Honoring the dead Irish immigrants, 150 Years Later

Sceala Clann T.D. Location: United States

A memorial service, held on Saturday, October 17, 2009, honored immigrants who had been buried in unmarked mass graves on Staten Island. Remains were discovered under a parking lot in 2000, and now the people who died while being held at the Staten Island Quarantine Hospital, most from Ireland and Germany, will receive a proper burial and the respect they have lacked for over a century and a half.

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New York Times
From Bones of Immigrants, Stories of Pain
By Jim Dwyer
A few weeks ago, a hearse left Tom Amorosi’s brownstone in Park Slope with the remains of 36 people who died in the 1840s and 1850s. The remains were on the final miles of a dizzying journey out of history. Mr. Amorosi, a forensic anthropologist, had been hired by the state to study them.

The old bones spoke, but did not give direct answers. “I’d look at some of them, and think, ‘How the heck did you get up in the morning?’ ” Mr. Amorosi said, tracing the ravages mapped in the bones by poverty, illness and birth defects. In the bones, recovered during the construction of a courthouse on Staten Island, we get a glimpse of the story of immigration long before Ellis Island.

From the late 18th century on, people arriving in the United States were examined by doctors while their ships were anchored in New York Harbor. Those suspected of having an infectious disease were sent to a quarantine station at Marine Hospital in St. George, Staten Island. Some recovered and left. Others did not, and were buried in a rude graveyard on the grounds.

When the hospital was built in 1799, St. George was distant, rural countryside. By the late 1850s, however, prosperity had arrived. Summer homes were built by wealthy families from Manhattan. A community had grown.

The walled compound of the Marine Hospital, crammed with diseased and dying immigrants, was not the ideal real estate amenity. In 1858, the neighbors decided to shut it down. The sick immigrants were put into a number of New York City homes until Ellis Island opened. “You had very respectable people — church leaders, local politicians, business owners — who battered the gates, emptied any people in the hospital buildings, and then burned each building down,” said Sara Mascia of Historical Perspectives Inc., a firm that studied the site for the state.

No one went to jail for the fires, said Cece Saunders of Historical Perspectives, because “arson was defined as burning down a house with people in it.”

Over the next century, fine houses were built atop the old burial ground. These fell into disuse, and around 1957, the city plowed over the ground and paved it for a public parking lot, disrupting many graves.

“There was one older woman who said she saw human remains being dumped into New York Harbor,” said Lynn Rogers, director of the Friends of Abandoned Cemeteries of Staten Island. In the late 1990s, the city began planning a new courthouse on the parking lot. The state’s Dormitory Authority, which constructs many public buildings, was managing the work. It hired Historical Perspectives to figure out where the cemetery had been.

“The goal was to define the limits of the cemetery so we could avoid it,” said Matthew Stanley, an environmental manager for the Dormitory Authority.

A FIGHT began over what would happen to the remains. Ms. Rogers said her group was willing to provide plots in another cemetery to rebury them. “We said, we don’t care if you want to build a courthouse, a hotel, a bowling alley,” Ms. Rogers said. “Just give them to us and we’ll bury them.”

The discussion got crabby. The state said it was responsible for the remains, unless someone could claim an ancestor. The state’s chapter of the Ancient Order of Hibernians said the remains were probably those of refugees from the Irish potato famine. But hospital records were spotty, and as many Germans as Irish were emigrating in some years the burial ground was in use.

“There were people talking about how we were going to bulldoze a cemetery and drop a courthouse or parking garage on top of it,” said the state’s Mr. Stanley. But the goals, he said, “were always to respect the site.”

The Staten Island borough president provided funds to build a memorial green, where the remains will eventually be placed, when the courthouse is finished. Although most of the remains were not disturbed during the archaeological study, 37 partial skeletons were recovered, jumbled in shallow graves.

These were brought to Mr. Amorosi’s lab in Brooklyn, where he saw compound fractures in the bones and arthritic joints in men and women not yet 40 years old. “These people were used as mules,” he concluded.

At 10 a.m. Saturday, two coffins, one for the adults, one for the five children, will be brought to St. Peter’s Catholic Church for an interfaith service. Afterwards, they will be placed in a holding tomb.

“Then we’re going to Tappan Park,” Ms. Rogers said, “for a traditional 19th-century wake.”

Irish Times
New resting place for mass grave immigrants in New York
The memorial service for Irish immigrants whose remains were found in a mass grave on Staten Island, at St Peter's Church, Staten Island, on Saturday.The memorial service for Irish immigrants whose remains were found in a mass grave on Staten Island, at St Peter's Church, Staten Island, on Saturday.
Lara Marlowe
In the mid-19th century, newly arrived Irish immigrants wandered Staten Island, penniless and disoriented, scrounging for food, waiting for children, spouses, siblings or parents interned in the quarantine hospital to die or be discharged.

They were remembered here this weekend, at a moving ceremony that united those who left Ireland and those who stayed, forever linked by what Edward Cardinal Egan called “the immense suffering” of the emigrants.

A dozen men in green kilts, white Aran jumpers and berets with Tricolour plumes, from the Ancient Order of Hibernians, were pallbearers for two oversized coffins. A beige coffin contained the remains of adults, a white one the bones of children. Ireland’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, Micheál Martin, the Ambassador to Washington, Michael Collins, and Niall Burgess, the Consul General in New York, represented those who stayed. After the service, women wearing Tricolour sashes seized the opportunity to have their photographs taken with Martin – proof that those who stayed still cared about the ones who crossed the Atlantic.

Some 600,000 European immigrants passed through the Staten Island immigrant station between 1799 and 1858, when it was burned to the ground and transferred, eventually to Ellis Island.

“The Irish influx during the Famine destroyed the quarantine hospital,” explains Lynn Rogers, executive director of the Friends of Abandoned Cemeteries. “The Irish relatives of those in quarantine built a shanty town. The locals didn’t want them. A lot stayed on in Staten Island, including my ancestors.”

At least 1,000 people died in the quarantine hospital, of typhoid and other diseases. They were buried in a mass grave across the road from what is now the Staten Island ferry station. There were Germans, Scots, English, Poles, Czechs and others, but Rogers says the majority were Irish. In 1957, a car park was built over the mass grave. “We found a whole row of remains cut off at the knee; a bulldozer rolled over them,” says Rogers. “People back then didn’t care.”

Six years ago, the Friends of Abandoned Cemeteries interrupted a plan to build a courthouse on the site of the mass grave, forcing the authorities to excavate and remove the remains of the quarantine victims. Until Saturday, the remains were held in storage. They’ve now been placed in a 19th century receiving tomb, while the former parking lot is transformed into a cemetery.

Cardinal Egan linked the wave of immigration in the 19th century to the present day. “It’s not easy for those who are coming now, just as it was not easy for these children,” he said, gesturing towards the white casket, “and these adults,” he nodded at the beige one. “Imagine the pain of those who saw their relatives put into a mass grave. But somehow we made it, and we became citizens of the United States of America...”

“The famine is the foundation of Irish-American identity,” Consul General Noel Burgess said later. “You’re struck by the strength and integrity of the memory here in America. In Ireland, we dealt with it by forgetting for six generations.”

Martin’s four-day visit to the US started in the 21st century, explaining the Lisbon Treaty. By Saturday, he had journeyed back to the 19th century. At number 7 State Street, on the southernmost tip of Manhattan, he visited Our Lady of the Rosary, where a home for Irish immigrant girls received more than 100,000 of the 308,000 young Irishwomen who passed through the Port of New York between 1883 and 1908.

Maureen Murphy, a history professor at Hofstra University, quotes a certain Cardinal Gibbons, explaining the protective mission of the home at the end of the 19th century: “These young maidens, after escaping the perils of the sea and landing on our shores, become a prey to the land sharks that infest your city” who sought “to rob those innocent and confiding women” of “the jewel of purity, for which the Irish maiden to all the world is so conspicuous.”

Like most of the women who left Ireland at the end of the 19th century, Murphy’s own grandmother worked as a maid. “Irish emigration was unusual, because there were more women than men,” Murphy explains. “The eldest boy inherited the land. One daughter was dowered off. Opportunity for boys depended on the economy, but for the girls there was always work.”

Murphy and Fr Peter Meehan, the priest at Our Lady of the Rosary, want to turn number 7 State Street into a research centre. Fr Peter found five leatherbound registers in a safe, containing the names, ages, county of origin, date of arrival and address of destination of 60,000 women – a gold mine for historians and genealogists.

As a politician, Martin said, he most enjoyed his day on Capitol Hill. But as a former history teacher, he was in his element discussing books with Murphy: “In my journey here, and through the various events I attend, a door keeps opening into the story of the Irish in America for me.”

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Honoring the dead Irish immigrants, 150 Years Later

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