On June 1, 1847, six year old Irish girl is the first to die at Boston's Deer Island Quarantine Hospital

On June 1, 1847, Mary Nelson became the first Irish immigrant to die at the new quarantine hospital at Deer Island.  She died of typhus fever and was six years old.

During the first ten days of June, 1847, other deaths included:

Mary Connelly, age one on June 3; 

Mary Flaherty, age 21,  on June 6; 

Timothy Mahoney, age 19,  on June 7; 

Ellen Welch, age 55,  on June 8; 

Thomas Miles, age 60,  on June 8; and 

William Dunn, age 32,  on June 10, 1847.  

The list of names extracted from the official death register of the City of Boston was compiled in 1990 by then-City Archivist Ed Quill.  A copy of the Deer Island Death/Burial Registry between 1847 and 1850 is kept at the City of Boston Archives. 

Those were not the only deaths in Boston during early June, 1847.  The Boston Traveler reported 59 deaths ( males 40, females 19) in the city for the week ending Friday June 4, ranging from consumption and typhus  to scarlet fever and suicide.   On June 4, Coroner C. Smith held an inquest on the body of a female infant, which was found floating near India Wharf.  

City officials had opened the quarantine station on  May 27 to monitor the ships coming from Ireland and Britain filled with refugees who were sick or dying from a variety of diseases, ranging from typhus fever and consumption to cholera and convulsions.  The Irish were fleeing the devastation on successive potato crop failures that triggered poverty and disease, conditions that were exacerbated by the failure of the British overseers of Ireland to address the problems.

Prior to the opening of the quarantine station, sick passengers arriving from Ireland were being allowed to come into Boston, as long as the head tax was being paid by the ship masters.  Many of the passengers became sick within a few days of arriving and ended up at the Alms House in South Boston, which quickly experience an outbreak of death among the patients.  In the last week of May, the total number of patients at the Almshouse was 812, "of whom 94 were admitted during the present week.  There have been 13 deaths during the same period and 53 discharged," according to an item in the Boston Traveler.

Commenting on the new hospital at Deer Island, a local nativist newspaper called American Signal wrote, "Quite a move of our wise city fathers, after they have allowed the city to be filled with pestilence, pauperism and crime.  It is like shutting the barn door after the horse is stolen."

Because of its proximity to sea air and wind, and its distance from the crowded tenements of Boston’s ghettoes, the Deer Island Hospital proved beneficial for the Irish who had contracted typhus, often called ship fever, and other airborne diseases.

The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, in its June 16, 1847 issue, wrote that “bad food, and the huddling together of men, women and children in the hold of a ship for weeks, engender the disease which is brought to our shores….The only efficient remedy, certainly the first source of relief, is a fresh atmospheric exposure.” 

From June 1847 to December 1850, 4,816 people were admitted to the hospital.  Of these, 4,069 were ill upon their arrival and 759 died on the island during this time. 

The Deer Island Irish Memorial is part of Boston's Irish Heritage Trail.  See information about visiting Deer Island here.