Coming to America via Galveston recalled

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Coming to America via Galveston recalled

Waves of migrants turned it into Texas' Ellis Island

By JEMIMAH NOONOO 2009 HOUSTON CHRONICLE

March 4, 2009, 4:14PM

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 roughly $1.5 million Forgotten Gateway exhibit tells this story through photographs, film footage and present-day accounts from hundreds of newcomers to the U.S. and the descendants of Galveston’s first immigrants, including Schepps.

Schepps was 3 when his family arrived. After they reunited with his father in Dallas, Nathan Schepps immediately put his 11 children to work on a dairy farm. Schepps Dairy is now one of the largest plants in America.

Seated in his Bellaire living room last week, A.I. Schepps, now 99, recalled those early days in America.

He had difficulty learning English at his rural elementary school while his Russian Jewish parents spoke Yiddish at home. He translated for his parents, reading and writing letters when they could not. His mother was the only family member never to become a naturalized citizen.

In 1932, Schepps became the only one in his family to graduate from college. He earned a degree in chemical engineering from Texas A&M University.

Still, it was the Great Depression, and Schepps struggled to make ends meet, earning $75 per month at an engineering job. He moved to Houston to sell tobacco and candy to stores out of a truck.

By the late 1930s he was married and running the Schepps Grocery Co. downtown.

From 1940 to 1945, he served as a lieutenant colonel in World War II, earning a silver star. After the war, he returned to Houston to continue operating his wholesale grocery business until he retired in 1987.

Not every immigrant who arrived via Galveston shares Schepps’s Horatio Alger success story.

Unlike Ellis Island, some of the people brought to Galveston’s shores were slaves, according to Seriff, an anthropologist who teaches at the University of Texas. Slaves were brought from other Southern states and sold on the island.

Beginning in the late 19th century, immigrants were examined by medical examiners at the ports. Those who were found unfit could be sent back to their countries of origin, said David Denney, who co-directs the exhibit with Seriff.

The examiners would then write reports, some of which were filled with undisguised prejudice. Some of these letters are on display in the exhibit.

As the 19th century gave way to the 20th, Americans everywhere became increasingly xenophobic, Seriff said.

From at least the 1880s, legislators increasingly restricted citizenship. For example, Congress passed laws prohibiting citizenship for Chinese immigrants, many of whom were laborers. The Immigration Act of 1924 barred entry of the Japanese and other Asians; other laws prevented immigrants from owning land and other property.

Such laws persisted until the 1965 Immigration Act abolished national quotas.

Ambivalence toward new immigrants is a recurring pattern in America, evident in the contemporary debate about immigration, the Forgotten Gateway organizers said.

Americans typically are open to immigrants when the nation needs people or workers, Seriff said, but lash out once those needs are met. She noted that, though the United States was built largely on the strengths of immigrants, people have always been quick to complain of the newcomers: “They don’t speak our language, and why don’t they come here legally?”

The exhibit encourages visitors to share their thoughts and stories.

Said Seriff, “We want people to have an ongoing conversation with themselves, each other and their own past throughout the exhibit.”

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