Irish immigrants arriving Boston 1847

Irish immigrants arriving Boston 1847 came ashore into a port that was building its response as the ships kept coming. Vessels from Cork, Liverpool, and other Irish and British departure points landed thousands of famine emigrants that spring and summer, many already carrying fever from the crossing, and by the last week of May the city had opened an emergency quarantine hospital on Deer Island to receive the sick who could go no further.

Irish immigrants arriving Boston 1847: what the count shows

The city’s own records give the clearest starting figure. A report from Boston’s newly formed Committee on Alien Passengers, dated 21 May 1847, stated that 6,377 alien passengers had arrived in the port since November of the previous year, and that 355 of them had been sent to the House of Industry because of poor health, a group that by itself made up half the institution’s total inmates. That single number, drawn straight from the committee’s own minutes, shows how quickly the House of Industry had been overwhelmed months before the worst of the summer arrivals.

Wider estimates for the whole of 1847 vary, and the surviving accounts do not agree with one another. The Boston Irish Famine Memorial, dedicated in the city in June 1998, states that 37,000 Irish refugees arrived at Boston in 1847 alone. A separate account of that year’s events, published by the Boston Irish Reporter, puts the number who landed during Black ‘47 specifically nearer 25,000. Both figures describe the same emergency; neither claims to be a precise census.

The brig Mary and a city on alert

Boston’s officials were nervous before the worst of the summer even arrived. On 17 May 1847, the British brig Mary was refused entry to the harbour with 46 famine passengers aboard, and a Revenue Cutter had to put down a mutiny among those on board before the vessel could be dealt with. The state’s Act relating to Alien passengers, passed on 20 April 1837, had already been on the books for a decade, but nothing in it had prepared Boston for a season like this one.

The Board of Aldermen moved first, forming a committee on 10 May 1847 to decide what the city government should do about the passengers arriving in its port. The Common Council joined three days later, and by 21 May the joint committee had reported back: the House of Industry was full, fever had become epidemic there, and a separate location was needed for the sick and the destitute. The City Council’s order that same day authorised the committee to find suitable accommodations and to charge the cost against fees already being collected from arriving passengers under the 1837 Act. Deer Island, out in the harbour, was judged the most suitable site.

Deer Island: the emergency hospital in the harbour

The Deer Island hospital admitted its first patients on 29 May 1847, according to the city’s own administrative records. Within days it had a death to record. Mary Nelson, a six-year-old Irish girl, died there of typhus on 1 June 1847, the first of what would become hundreds of burials on the island before the emergency passed.

How many, exactly, depends on which surviving account is consulted. The U.S. National Park Service, which now manages Deer Island as part of the Boston Harbor Islands park, records that roughly 5,000 people were treated there between 1847 and 1849, more than 750 of whom died and were buried on the island. A separate tally, compiled for the Great Famine Voices project, puts total burials at 850 between 1847 and 1850, with close to 300 of those deaths falling in 1847 alone and about 200 attributed to typhus that year. By the same account, the hospital had already treated 2,034 patients by the end of its first year. A third figure, drawn from hospital admission records covering June 1847 to December 1850, counts 4,816 total admissions, of whom 4,069 arrived already ill and 759 died on the island. None of these three counts contradicts the others outright; they measure different spans of time using different surviving ledgers, and no single document reconciles them.

The hospital employed a staff of around 50, roughly half of them Irish, and the disease did not spare the people running the institution. Dr. Joseph Moriarty, the chief physician, contracted typhus from his patients and died in December 1847 at the age of 34; his brother, Dr. John Moriarty, took over the post. Captain Daniel Chandler, head of the House of Industry, the city’s almshouse and workhouse that had been overwhelmed the previous spring, also died of typhus that same year. By the summer of 1848 the hospital’s patient numbers had fallen into the hundreds, and by October of that year there were hardly any patients left. The Committee on Alien Passengers formally closed its business on 27 December 1848.

The graves on Deer Island went largely unmarked for well over a century. A Celtic Cross memorial to those buried there was unveiled on the island on 29 May 2019, close to a century and a half after the hospital first opened its doors, giving a formal marker to a burial ground the original committee had chosen in the same hurried weeks it built the hospital itself.

Bonds, fees, and a wary Superintendent

Boston did not simply let ships land or turn them away; it tried to price the risk each one carried. In June 1847, the city set up a quarantine station about half a mile from the Deer Island hospital and published stricter regulations: every incoming vessel had to stop there for inspection by the Port Physician and the Superintendent of Alien Passengers before it could proceed. The Superintendent collected a $2.00 entry fee for every passenger and secured a bond, commonly cited at $1,000, from the ship’s master for any passenger judged likely to become a public charge. A ship found carrying typhus, dysentery, or another serious disease was quarantined for three days and its sick sent directly to the island.

The public reception waiting on shore was not uniformly hostile, but it was far from settled. The Boston Daily Evening Transcript described the arriving Irish, in print, as “these thoughtless, head-strong, imprudent people,” language that captured a widely shared unease even as churches and relief committees tried to respond to the same crisis with aid. Bishop John B. Fitzpatrick, who led Boston’s Catholic diocese through these years, urged calm among the city’s Irish Catholics as nativist sentiment hardened that year, the same tension that would later carry into organised political opposition described in our piece on how Famine migration changed Boston.

Boston passenger lists 1847: what survives and what doesn’t

Every vessel arriving in Boston from a foreign port was, in principle, required to leave a paper trail. Under an act of Congress passed 2 March 1819, effective from 1 January 1820, the master of any arriving vessel had to submit a sworn passenger list to the customs collector, recording each traveller’s name, age, sex, occupation, home country, intended country of residence, and any deaths that occurred during the voyage. These Boston passenger lists survive today through National Archives Microfilm Publication M277, drawn from Record Group 36, the records of the Bureau of Customs, with a single roll of that microfilm covering arrivals from 1 June to 12 October 1847, the very months this quarantine emergency unfolded.

What survives, though, is not what was originally filed. The original Boston passenger lists dated before 1883 were destroyed in a fire at the Boston customhouse in May 1894, so the sheets researchers consult today for 1847 are copies received by the National Archives from the old Immigration and Naturalization Service, not the documents a clerk filled out dockside. Searching them is also harder than it sounds: no complete index exists for Boston arrivals before 1848, and the supplemental card index that partly fills the gap for the earlier period is itself incomplete. Anyone reconstructing a single family’s crossing through Boston in 1847 is working from a copy of a copy, filtered through indexes that were never finished. The arrival process at Boston in these years also looked nothing like the more organised immigration depots that opened decades later in New York, a comparison covered separately in our piece on Castle Garden versus Ellis Island.

What historians cannot know

The Deer Island death toll alone shows the limits of what the surviving paperwork can settle. Figures for total burials range from roughly 750 to 850 depending on the source and the years counted, and a separate tally of hospital admissions puts total deaths at 759 out of 4,816 people admitted between June 1847 and December 1850, a mortality rate near 16 percent among those treated. These are not contradictions so much as different institutions, working from different ledgers, counting different things over different windows of time. No single surviving document reconciles all three.

Motive is harder still to recover than mortality. Officials at the time framed the quarantine as a public health necessity, and the disease risk was genuine: typhus, poorly understood in 1847, spread easily through crowded steerage and crowded wards alike, killing patients and staff without distinction. But the surviving record was written almost entirely by the officials doing the containing, from committee minutes to newspaper columns describing the new arrivals as a nuisance, and it says far less about how the sick themselves experienced those weeks on the island. What Mary Nelson’s family knew of her final days, or what any of the thousands of ordinary passengers who cleared quarantine without incident felt as their ship was held for inspection, was not the sort of detail a nineteenth-century committee report or customs ledger was built to preserve. The gap in the record is, in that sense, as telling as anything written in it.

Boston’s own reckoning with these arrivals did not end with the hospital’s closure at the end of 1848. Anyone tracing what the crossing itself was like for the passengers who reached that quarantine station will find the wider picture, ship by ship, in our account of the coffin ships of Black ‘47.

Sources and further reading

• City of Boston Archives and Records Management Division, “Guide to the City Council Joint Committee on Alien Passengers records,” Collection 0140.011, finding aid prepared by John McColgan and Kristen Swett.
• U.S. National Park Service, Boston Harbor Islands National and State Park, “Historic Health in the Harbor,” nps.gov.
• EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum, Great Famine Voices project, “The History of Deer Island Famine Irish Quarantine Station in Boston,” greatfaminevoices.ie.
• Boston Irish Reporter, “These thoughtless, head-strong, imprudent people: June 1847, mass arrival of famine Irish,” bostonirish.com, 2024.
• Boston Irish Reporter, “Deer Island: the stories of the famine-era burials,” bostonirish.com.
• National Archives and Records Administration, Microfilm Publication M277, “Passenger Lists of Vessels Arriving at Boston, 1820-1891,” Record Group 36, Records of the Bureau of Customs, pamphlet accompanying M-277, 1970.