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St.
The banked mind article routes the township's insane to the state hospitals and expressly does not reach the county-home layer beneath them; that layer is dug here from the county's own record, at county strength, with the township's share of it named as the residue. The county's course, on its own timeline: in 1821 the county's poor asylums opened their doors to the insane; in 1831 the commissioners were renting houses in South Bend for the destitute; in 1846 a permanent asylum rose on 120 acres near Nutwood, called White Hall. In 1847 Dorothea Dix came and commented: a poorhouse on the Michigan Road six or seven miles from South Bend, a 200-acre farm, and only two dependent persons found — one of them an insane man found in the woods with frozen feet. In 1852 the commissioners purchased 240 acres, and the poorhouse completed by 1857 stood between Penn and Portage townships, which supplied most admissions; the violent insane were kept in cells. In 1905 the county bought the Brown Farm for $20,962.50, and on 4 April 1907 the patients were transferred to the St. Joseph County Infirmary on the 113.8-acre Portage Prairie site — total cost with farm and sewer $126,370.80, capacity some 90 women and 195 men — with a pauper's cemetery, the Potter's Field, on the ground. That is the institution to which Union Township's charges went, and the layer the banked file lacked. The residue is express: no carrier reached prints Union Township's own charge numbers or the conditions of its people inside those walls, and the settler stands named and current — the St. Joseph County home and commissioners' reports, read for this township's charges entire.