Annie Moore

On the morning of New Year's Day 1892 a seventeen-year-old from Cork walked down a gangway in New York harbour, was handed a ten-dollar gold piece by a man in a uniform, and became the first person ever admitted to the United States through Ellis Island. Twelve million people followed her through those doors over the next sixty years. Annie Moore went first, and she had sailed from the harbour twenty minutes down the river from where this walk starts.

The crossing

Annie was born in Cork in 1874. Her parents had gone ahead to New York a few years earlier, the way so many families did it, leaving the children with relatives until there was money for the fares. On 20 December 1891 the money came, and 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 in steerage, Christmas Day included, and reached New York on the last evening of the year. The passengers stayed on board overnight. The new immigration station on the island opened the next morning, and the Nevada's people were the first ashore.

First through the doors

The officials made an occasion of it. Annie was led to the desk first, the register was opened with her name, and a ten-dollar gold coin was pressed into her hand, more money than she had ever held. Then she and the boys were sent through to find their parents, who were waiting on the other side, and the family walked out into Manhattan to start again. Behind her, for the next six decades, came the great flood, and Cork's harbour sent more of them than any other port in Ireland.

What made her first was part luck and part Cork. The Nevada happened to be the ship at the pier when the station opened, and the Irish happened to be at the front of the line. The newspapers loved it: a young Irish girl, a gold coin, a fresh start, the perfect picture for a country that told itself it was built on arrivals. The sentiment was real enough underneath. Behind the speeches stood an actual teenager who had crossed a winter ocean minding two small brothers, and who stepped off the boat into a city where she knew nobody but her own parents.

The girl in bronze

For most of a century the real Annie was lost. A story went round that she had gone west, married, and died young under a train in Texas, and that version got as far as the history books. Then in 2006 a genealogist in New York went looking properly and found the truth. Annie never left the city. She married a Fulton Fish Market clerk called Joseph Schayer, had eleven children on the Lower East Side, buried several of them, and died there in 1924 at fifty. Her grave in Queens was unmarked until 2008. There are two statues of her now, both by the Cork sculptor Jeanne Rynhart: one on the quay at Cobh looking out at the water she left, and one at Ellis Island looking back. She is the face the world puts on 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 two and a half million others took their last look at Ireland.