Oyster Island

Pre-Contact to Colonization

 

An illustration by John White depicting Native American men cooking fish on a wooden frame over a fire.

Library of Congress

During the restoration of the immigration station on Ellis Island in the 1980s, archaeologists revealed the island's buried past. The first people to utilize the island were Native Americans -- members of the Algonquian speaking tribes that lived in the northeast region of North America. They visited Ellis Island because it contained large oyster beds, which were a good source of food. As a result, the island was referred to as one of the three "Oyster Islands" in New York Harbor (Bedloe's, later Liberty, Island was another, and the third was Black Tom Island, slightly west of Bedloe.).

The Upper Bay of New York Harbor was rich with many different types of marine food sources that included striped bass, and other finfish, and many varieties of shellfish (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_life_of_New_York-New_Jersey_Harbor_Estuary ). The oysters are easy to define as a food source - they ate the meat and tossed the shells into a midden, a sort of garbage pit. These shells were later found in a shell midden stratum (a type of archeological feature made up mostly of mollusk shells and naturally preserved by the calcium within the shells) by archeologists during restoration work on Ellis Island in 1985. Also among the shells, archeologists found pottery fragments, arrow heads, fish bones, duck bones, deer bones, and turtle bones. These items have given archeologists and historians a better understanding of the Native American's diet and settlement patterns, as well as their keeping the site clean by centralizing their garbage pit and then burying it..

Available archeological data indicates that the Native Americans used both Ellis and Liberty islands to acquire food. From harvesting shellfish to hunting small animals, they found numerous ways to live off the land. They utilized the islands at various times of the year, they fished during the spring, harvested clams, crabs, and oysters during the summer, and hunted year round. They seemed to understand that the cycle of life must be maintained so that they could all exist together in nature.

 

An illustration by John White of Native American men and women fishing in a dugout canoe. In the background, native men spear fish in the water.

Library of Congress

 

Jersey City shoreline, NJ 1905
This map shows location of the Oyster Islands in NY Harbor, though slightly different from pre-colonization days.  Little Oyster Island is at the top, Ellis Island; below that is an island that was never “built” and barely rose above low tide; below that is another Oyster Island, now Bedloe’s or Liberty Island; finally, to the left of that, and closest to shore, here joined by a railroad bridge and tracks, is the Third Oyster Island, known as Black Tom Island.

This is part of a U.S. Geological Survey map and is in the Public Domain.

 

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