The Philadelphia Lazaretto: America's First Quarantine Station
Near Wilmington, Pennsylvania
The building sitting here on the Delaware riverbank in Tinicum Township is the oldest surviving quarantine station in the United States, a fact most Americans drive past in complete ignorance. It predates Ellis Island by almost a century, yet an estimated one-third of all living Americans are descended from people who passed through this place.
The Philadelphia Lazaretto was built in seventeen ninety-nine, commissioned by the Pennsylvania Board of Health in direct response to the yellow fever catastrophe of seventeen ninety-three. That epidemic killed roughly ten percent of Philadelphia's entire population in a single summer. The nation's capital had to flee. The founding generation was terrified. Their answer was a quarantine station, placed here on the Delaware south of the city, so that every incoming ship could be stopped and inspected before disease could spread again.
The name comes from the biblical Lazarus, the patron of lepers and the sick. From eighteen oh two until eighteen ninety-five, ships bound for Philadelphia were required by law to halt here. Officers boarded them, inspected cargo and passengers, and quarantined anyone suspected of carrying cholera, typhus, smallpox, or yellow fever. All immigrants, merchants, and returning citizens paid a fee and submitted to examination. Sick passengers were offloaded and hospitalized on site, sometimes for weeks.
At its height the Lazaretto handled thousands of ships per year. The station finally closed in eighteen ninety-five as germ theory replaced miasma theory, and the city's port moved and modernized. The complex passed through private hands until Tinicum Township purchased it in two thousand five, rescuing it from development.
Today historians consider the Lazaretto the sixth-oldest quarantine facility in the entire world. It is a place where public health was invented, imperfectly, urgently, in the shadow of a disease that had already killed thousands of Americans. Ellis Island gets the fame. This is where the story began.
