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New York - New York City - Ellis Island Ellis Island is the headquarters of District No. 3 (southern New York and northern New Jersey) of the twenty-two Immigration and Naturalization Districts into which the United States is divided. It lies about one mile southwest of the Battery in Upper Bay. Its shape is that of two parallel rectangles joined by filled land at their western ends, but separated for the most part by a narrow rectangular basin which contains a ferry slip. When the Dutch colonists used this island as a picnic ground and called it Oyster Island, it had only about three acres of land. It was known also as Bucking Island, and after the pirate Anderson was hanged there in 1765, as Gibbet Island. In the eighteenth century Samuel Ellis, a Manhattan dealer in general merchandise and owner of a New Jersey farm, bought it. After he died, it passed from his heirs to John A. Berry and, in 1808, to New York State. New York immediately sold the island for ten thousand dollars to the Federal Government. For a time it was used' as a government arsenal, to the alarm of near-by Jersey residents who feared an explosion. In 1814 it became the site of Fort Gibson. By 1890 Castle Garden at the Battery could no longer cope with the successive tidal waves of immigrants, and construction of another station on the island was authorized. The name Ellis Island was restored in 1891, and in January, 1892, the station went into operation. Fire destroyed the buildings in 1897, but twenty-eight new ones were constructed. Two more islands were created by the dumping of earth and rock in 1898 and 1905. Today, although causeways and filled land make one 27½-acre island of the three, employees still designate certain sections as Island No. 1, Island No. 2, and Island No. 3. Long the wide-open door to the New World, Ellis Island is now barely ajar. In 1907, the station's peak year, 1,285,349 immigrants were admitted. A Frontal View of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island Photographic Print Buy at AllPosters.com Ellis Island Art Print Buy at AllPosters.com Ellis Island Immigration Depot, New York City Art Print Buy at AllPosters.com Immigrants Waiting Inspection in the Great Assembly Hall at Ellis Island New York Giclee Print Buy at AllPosters.com