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1907–2026 · 3016 Portage Avenue, South Bend — closed July 31, 2023; sale approved October 6, 2026
The poorhouse's third seat is the one whose second life this row asks for. In 1905 the commissioners bought the 113.8-acre Brown farm on Portage Avenue, beyond Riverview Cemetery, for 20,962.50 dollars, and built the St. Joseph County Infirmary to designs by the South Bend architects Freyermuth and Maurer — a Classical Revival main building whose plan carried the asylum inside it: administration at the centre, a wing for men and a wing for women, and, per the 1907 Tribune account the landmark nomination quotes, a separate building providing sixteen wards for residents then classified as insane. Forty inmates were transferred to the new building in 1907 (the landmark file dates the transfer April 4, 1907). The house's capacity prints in the record's own conflict, given whole: the landmark nomination says it "was built to accommodate about 90 women and 195 men" — 285 souls — while the county's timeline says it "had only been built with the intent of having sufficient space to house 120 residents." Both stand; the crowding that followed is not in dispute. The county timeline counts 298 residents in 1937 and a peak of 351 in February 1939; the Asylum Projects account carried in the 2026 county-home history says 351 people already by 1937, in a building designed for about 120. The overflow went to Westville, as the sent-away article prints.
The renaming came by statute: changes in state law in 1947 renamed the infirmary the St. Joseph County Home (a January 1947 report of the Indiana Department of Public Welfare had called it "truly outstanding"), and in time it took the friendlier name it died under, Portage Manor. The second life proper — the poorhouse reused as a residence for the mentally ill — is a licensing fact: in 1966 the manor was approved for facility licensing as 108 residential beds and 12 comprehensive nursing care beds, after a two-year drive under Superintendent Joseph Snyder to convert a farm warehouse into a licensed residential-care and nursing institution. By 1981 it had completed the transition to a residential care facility for adults able to handle most of their daily needs, with 97 residents; through the 1990s its 144 beds were frequently filled, with a waiting list. The mental-health character was by then the institution's core business: in 1992 it formalised its working relationship with the local community mental health centre, Madison Center, with daily on-site case management and psychiatrists and therapists seeing residents on site; in 2009 Madison Center and Portage Manor together received the Indiana State Consumer Service Review Team's recognition for care of mentally ill residents, "the highest score of any CMHC in the state." After Madison Center closed in 2012, Oaklawn assumed the manor's outpatient services, including a weekly on-site psychiatrist. The end came on regulation and money, not on care findings alone: the manor was found to be operating without a licensed administrator, and after months of public outcry the commissioners and county council voted to close it. Four residents sued to block the closure; the suit failed to keep it open but ended with the county paying the four plaintiffs settlements toward their transitions. The last two residents moved out on July 31, 2023 — some thirty of the displaced went as far as a retrofitted hotel in Fort Wayne — and the house that had stood open since 1907 shut its doors. Its present state, as of November 2026: the building stands vacant on its county-owned acres inside the South Bend city limits, listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 2000; a stale directory line still prints it "permanently closed and slated to be destroyed," against which the record prints county officials' statements that they would not tear it down, an April 28, 2026 public hearing at which demolition-minded development met organised opposition, and the outcome: on October 6, 2026 the county commissioners approved the sale of Portage Manor to St. Thomas More Academy, the Catholic K-12 school whose late-2025 proposal takes 21.7 acres and a planned immediate investment of five to seven million dollars to make the old infirmary its permanent home. The county home's third life, if the sale completes, is a school.
Sources: Proposed Landmark nomination, 3016 Portage Avenue (Historic Preservation Commission file, 2020 — the 1905 purchase price, the architects, the 1907 transfer, the 1947 renaming, the capacity figure); St. Joseph County Home timeline (the 120-resident design intent, the 298/351 counts, the 1966 licensing, the 1992 Madison Center relationship, the 2009 recognition, the 2012 Oaklawn succession at the manor); South Bend Tribune, October 7, 1981 (the residential-care transition, via Shideler); Shideler (2026), citing Asylum Projects and the Tribune (the 351-by-1937 variance, the unlicensed-administrator finding, the February 2023 closure vote); South Bend Tribune / Notre Dame Insider, August 2023 (the closure, the residents' lawsuit and settlements, the Fort Wayne placements); South Bend Tribune, May 5, 2026 (the April 28, 2026 hearing; open since 1907; last residents out July 31, 2023); WSBT, October 6, 2026 (commissioners approve the sale to St. Thomas More Academy), via Shideler; National Register of Historic Places no. 00000670.