The story of Donald Trump’s grandfather, who came to the U.S. as an unaccompanied minor

The packed steamship S.S. Eider arrived in New York City’s Castle Garden, the country’s first immigration center, on Oct. 17, 1885. Hundreds of would-be Americans from Germany had traveled for 10 days across the North Atlantic to their new home. Among them was a skinny, light-haired 16-year-old boy who had left his hometown, a small winemaking village where working hard meant just getting by.

Friedrich Trump stood on the deck, “waiting for his first glimpse of the New York Harbor,” author Gwenda Blair wrote in her 2001 book, “The Trumps: Three Generations That Built an Empire.”

He did not have much; the young barber’s apprentice had brought only some clothes crammed in a small suitcase.

“He didn’t know English. He couldn’t possibly have known English,” Blair told The Washington Post. “He didn’t have anything like a high school diploma. He was literate, but in German.”