Ellis Island visitors to get history lesson on Dalton

Charles Oliver

Each year, some two million people pass through the Ellis Island Museum in New York to learn about the country’s immigration history. And starting in about a year, those visitors will also learn a little bit about Dalton.

A film crew from the History Channel came to Dalton in October to film part of a series on immigration. Steve Briganti, president of the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, said the films are part of a major expansion to the museum, located on the site of what was the main port of entry to the United States from 1892 to 1954.

“The museum as it is now discusses those Ellis Island years,” Briganti said. “But now we are expanding it to cover the entire spectrum of the populating of America, going back to the people we now call the Native Americans and bringing it up to 1892 and jumping forward from 1954 to the present. The museum’s name will change to the National Museum of Immigration.”

The expansion will add about 20,000 square feet to the museum, which stands at roughly 200,000 square feet, and will be finished at the end of 2011 or the start of 2012.

The films, each just a few minutes long, will play constantly throughout the museum and will show how recent immigration has changed each of five different cities. Briganti said the other communities the films focus on are Garden City, Kan., Minneapolis, Monterey Park, Calif. and Queens, N.Y.

“We wanted to go to five places that showed the changing of America since Ellis Island closed in 1954. Dalton was chosen because it has an interesting history and because it has had a dramatic change in the last few years,” he said.

In 1980, the Census Bureau reported there were just 526 Hispanic residents in Whitfield County, 237 of them in Dalton. By 1990, the census found there were 2,321 Hispanics in Whitfield County, with 1,422 in the city of Dalton. And by the 2000 census, the bureau reported 18,419 Hispanics in Whitfield County, with 11,219 in Dalton.

Those numbers, which many people believe underestimate the growth, gave Whitfield County, and Dalton in particular, one of the fastest growing Hispanic populations in the nation. And much of that growth has been fueled by immigration, mostly from Mexico.

“What has happened in Dalton is something that has happened to all of America. It’s not unlike what happened to America when Ellis Island opened,” Briganti said. “Prior to Ellis Island opening, most of the people who came to this country, except for those who were forced to come, were northern and western Europeans, and they were primarily Protestants. Then in the Ellis Island years, that shifted to southern and eastern Europeans, and they were primarily Catholics and Jews.”

Alan Kraut, professor of history at American University in Washington, D.C., chairs the museum’s history advisory committee and helped choose Dalton as one of the cities to highlight. He said immigration today has some strong similarities to the Ellis Island era, but it also has an important difference.

“It’s similar in that whenever you have a new group come in, particularly a group where English isn’t the first language, and they are coming from a different type of society, there’s a period of adjustment and integration that has to take place,” he said. “What’s different is that unlike earlier eras, smaller cities and towns are getting an immigration that they have never had before. They don’t have experience with getting lots and lots of people from different backgrounds. So for them, the experience is a very new experience. Adjustment to people from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds can be a real challenge.”

He said that’s why it was important to focus on some small communities such as Dalton.

“We want folks to understand this is just a new chapter in a very old American story,” he said.

Briganti said the final films haven’t been completed yet, but he has seen written synopses.

“I believe the people of Dalton will be proud of the end product,” he said.

The Web site for the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation is www.ellisisland.org.