When we think of immigration to the US, Ellis Island in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty comes to mind. But there have been other historic points of entry for foreigners wishing to seek their fortunes in the land of opportunity. Angel Island in northern California was the main processing station for far east Asian immigrants arriving via the Pacific (see the story of immigrant poetry on the walls of Angel Island). Texas too had its own gateway. Galveston Island near Houston saw some 200,000 foreigners from many different countries come through its port from the late 19th to the mid 20th century.
A.I. Schepps, his mother and seven siblings left Russia in 1913 on the steamship Chemnitz, bound for a new life in the United States.
But they never sailed through the shadow of the Statue of Liberty and never set foot on storied Ellis Island. Their immigrant journey took them farther south, through the Gulf of Mexico and into an island community still recovering from a devastating hurricane a decade earlier.
From there, the family traveled more than 250 miles north to Dallas, where Schepps’ father and three other siblings were preparing to start the farm that would become one of the largest dairies in the nation.
Theirs is the quintessential immigrant success story — they arrived tired and poor, and their brood was likely a huddled mass — but it has a Texas twist: They were among an estimated 200,000 immigrants who came to America via the port of Galveston between 1865 and 1924.
That number, considered by some scholars a conservative estimate, puts Galveston among the 10 biggest immigrant ports of 19th- and 20th-century America.
“People do not think much about Galveston as a national port of entry to the United States,” said Suzanne Seriff, curator of the Forgotten Gateway, a new exhibit that chronicles Galveston as a major port of entry for U.S. immigrants.
On display at the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin, the exhibit will come to Galveston’s Moody Gardens in November.
“We are trying to add to our national history about a port that has largely been forgotten,” Seriff said.
Like those who arrived via other ports of the time, those who came through Galveston were overwhelmingly European. During the late 19th century, they arrived from countries such as Germany and what was then Czechoslovakia. Later, they increasingly were from Italy or Greece.
As Galveston became more developed, some settled there as tailors and merchants. Others moved on to different states. Many branched out to other communities in Texas, establishing ethnic enclaves such as Fredericksburg and New Braunfels.
The rest of the story here.
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