Arriving in New York, July 1844
Today the New York skyline is hard to imagine without the Statue of Liberty standing tall before the urban chaos that is Manhattan and the metropolitan area. In 1844, however, Lady Liberty was still more than 40 years away from being constructed, and the city’s famed Ellis Island would not begin operating for another half-century.
The most common method of immigration entry for new arrivals from abroad was at the current site of Battery Park, on the east side of the tip of Manhattan around South Street. It is most likely that Jan Willem, Willemina, and their children were processed at a makeshift immigration center near this landmark, what eventually became Castle Clinton.
Common Ports of Arrival
On July 27, 1844 the Ship Hoop of Rotterdam, Netherlands, with Jan Willem and his family aboard, sailed into New York Harbor and docked near South Street. The seasick passengers who survived the trip across the North Atlantic disembarked the vessel and made their way to an immigration officer who reconciled their names with those contained on the manifest.
This began their assimilation to American society (and likely initiated the spelling update to the Loomans family name).
By many accounts, New York was an obvious choice for an immigrant’s port of arrival. First, it was likely the cheapest option. It also provided the most advantageous access to transportation networks that could take immigrants further inland or down the coastline to the cities of Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Charleston, or Savannah, among others.
Second, New York was less ‘foreign’ to Dutch immigrants than other ports (such as Boston or New Orleans) because of its origins as a center of Netherlandic culture and trade in the New World. Lastly, the high Dutch population in the city also contributed to the formation of immigrant aid societies to welcome and support newcomers from the motherland.
The First Days and Weeks
Immigrants Arrive at Castle Garden | Courtesy FamilySearch.org
Early immigrants to New York, including Dutch Reverend Thomas De Witt and Pieter I. G. Hodenpijl, stayed in the city and became agents for supporting Dutch immigrants as they arrived at the docks. Relatives who previously made the journey waited eagerly for their family members to arrive.
Once the immigrants were processed through the customs station, they were directed to rooming houses near the harbor, many operated by Dutch proprietors. Other services, including those that helped immigrants plan for subsequent legs of their journey, were often run by Dutch businessmen to bring a level of comfortability to this new experience.
Immigrants of the rural Dutch countryside, conditioned to the peace and quiet of their farms, likely found chaotic New York City strange and threatening, even more than their experience in Rotterdam six weeks earlier. Bands of “sharks” and “runners” (people pretending to be compatriots, many of whom spoke Dutch) swept in quickly to swindle the arrivals.
Immigrants, often confused, would trust these conmen and ultimately pay money for accommodations or travel tickets that were fake or immaterial. As a direct result, many Dutch people wrote back to their families in the Netherlands to be careful upon their own trip to the United States and trust nobody, including those speaking the native tongue.
It is unknown how quickly Jan Willem and his family moved away from New York City. Some immigrants left as soon as the following day, taking another vessel to Albany, New York where trusted Dutch clerics and noblemen could be found to help with further travel arrangements. For its part, New York was advantageously located along several waterways and contained an extensive network of inland transportation routes that more easily enabled Dutch immigrants to reach their ultimate destination beyond the port of arrival.
While some traveled directly to Albany and others to Buffalo on the west side of New York State, the Loomans family found their way inland to the small town of Clymer in Chautauqua County. About 80 miles southwest of Buffalo and less than 30 miles east of modern-day Erie, Pennsylvania, the village was a popular stop on many Dutch settler routes to the Midwest.
The First Loomans Steps Inland
Arriving at the end of July, the Loomans’ gradually made their way inland (they likely traveled by foot or waterway, given transportation by train was not yet popular and also cost prohibitive). The Hudson River-Erie Canal waterway to Buffalo would have gotten the family closest to Clymer where they could have met up with other families they knew from the Netherlands.
Census records for Clymer show that a high number of Dutch immigrants found the land in Chautauqua County suitable for farming and settled among the farmlands of western New York near the Pennsylvania border. While some stayed behind, others kept moving further west to the states of Michigan, Iowa, and Wisconsin.
Notwithstanding their method of travel to Clymer, we know that Jan Willem and his family spent at least the autumn and winter months of 1844 and 1845 in the small town which today only boasts a total population of about one thousand people.
Their brief encounter with New York City was likely the only time in their lives they experienced the pre-industrial urban environment of New York in all its nineteenth century glory. Chaotic as it was, New York represented the next sage of a journey that would continue as they gradually moved to the farmlands of the Midwest.
Family Artifact: Passenger Manifest of Ship Hoop
A digital copy of the ship manifest recorded at the Port of New York on July 27, 1844, the names of Jan Willem, Willemina, and their children can be seen on the below document starting on line 23 with “J.W. Loomans.”
This document is the second-oldest known document in the Loomans family archives. The original is kept at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.
LEARN MORE:
Castle Garden Official Website: Link Here
Castle Garden: Immigration Before Ellis Island by Sunny Jane Morton: Link Here
Dutch Emigration in the 19th Century, Collected by The Memory, Netherlands: Link Here
From Winterswijk to Wisconsin by Yvette Hoitink of the National Archives of the Netherlands: Link Here
Going to America by Robert P. Swierenga, Van Raalte Institute, Hope College (1997): Link Here