LAZARETTO IMMIGRATION INSPECTION STATION LOCATED IN ESSINGTON, TINICUM TOWNSHIP, DELAWARE COUNTY, PA.

A QUARANTINE STATION AND HOSPITAL FOR SHIPS INBOUND TO PHILADELPHIA PA, IN USE FROM 1799 TO ????

This page is the start of an ongoing project about immigration in Delaware County and Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania.

The project will be done in sections as I get permissions to use information and am able to acquire photographs.

Location

The Lazaretto lies on the banks of the Delaware River just west of the Philadelphia Airport. It tells the story of quarantine and entry to America from 1643 to 1893. It also tells the story of early aviation.

The Lazaretto Site spans the area from the Delaware River to Second Street(Essington), and consists of the 18th century main building, several smaller buildings and the site of the historic burial grounds at the northeast corner.

As David Barnes wrote in the Philadelphia Inquirer, "Some have called the Lazaretto Philadelphia's Ellis Island, but from a historical standpoint, it is even rarer and more precious than New York's famous immigrant inspection station. A century older than the Ellis Island facility, the original 1799 Lazaretto structure still stands as a silent monument to the first hundred years of our nation's conflicted history of immigration and public health. Unfortunately, the building is not only abandoned and closed to the public, it also is endangered by development. The bulldozers could be put to work as soon as this summer." [Source: Philadelphia Inquirer, June 22, 2006.  Byline: David Barnes.]

Before it was a quarantine station, it was part of the 1643 Swedish settlement, the first permanent European settlement in Pennsylvania. It is also the story of the Lenni Lenape who lived here before the Swedes, and was later a seaplane base in the earliest days of aviation.

Background

Venetians established the first institutionalized system of isolation during the Black Death, detaining ships for 40 days (and introducing the word quarantine from the Italian "quaranta giorni"). In 1403, the world's first maritime quarantine station, or lazaretto, named for Saint Lazarus, the poor man at the rich man's gate from Christ's parable, was built on an island approaching Venice.

Colonial American quarantine law began in 1663, when New York restricted entrance to the city attempting to curb an outbreak of smallpox. In the 1730s, officials built a quarantine station on Bedloe's Island in New York Harbor. The Philadelphia Lazaretto was built in reaction devastation from a yellow fever epidemic in the 1790s and temporarily drove the national government (Philadelphia was then the nation's capital) out of the city. The 10-acre Lazaretto, built with a hospital, offices and residences on the banks of the Delaware River in Tinicum Township, processed ships, cargo and passengers sailing for the port of Philadelphia for nearly a century.

The Philadelphia Lazaretto is believed to be the last surviving example of its type in America. Bedloe's Island in New York harbor was long ago cleared, renamed and later became the site of the Statue of Liberty. Between 1885 and 1938, officials isolated victims of smallpox at Riverside Hospital on North Brother Island in New York's East River. (The famous "Typhoid Mary" was quarantined there.) In California, San Francisco officials attempted to contain cholera at the Ayala Cove Quarantine Station on Angel Island. This site was demolished in the 1950s, when the site became a state park. The Philadelphia Lazaretto remains as the oldest extant example of this and important type of site. It stands today as it has for the last 206 years on a flat stretch of riverbank in Tinicum Township, Pennsylvania, a town of 4,500 nestled between Interstate 95 and the Delaware River, just south of the Philadelphia city line.

In 1799, the Lazaretto Station was established in response to the Yellow Fever epidemic of 1793. The complex included a large main building, several outbuildings, and a burial ground. Much of this site still remains today. Philadelphia-bound ships stopped here for cargo to be inspected and passengers to be screened. Infested cargoes were fumigated or destroyed completely. Ill passengers were brought ashore to the main building or hospital of the Lazaretto for quarantine to await recovery or death.

By some estimates, as many as 1 out of 3 Americans today are descended from those whose first exposure to the New World was here.

Tinicum Township prides itself as the "First Permanent Settlement in Pennsylvania." Thirty years ago, King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden dedicated the statue Johann Printz, the first Governor of New Sweden in the center of the 7-acre Governor Printz Park, nearby the Lazaretto. The fact that some of the earliest European arrivals to the New World stepped ashore on this flat stretch of green riverbank in the 1640s and the Lazaretto continued to operate up to the Civil War makes Tinicum an important and unique site of American arrival for more than 350 years.

THE INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN TAKEN FROM:
http://www.ushistory.org/laz/index.htm AND USED WITH PERMISSION
MOST OF THE WRITING WAS DONE IN 2006.