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purely business decision. In return, Bedloo received political patronage in the new British colony and was able to purchase Great Oyster Island. Bedloo, like other Dutch settlers under British rule, Anglicized his name to “Bedlow,” which later generations corrupted to “Bedloe,” the name that would eventually attach itself to the island that in 1886 became home to the Statue of Liberty.
    Little Oyster Island would also become known as Dyre Island and then Bucking Island in the eighteenth century. Ownership of the island from the late 1690s until 1785 was unclear. In that latter year, an advertisement appeared in a local newspaper offering for sale “that pleasant situated Island, called Oyster Island, lying in York Bay, near Powles’ Hook, together with all its improvements, which are considerable.” In addition to the island, the seller offered two lots in Manhattan, a “few barrels of excellent shad and herrings,” “a quantity of twine,” and “a large Pleasure Sleigh, almost new.”
    The seller was Samuel Ellis, a farmer and merchant who resided at 1 Greenwich Street. It is not known when Ellis bought the island, though a notice was found in a 1778 newspaper publicizing the fact that a boat had been found adrift at “Mr. Ellis’s Island.”
    Ellis died in 1794, still in possession of his island. His daughter, Catherine Westervelt, was pregnant at the time and Samuel’s will made clear that if she had a boy, it was his wish “that the boy may be baptized by the name of Samuel Ellis.” Ellis was clearly interested in his posterity. With three daughters, he most likely feared his name would not live on past his death, and having a grandson named Samuel Ellis Westervelt was the next best thing. His plans were tragically thwarted. Though Catherine’s child was a boy and christened as his grandfather had ordered, Samuel Ellis Westervelt died young. Yet through the agency of history and luck, the name Ellis would still attach itself to one of the nation’s most famous islands.
    Even during Samuel Ellis’s life, the island’s ownership became a matter of some controversy and confusion, as the new government of the United States became interested in the island. In the 1790s, tensions with England continued and the War Department began to devise a strategy for defending its shores. In New York, the military began to fortify the islands of New York Harbor to ward off a possible British naval attack.
    Before Samuel Ellis passed away, the city granted to New York State the right to the soil around the island from the high-water mark to the low-water mark. The city felt it had the right to that land, even though the island proper was in private hands.
    Over the next few years, the state built earthen fortifications on the island, some of them intruding upon private property. In 1798, Colonel Ebenezer Stevens advised the War Department that a troop barrack there had been completed, along with twelve large guns. However, he reminded his superiors that the island was still in private hands. “I think something ought to be done with respect to purchasing it and the State will cede the jurisdiction to the Federal Government,” Stevens wrote. In 1800, New York State transferred jurisdiction over all the fortified islands in New York Harbor to the federal government, even though it still did not have legal rights over Ellis Island.
    In 1807, Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Williams, chief engineer of the United States Army, declared that the fortification at Ellis Island was “totally out of repair.” He drew up new plans for a fortified New York Harbor that included a new fort at Ellis Island. But first the title of the island needed to be settled. The New York governor, Daniel Tompkins, wrote to Williams that although Samuel Ellis had agreed to sell the island, he had died before the deed could be executed. The military works constructed there, wrote Tompkins, “are occupied merely by the permission of the owner