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Since Europeans settled Massachusetts, at least seven of the 34 islands and peninsulas of Boston Harbor have held quarantine stations and hospitals. At their best they protected the city from epidemics and cared for people in need. At their worst they were a way to send away people society did not want to see.
Quarantine, 1677–1886
| Year | |
|---|---|
| 1677 | Deer Island becomes the first quarantine station, for smallpox cases arriving by ship |
| about 1686 | a ship with passengers exposed to smallpox is held at Lovells Island |
| 1717 | Boston opens a quarantine station on Spectacle Island, where many arriving in the 1729 smallpox outbreak from Ireland are landed |
| 1737 | the town buys Rainsford Island — "Hospital Island" — for a new station; the keepers of Boston Light and Castle Island must send every ship with disease aboard there |
| 1764 | during a smallpox epidemic Castle Island takes 3,000 patients; Dr. Joseph Warren runs an inoculation site there |
| 1847–1849 | fleeing the Irish famine on ships without doctors, immigrants bring dysentery, cholera and typhus; a temporary hospital on Deer Island admits some 5,000 people, and more than 750 die and are buried there |
| 1866 | quarantine moves to Gallops Island |
| 1886 | its staff examine more than 33,000 passengers a year |
Rainsford's reputation was grim: Boston families sent relatives there with infectious diseases, as one historian of public health put it, fairly sure they would never come back.
Almshouses and hospitals
- Rainsford. The state bought the island in 1852 and turned the quarantine buildings into three almshouses and a hospital for the poor, with a home for Black Civil War veterans. Conditions became intolerable; the reformer Alice North Towne Lincoln campaigned until it closed in 1894.
- Long Island. The city built an almshouse and then a hospital there, which took Rainsford's remaining residents and ran until 2015.
Both islands served people in need while also removing the "less desirable" from sight — and probably inspired Dennis Lehane's novel Shutter Island.
Care for children
- The Boston Floating Hospital, started in 1894 by the Rev. Rufus B. Tobey, took sick children and their mothers out on summer harbour cruises, where the breeze eased deadly heat; it provided food and health care and followed up at home.
- Bumpkin Island's children's hospital, founded by the industrialist Albert Burrage, opened in 1902 with open-air play areas and a pavilion, for up to 150 children with non-contagious illnesses whose families could not care for them.
Deer Island today
Deer Island serves the city's health in a new way: since 1995 it has been home to the Deer Island Wastewater Treatment Plant, run by the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority. It has done more than anything else to clean up the harbour — by the park's account, Boston's water is cleaner than it has ever been.
Sources
Written from "Historic Health in the Harbor", National Park Service, Boston Harbor Islands National Recreation Area, a work of the United States government in the public domain, drawing on the park's Cultural Landscape Report (Olmsted Center for Landscape Preservation, 2017).
In these collectionsBoston Harbor Islands National Recreation Area
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from www.nps.gov
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