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Joseph County Infirmary, at boundary strength
The county relieved its poor for 192 years and closed the institution on 31 July 2023. The county's own timeline begins the system in 1831, the commissioners renting houses for the destitute; a poorhouse served 1857–1907 between Penn and Portage townships. The permanent plant dates to the century's turn: the Brown Farm — 113.8 acres at 3016 Portage Avenue — purchased in 1905 for $20,962.50; the main building built 1906 (Keogan Construction, winning bid $72,549.69; architects George W. Freyermuth and R. Vernon Maurer; Classical Revival), and the patients transferred in on 4 April 1907, forty inmates. A 1947 state law renamed it the St. Joseph County Home; as Portage Manor it was listed on the National Register on 15 June 2000, and it closed on 31 July 2023 — the final resident discharged at 10:00 that morning, 83 residents transitioned to other care, on the county commissioners' own press release. The township limb prints at its strength: Union Township's poor relief runs, as Indiana law frames it, through the township trustee (office at 117 S. The trustee's own relief records (case counts, disbursements, the overseer-of-the-poor era before trustees) were not reached in any carrier; that limb's residue stands named: the trustee's records and the county auditor's poor-relief ledgers.
Principal sources: St. Joseph County's published timeline and the commissioners' closure release (sjcindiana.gov); the South Bend landmark nomination for Portage Manor (Historic Preservation Commission, rev. 2023); the banked The Story of Lakeville (the trustee's office).