NEW YORK -- When Ellis Island opened in 1892, the first immigrant to step ashore was a 15-year-old girl from Ireland's County Cork named Annie Moore.
On Nov. 12, 1954, the last person processed through the tiny island almost in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty was a Norwegian sailor named Ivan Pederson.
During the 62 years in between, an incredible 12 million newcomers came to Ellis Island looking for America. It was the largest migration in human history.
On Sept. 9, President Bush will stand on a sparkling Ellis Island brought back from the dead and dedicate the new National Museum of Immigration and the 27 acres surrounding it as a national shrine.
The name alone conjures up countless memories. It has been estimated that 100 million Americans can trace their families back to someone who passed through Ellis Island.
The trauma of the experience is a legacy for many. Recalls New York Gov. Mario Cuomo of his parents' arrival:
'Mama said there was terror and tears, sick people and crying. The people who went through Ellis Island were offended by the mechanics of it. Names were distorted and they were treated like cattle.'NEWLN:------
The mechanics of it were basic. For the first time in the history of the United States, the federal government decided to step in and put some restrictions on immigration, complete with a classic ham-handed bureaucracy.
Before the 1880s, the vast underpopulated country needed as many people as it could get to help stoke the Industrial Revolution and push on to the Pacific.
The first great wave of immigration began in the 1840s, when Irish famines and political turmoil in Germany and France sent million streaming to the United States. They were joined by Scandinavians, Belgians, Dutch, Scots and Welsh, northwestern Europeans on the move.
Immigration was the business of state governments. By 1855, the flow of newcomers into New York City had become so heavy the state took over Castle Garden, a former theater at the tip of Manhattan, to put some order to the process and offer nominal protection and counseling to the new arrivals.
Between 1855 and 1890, more than 8 million of the 12 million immigrants entering the country came through Castle Garden.
In 1881, Czar Alexander II was assassinated, and the ensuing pogroms and atrocities against the Jews forced millions to flee westward. Poverty and political upheavals spread to Italy and other Eastern European countries.
And despite the high ideals embodied in the then-recently dedicated Statue of Liberty, many of the 'old' immigrants took a dim view of the 'new' immigrants. Pressures built for tighter entry requirements.
In 1890, the federal government took over the immigration process. It chose Ellis Island, an old naval arsenal just off the New Jersey shoreline in New York Harbor, and began building the huge immigration facility.NEWLN:------
Ellis Island was fueled by the steamship. Every week, dozens of them, their lower decks crammed with laborers, peasants, mechanics, artisans and adventurers, arrived in New York Harbor.
To get to America in steerage class, you paid about $35. That got you a cramped bunk, meals of pickled beef and herring, bean soup and potatoes. If you wanted to wash yourself or your clothes, sea water was provided.
It didn't take long after Ellis Island opened for the stories to drift back across the Atlantic. There were tales of the '60-second medical,' of sadistic, prejudiced officials who watched your every move, every expression, every nervous tic, jiggle or stumble for an excuse to send you back.
True? False? Who knew for sure?
According to many accounts, by the time immigrants had suffered up to three weeks on a rolling ship with the smell of vomit, dirty bodies and the screams of babies, they were nervous wrecks.
There are many vivid recollections of watching at the rail as the ship moved between Staten Island and Brooklyn and into the incredible sights of Upper New York Bay.
On the left was Lady Liberty. 'She stands up with her hand outside and everything. ... It's the freedom of the world,' recalled a Russian immigrant years later.
Straight ahead was Manhattan. All those buildings ... so tall ... so close. The ship stopped in the bay at a place called 'quarantine.' Better-heeled immigrants who could afford the $60 to $90 for first and second-class fares moved on to Manhattan for more refined processing.
Steerage passengers with their bags and bundles and badly tied boxes were loaded onto stumpy little steam ferries for the trip to the fabled Ellis Island.
First impressions: Was that a castle? No, a palace -- with domed roof and red brick walls and cream stone trim. There are four towers topped with green. Hundreds of electric lights sparkled.
Over the years, many reporters stood on the quay in front of the huge Main Building, with its ornate Beaux-Art style architecture, and watched the families trooping off the ferries.
One recalled it as 'a sea of straining immigrant faces, beards, boots, long overcoats, a babel of languages and dialects, heavily clad women in babuskas clutching in one hand a saucer-eyed child and in the other a knotted bedsheet bulging with the possessions of the first half of a life. Americans-to-be.'
