Ellis Island portraits
The faces that became America
Alex Q. Arbuckle
1906-1912
First opened in 1892, the immigration station at Ellis Island in New York harbor processed more than 12 million immigrants before being closed in 1954. At the station's peak in 1907, more than one million immigrants passed through in a single year, with 3,000 to 5,000 entering every day, mostly from Europe and its periphery.While most entrants to Ellis Island answered a few questions and passed through to the mainland within a few hours, some were detained on the island for longer periods.Augustus Francis Sherman was the chief registry clerk at Ellis Island, and an avid amateur photographer. He had special access to the immigrants who were temporarily detained while waiting on escorts, money or travel tickets.Sherman persuaded many of these immigrants to pose for his camera, encouraging them to put on their finest clothes or national dress. His photographs, captioned simply with the subject’s place of origin, were published in National Geographic in 1907 and hung for many years in the headquarters of the Federal Immigration Service.Today, more than 100 million Americans — a third of the population — can trace their ancestry back to an individual who immigrated through Ellis Island.
That’s all you heard. Gold on the streets of America…. You could be anything you want here and make a lot of money, even if it was a dollar a day. - Louise Nagy, immigrated from Poland 1913
Here is not merely a nation, but a teeming nation of nations. - Walt Whitman
Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists. - Franklin D. Roosevelt
Remember that when you say ‘I will have none of this exile and this stranger for his face is not like my face and his speech is strange,’ you have denied America with that word. - Stephen Vincent Benet
