"Much of the story consists of long, unaltered copy from 
The Williamsburgh Post, which I have signified by indents right 
and left. Alas, we have no photos to illustrate the item. It 
took three weeks even to nail down the location and exact date 
of this incident, first mention of which we found in an 1848 
publication called The American Whig Review."

Larry Sullivan

"Long Island Farms," as it was known -- 
formally the Juvenile Department of the NYC Almshouse and later 
The Nursery schools and hospital on Randall's Island -- 
was situated in the village of Ravenswood, a short distance from
Astoria and about three miles east of Williamsburgh.


FORMER NURSERY TORCHED IN SHIP FEVER SCARE

The children were long gone when angry townsmen tore down and burned the 
original buildings of the New York City Almshouse Nursery in a midnight 
raid seemingly ripped from the pages of Frankenstein.

Even the setting - the village of Ravenswood in Queens County - sounds 
like it belonged in Mary Shelley’s gothic morality tale.

In another literary twist, The Daily Brooklyn Eagle headlined its account, 
"The Infamous Affair at the Long Island Farms."

The torch-bearing neighbors had nothing against the little paupers, or the 
school itself. What set them off were plans to turn the recently vacated 
buildings into quarantine hospitals for immigrants who’d arrived in America 
with a malignant form of typhus known as "ship fever."

The disease, rapidly approaching epidemic levels, had crept into town with 
the huge wave of Irish who’d fled the potato famine in their homeland. 
Many were sick when they shuffled aboard the overcrowded and 
filthy "coffin ships." 

To meet the emergency, the state Commission on Immigration contracted 
with the Rev. W. W. Niles, who’d just bought three of the abandoned 
Nursery buildings at public auction, to lease them for use as temporary 
hospitals. The papers were signed on Wednesday, 26 May 1847, and the 
first patients were expected to arrive the very next day. 

Word of the plan spread quicker than the plague, causing, as the weekly 
Williiamsburgh Post put it, "great excitement in the surrounding country."

Townsfolk hastily called a meeting for Wednesday evening at a waterfront 
tavern near the Hell Gate ferry dock in the nearby village of Astoria. 
Despite the short notice, between 50 and 80 people showed up.

"They assembled at 8 o’clock and remained in session till between 10 and 11, 
at which time they left the place of meeting in a body and proceeded to the 
obnoxious premises," the Post reported.

"The impression became prevalent that the immigrants would be moved into 
the houses on Thursday, so that the Queens County men thought that if they 
were to act at all there was no time to be lost."

The ill-fated cluster of large wood-frame buildings, known as the 
Long Island Farm Schools, was situated in the southwestern tip of 
Queens County about halfway between Astoria and Williamsburgh 
(now part of Brooklyn). The facility had been established in 1832 in a 
move, radical at the time, to separate destitute children from the horrid 
examples of their elders at the main almshouse.

The almshouse board of governors closed the facility earlier in the spring of 
‘47, in anticipation of completion of a new complex on Randall’s Island, and 
put the property up for sale. The children, meanwhile, were lodged temporarily 
at the almshouse proper on Blackwell’s Island.

The Post’s anonymous reporter was on the scene within hours of the inferno. 
He said he gleaned most of the facts from W. B. Mott, former steward of 
The Nursery school and hospital; Thomas English, whom Niles had hired as a 
night watchman; and Henry Burdon, a young man who lived across the street.

Here’s the gist of the Post’s account:

When the body of rioters reached the ground they found the two sons of 
Mr. Niles on watch. The oldest son, about 16, had a loaded gun. They 
immediately gave the alarm to English - whose watch on deck didn’t 
commence till 12 o’clock.

When Mr. English came out he found a number of the men on the road and a 
still larger number on the premises. He asked them what their business was, 
and they replied that they came to burn and pull down the houses...

English endeavored to dissuade them from their purpose, and even suggested 
that if they were determined on the deed it would be better to do it in daylight.

They replied that they would have delayed till to-morrow, only by that time 
the contagion would be among them - hence they were resolved to take time 
by the forelock. And so to work they went.

He noticed but one axe among them, though every man, almost, had a 
bludgeon of wood.

There are, or rather there were, four buildings standing apart from each 
other some four hundred feet. Three of these belonged to Mr. Niles, but 
the fourth lying next this village belongs to a Mr. Robinson of the 17th Ward, 
New York. This one had not been leased to the Commissioners, and thus 
escaped the fury of the rioters - who went to work on the other three.

First, they entered the middle house and from within broke all the windows. 
This accomplished, they cut up the doors for kindling wood and made two fires, 
one in the school department, the other in the dormitory wing. They were 
all-frame houses, and burned with great rapidity.

This middle house was consumed first. Indeed the crowd were about to depart, 
satisfied with the destruction, but on a second thought they returned and 
carried flaming brands from the burning pile with which they soon set the 
other two buildings in a blaze. ...

The rival Brooklyn Eagle said firemen on three horse-drawn engines raced 
to the scene from Williamsburgh, some three miles away, but when they 
arrived there was nothing left but piles of ashes and embers.

Niles, the owner, petitioned the State Assembly repeatedly over the next 
few years to be paid for his loss, which he placed at $20,000, but a 
search of The Brooklyn Eagle and The New York Times on microfilm failed 
to produce evidence that he collected.


By LAWRENCE SULLIVAN
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