“The general state of things described as existing at the Poor House, is bad, every way,” wrote the Troy Daily Whig in February 1857. Because they had only straw to sleep on and no sanitary facilities, a mixture of straw and urine froze onto their bodies in the winter “and was removed only by thawing it off,” causing permanent disabilities. In 1857, a legislative investigation found that the House of Industry confined the mentally ill to 4½-by-7-feet cells for as long as six months at a time.
His plan succeeded: within a decade, 55 county poorhouses had been erected in New York.ĭespite optimistic predictions that poorhouses would furnish relief “with economy and humanity,” the poorhouse was an institution that rightly inspired terror among poor and working-class people. John Van Ness Yates, charged by the state of New York with conducting a year-long inquiry into the “Relief and Settlement of the Poor” in 1824, used Troy’s example to argue that the state should build a poorhouse in every county. While most of its residents were too ill, too old, or too young for physical labor, able-bodied inmates worked on a 152-acre farm and in a nearby stone quarry, earning the institution its name: the Rensselaer County House of Industry. The poorhouse in my hometown of Troy, New York, was built in 1821. Some have been renamed to obscure their past: Poor House Road in Virginia Beach is now called Prosperity Road. There are Poor Farm Roads in Bristol, Maine, and Natchez, Mississippi County Home Roads in Marysville, Ohio, and Greenville, North Carolina Poorhouse Roads in Winchester, Virginia, and San Mateo, California.
Cities and towns across the country still include streets named for the poorhouses once sited on them. Local societies scheduled tours for charity-minded citizens and common gawkers. At their height, poorhouses appeared on postcards and in popular songs. But the poorhouse was once a very real and much feared institution.
Most of us reference the poorhouse only reflexively today. “You’re going to send me to the poorhouse!”
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