On a windy New Year's Day in 1892, a seventeen-year-old Irish girl named Annie Moore stepped off the steamship Nevada with her two little brothers and walked, blinking, into a brand-new building on a tiny island in New York Harbor. She was the very first person ever processed through Ellis Island. A man handed her a ten-dollar gold piece - more money than she had ever held.
For the next 62 years, ferries kept arriving. Families from Italy, Poland, Russia, Greece, Ireland, and dozens of other places stood in long lines under the giant arched windows of the Great Hall, their belongings tied in cloth bundles. Doctors checked eyes with little buttonhooks. Inspectors asked 29 rapid-fire questions in languages people sometimes barely spoke. Most travellers made it through in a few hours. About twelve million people in all walked off that island and into America.
When Ellis Island finally closed in 1954, the buildings were left to rot - paint peeling, pigeons in the rafters. But people remembered. Today the Great Hall has been polished up into a museum, and roughly four in every ten people living in the United States can trace a great-grandparent or great-great-grandparent back through that one set of doors. Annie Moore's bronze statue still stands near the dock, suitcase in hand, looking out at the Statue of Liberty.
