The county asylum and its insane ward

1853 — the Bluffton Road farm closed 1925

Before any hospital, there was the poor farm: Allen County established its poor farm in June 1853, buying land in Section 29 of Wayne Township and contracting to build a house for $750; George L. Parker was hired that December to keep the county's paupers for $600 a year. In 1864 the county moved the farm closer to the city, to the Bluffton Road just west of the bridge, and built an infirmary as its centerpiece — completed in June 1865 for $14,468 — renaming the institution the Allen County Asylum, with James M. Read as superintendent. Behind the main building, connected to it by a covered porch, stood the insane ward. A memoir by Carl C. Johnston, who grew up at the infirmary while his grandfather William H. Johnston was superintendent from 1908 to 1920, describes the layout plainly: the superintendent's house facing Bluffton Road, the main building behind it, and the insane ward behind that. The directory of 1918 still lists the place under "Hospitals and Asylums" as the Allen County Asylum on Bluffton Road, W. H. Johnston superintendent. For the whole of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, this ward — a back building of a poor farm, staffed by a superintendent and his family — was where Allen County kept its poorest residents with mental illness, alongside the aged, the orphaned, and the destitute; the county's asylum registers, running from 1853 to 1939, are preserved at the Genealogy Center of the Allen County Public Library. The county home itself moved in 1916 to the Lima Road site in Perry Township, and the Bluffton Road farm was sold for development in 1925. The county institution's later course — Allen County Home, Allen County Health Center, and today's Byron Health Center — belongs to the tuberculosis record and is told in the Epidemics section; what belongs here is the ward behind the porch, the city's first and for decades its only public provision for madness.

Sources:

1. History of Allen County, Indiana (Kingman Brothers, 1880), p. 54 — the June 1853 land purchase, the $750 building contract, the keepers' contracts, the 1860s enlargement, and the asylum's course.
2. Carl C. Johnston, "I Was Raised at the Poor Farm," Old Fort News (1986), reprinted by the Waynedale News from the History Center — the 1864 move, the infirmary completed June 1865 for $14,468, James Read as superintendent of the renamed Allen County Asylum, the insane ward behind the main building, and William H. Johnston's superintendency, 1908–1920.
3. R. L. Polk & Co., Fort Wayne directory (1918), "Hospitals and Asylums" — the Allen County Asylum on Bluffton Road near the bridge, W. H. Johnston, superintendent.
4. Allen County Genealogical Society of Indiana (ACGSI), Poor Farm — County Asylum page — the asylum registers of 1853–1939 at the ACPL Genealogy Center, the 1916 move to the Lima Road location, and the county home's later names.