Annie Moore

On New Year's Day 1892, a teenager from Cork became the first person ever processed at Ellis Island. Annie Moore stepped off the gangway, was handed a ten-dollar gold piece, and walked into America ahead of the twelve million who would follow her through those doors. She had sailed from the harbour just downriver from where this walk begins.

The crossing

Annie was born in Cork around 1874. Her parents had already gone ahead to New York, leaving the children behind until they could send for them. Two days before Christmas 1891, seventeen-year-old Annie boarded the SS Nevada at Queenstown, the harbour town now called Cobh, with her two younger brothers Anthony and Philip in her charge. They spent twelve days at sea, Christmas among them, in the steerage decks where most Irish emigrants travelled. On the last day of the year the ship reached New York.

First through the doors

Ellis Island opened as the United States' new immigration station on 1 January 1892, and Annie Moore was the first in the line. Officials made a small ceremony of it, presenting her with a ten-dollar gold coin, likely more money than her family had ever held at once. Then she and her brothers passed through to find their parents and begin again. Behind her, for the next sixty years, came the great flood of emigration, and Cork's harbour sent more of them than any other port in Ireland.

What made her the first was part luck and part Cork. The Nevada had sailed from Queenstown, and when it reached New York the new station happened to open the next morning, with the Irish ahead of the line. Officials and reporters seized on the moment: a young Irish girl, a gold coin, a fresh start, the perfect image for a country built on arrivals. The ceremony was sentimental, but the thing under it was true. Behind the speeches stood a real teenager who had crossed a winter ocean minding two younger brothers, and who walked off the boat into a city where she knew almost no one but her own parents.

The girl in bronze

For a long time the real Annie was lost, and a wrong story had her dying young out west. Genealogists later found the truth: she stayed in New York, married, raised a large family on the Lower East Side, and died there in 1924. Two statues now mark her crossing, both by the sculptor Jeanne Rynhart. One stands at Cobh, looking out at the harbour she left, and one at Ellis Island, looking back. She is the face the world gives to Irish emigration, and she was a Cork girl first.

On the walk

Cork's emigrant story runs through the whole tour. We follow it from the Famine quays toward the harbour at Cobh, where Annie Moore and millions of others took their last sight of Ireland.