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1831–1907 · the St. Joseph County poor asylum, South Bend ground
The county's first asylum course is the poorhouse course, and it begins in rented rooms: in 1831 the St. Joseph County commissioners began renting houses in South Bend for the destitute, qualifying them by "age, infirmity or other misfortune." A permanent asylum followed in 1846 — White Hall, on 120 acres near Nutwood on the Michigan Road. Dorothea Dix inspected it in 1847 and printed the county's first condition report: the farm "contains 200 acres, with a remarkably pleasant and convenient family residence," but "the building in which the poor are kept is in the rear of this, and very defective in construction and the general plan, and poorly furnished. I found there but two who were dependent on the public... one, an insane man, who had in the winter been found in the woods with his feet frozen; the other, an aged negroe." The insane were in the poorhouse from the start, because there was nowhere else: Indiana's county poor asylums had been open to the insane since the state's first indoor-relief act of 1821, and the county's own budget shows expenses for the care of the insane by 1852.
In 1852 the commissioners bought 240 acres just east of South Bend — the ground now bordered by McKinley, Ironwood, Jefferson and Greenlawn — and built the poorhouse the county used from 1857 to 1907, sited deliberately on the boundary of Penn and Portage townships, "which happened to supply most of the admissions" (Bruce Smith, "Poor Relief at the St. Joseph County Poor Asylum, 1877–1891," Indiana Magazine of History, 1990, from the asylum ledgers). That siting is this ground's share stated by the record itself: Clay and Harris township cases came through their township trustees like everyone else's, but the farm townships were the minority of the house. The Board of State Charities' inspectors give the numbers and conditions. On April 25, 1889: "Average number of inmates about 47. Weekly cost per inmate about $2.04... In the men's building are several cellrooms for the insane, in one of which there was an insane woman kept in seclusion, but in sight and hearing of the men... The chronic insane, who are able-bodied, are for the most part usefully employed. On the whole the management appeared very good, with the exception of the treatment of the more violent insane." The 1893 report found the average risen to about 75 inmates, at about $1.56 a week each, cleanliness good, a fine garden — and the verdict that "the asylum is not such an institution as St. Joseph County should have," with the Board by the turn of the century sharply criticising the facility. Smith's ledger study adds the human arithmetic: more than three-fourths of those admitted in 1877–79 and 1887–91 were male; sickness and age, not destitution alone, were the great causes of admission; and "the 'simpleminded' and the 'insane'... tended to be in their twenties and thirties." Funding ran through the townships: the home was paid per resident by the township trustee of the resident's own township — a charge Clay and Harris trustees carried for their own people, as the county's 1947 accounts still show the originating township paying weekly compensation for each of its residents.
Sources: St. Joseph County, "Historical timeline of the St. Joseph County Home" (the county's own facility history, sjcindiana.gov — the 1831 renting, White Hall 1846, the Dix report of 1847, the 1852 purchase, the township-payment system of 1947); Smith, Indiana Magazine of History LXXXVI (June 1990), pp. 179–195 (the ledger study; the Board of State Charities reports of April 25, 1889 and 1893 quoted whole; the Penn/Portage admissions finding); Indiana, First and Fourth Reports of the Board of State Charities, as quoted in Smith.