Galveston Quarantine Stations

The inspection routine is the part the plaque skips. When a ship anchored offshore, the master signaled the station and a surgeon sailed out with his nurses on the station's launch, the Seaway. They checked passengers for contagious disease and the ship's papers for a clean bill of health. A ship from an infected port, or with sick aboard, faced a twenty-day quarantine, and the sick were taken to the station. Yellow fever killed more than a thousand Galvestonians in 1867. The last station was demolished in 1972, and Seawolf Park stands on the site.

What the plaque says

Galveston Quarantine Stations Unregulated entry of immigrants through Galveston in the late 1830s greatly contributed to local outbreaks of yellow fever and other communicable diseases. The young city instituted quarantine measures in 1839 and in 1853 built Texas' first quarantine station on the eastern tip of Galveston Island. Yellow fever returned to plague the community in 1867 and 1868. A larger quarantine station, built by the city in 1870, was destroyed by hurricane winds in 1875. The state built new facilities in 1879 and again in 1885 at a site in Galveston known as Port Point. Ships suspected of harboring infected crew, passengers, or cargo were not allowed to enter Galveston's port. A new station, built on nearby Pelican Island by the state in 1892, was destroyed in the storm of 1900. Texas built its last quarantine station at the Fort Point site in 1902. This station merged with Federal operations in 1919. A federally funded 10-structure quarantine facility, secured with the help of Galveston's Federal Liaison Colonel Walter Gresham, was completed here on Pelican Island in 1915. The Pelican Island Federal Quarantine Station, which closed in 1950, inspected an estimated 30,000 ships that brought an estimated 750,000 immigrants to Texas during its 35 years of operation. (1993)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Texas Seaport Museum and the Elissa — 2.0 mi
  An iron barque launched in Aberdeen in 1877 that called at Galveston twice, ended up smuggling in the Adriatic, and was bought back from a Greek scrapyard to sail again from Pier 22.
• The Strand — 2.2 mi
  Five blocks of iron-front brick buildings near the harbor that were once called the Wall Street of the Southwest, emptied after 1900 and brought back by preservationists from the 1960s.
• 1892 Bishop's Palace — 2.3 mi
  Nicholas Clayton's stone house on Broadway for the railroad lawyer Walter Gresham, later home to Galveston's Catholic bishops and one of the most admired Victorian houses in the country.
• 1859 Ashton Villa — 2.6 mi
  A brick Italianate house on Broadway, built with enslaved labor in 1859, whose lawn has held Galveston's Juneteenth commemoration of General Orders, No. 3 every year since 1979.

More markers nearby

• Galveston: Gateway to Texas — steps away
• SS Selma — steps away
• World War I Physicians from Galveston — 1.7 mi
• Galveston Seawall — 1.8 mi