Birds Eye View of the Fire Island Surf Hotel

With approval from Governor Flower, Jenkins had purchased the debilitated Surf Hotel from proprietor David Sturges S. S. Sammis for the inflated price of between $210,000 and $250,000.  In the 1850s Sammis opened the hotel, an immensely popular and profitable summer resort in its time that had fallen into disrepair by the 1890s. After the purchase Jenkins had the site cleaned up and staffed with a manager and physician, and police guards. In anticipation of the passengers of the Normannia and their five-star quarantine, “Forty French cooks and waiters” were requested but never arrived. They “were stopped at Babylon and stoned,” effectively preventing them from embarking for Fire Island.  For selling the property to the state as a quarantine site Sammis was threatened with a tar and feathering by unidentified individuals.

Following the sale of the property and hotel the Board of Health of the town of Islip “called a mass meeting of citizens of the town to protest against the lan[d]ing of passengers at any place within the town jurisdiction.”  At the conclusion “[a] committee was appointed to go to Fire Island with twenty deputy constables to protest against the use of the island for quarantinee purposes, and resist the landing of passengers.”

There are several factors that motivated Long Islanders, primarily men from Islip, Bayshore, and Babylon, to protest the Fire Island quarantine.  I believe they can be summed up in one and divided into three.  The overarching source of the unrest was fear motivated by the threat and proximity of cholera, authority over town lands, and discrimination against immigration.

The Bay Shore Clam-Diggers, Who Were of the Mob, Taking to Their Boats

The Great South Bay is approximately 6.8 miles at its widest point.  This span, far greater than the 6 feet separation we maintain for the Coronavirus pandemic, is not actually that far for a marine community.  That distance could be spanned in a few hours with a good strong wind in your sails.  During the Board of Health meeting residents raised concerns that the proximity to cholera would harm property values and the oyster and fishing industries.  If you kept a wary eye on the news as I did from January to March you would have a sense of the fear, anxiety, and dread that accompanies an approaching pathological disaster.  Fear precedes epidemics.  Newspapers had been reporting the approach of cholera infected “pest ships” from Hamburg for weeks.  With the purchase of the Surf Hotel as a future quarantine site, as far as Long Islanders were concerned, “[t]he idea of a cholera crisis had already landed” and it was far too close for comfort.

Not only was the state government placing their lives and livelihoods at risk, they were also appropriating land within the Islip town jurisdiction to do so.  Unease over the use of the purchased property led to the formation of a committee for protesting the use of the island for quarantine and an injunction declared by Judge Barnard of the supreme court, “restraining Governor Flower, Dr. Jenkins and others from landing quarantine passengers on Fire Island.”

Despite the fact that most of the passengers of the Cephus were affluent and wealthy Americans returning from abroad, the Long Islanders were also protesting immigration and the spread of an “Asiatic” disease. Cholera spreads when feces infected with the cholera causing bacteria Vibrio choleraecontaminates food or drinking water that is then ingested by people.  Migrant communities and other populations under stress are susceptible to the disease. In 1892 cholera traveled through Europe and across the Atlantic from ports in Hamburg following the movements of Jewish migrants fleeing antisemitism, persecution, and abuse.  The steerage accommodations that these immigrants were forced to travel in were the ideal environments for the contraction and spread of cholera, especially if the passengers were coming from a contaminated port as the port of origin, Hamburg, was.  A “long-forgotten Congressional investigation of steerage conditions, conducted in 1911” found steerage accommodations to be “filthy… inadequate… almost unendurable.” In 1911, as it surly was only a decade previously, steerage passengers were subject to bad food, cramped and poorly ventilated quarters, open baths, and communal cups for drinking water.  I do not want to completely disregard the suffering of the cabin class passengers of the Normmania, but they couldn’t hold a light to the pathological, humanitarian nightmare endured by the immigrants in steerage.  Given the nature of the disease and the way it spread in 1892 it was unfortunately not very difficult for some to connect cholera, to immigration, to Jewish migrants.  One needs only read the poem by Emma Lazarus, engraved at the bottom of the Statue of Liberty, calling for the “huddled masses” and “wretched refuse” or how the very opinionated Caspar Whitney describes the “steerage passengers, unclean cholera-trafficking wretches that they are” in his article “Two Days With the Cholera Exiles” to get a sense of how people imagined immigrants in general and immigrants during the 1892 cholera epidemic in particular.

The Mob at Fire Island Preventing the Landing of the “Normannia” Passengers

The Imprisoned “Normannia” Passengers on the “Cephus” off the Wharf at Fire Island

So, how did the standoff between the armed Long Islanders and the state authorities and passengers of the Cephus actually play out?  One particularly interesting article from the September 13th, 1892 edition of The Sun describes the whole episode as the stuff of a “plot for an opera hou∫∫e [house]” and writes it as such.  What follows is a contest between locals, state officials, and travelers.  In all of the papers I have read, the Long Islanders appear as a rowdy, cruel, faceless mob of mainlanders and baymen represented by an Attorney Reid who seems to be a ring leader.  In the papers they seem inhumane, unaffected, and unsympathetic to the plight of the passengers of the Cephus who were, admittedly, stuck on an overcrowded day boat for nearly two and a half days with little food and no bedding or shelter.  The crowds finally dispersed back into the Bay on the 13th when news arrived that the Governor was calling in the state militia.  The conclusion of the drama was less climactic than descriptions of fleets of catboats or hundreds of shadowy, menacing, jeering figures crowding the docks armed with clubs and fishing implements suggests.  The Surf Hotel was used as a quarantine site until October.  According to Shoshanna McCollum of the Fire Island News, “only two documented cases of illness were reported on Fire Island… and those ultimately turned out not to be cholera at all.”

There is more to the story than I was able to fit here, and I encourage you to read more if you are interested.  While an interesting episode for sure this story is not particularly uplifting or inspiring.  You may read this story from your own quarantine and thank the stars that your experience has been nothing like those of the immigrants in steerage or on quarantined islands, or the passengers trapped on the Cephus.  The efforts through which these Long Islanders tried to protect themselves and their communities, their rights, livelihoods, and shores from an approaching pathogenic crisis were not particularly constructive, admirable, or inspirational.  Their actions were inspired by fear and insecurity.  The Long Islanders who protested the landing of the Cephus and the use of the site for quarantine responded in ways that made sense to them and provided a sense of comfort, safety, and empowerment, catharsis in the face of crisis.

Thank you for reading my thoughts on this very interesting standoff between Long Islanders and state authorities and the ordeals of the immigrants and the passengers of the Cephus amidst the Cholera epidemic that never reached New York.  I hope you found it as interesting as I did.  My interpretation of the events is just one after all.

 

 

Further Reading:

“Plague & Prejudice: When Quarantine Came to the Shores of Fire Island” by Shoshanna McCollum

Ithaca Daily Journal, September 12, 1892

The Daily Leader, September 12, 1892

The Sun, September 13, 1892

Watertown re-union, September 14, 1892

Fire Island’s Surf Hotel and other Hostelries on Fire Island Beaches in the Nineteenth Century by Harry W. Havemeyer

“Two Days With the Cholera Exiles” by Caspar W. Whitney

New York Department of Health

Fire Island Saga: How Fire Island Got Its Name by Warren C. McDowell

“When Germs Travel” by Howard Markel

“Fearing Future Epidemics: The Cholera Crisis of 1892” by Paul S. B. Jackson