quarantine before being cleared to land. Passengers found to have dangerous contagious diseases were taken off ships at quarantine and transferred to the hospital at either Hoffman or Swinburne Island. Twenty-four of Moravia's passengers were ill and twenty-two deaths had occurred during the voyage. Many were children. It was believed that the outbreak occurred due to the ship taking on contaminated water from the Elbe river. The threat of a pandemic caused all shipping traffic to be suspended. The backlog of ships held at quarantine and the lack of adequate medical facilities to handle the volume quickly precipitated the need for a more robust healthcare facility to treat immigrants and merchant marine sailors.