The county asylum: Mishawaka's share

1821 — the county home closed 2023

Care of the mind began as poor relief, and the relief was the county's: Indiana's act of 1821 that provided for houses for the employment of the poor opened the county asylums to the insane as well, and St. Joseph County's asylum stood, in every one of its forms, on the far side of the river: the rented houses in South Bend from 1831, White Hall on 120 acres near Nutwood from 1846, and from 1857 a purpose-built poorhouse placed deliberately between Penn and Portage townships. The siting is this city's share of the founding fact: Penn Township is Mishawaka's township, and the county's own timeline gives the reason for the ground — Penn and Portage were the two townships that supplied most of the home's admissions. Mishawaka's mad, its aged, and its destitute were therefore among the county home's founding population, carried the few miles west to a farm in the next township. What they found there is documented in the county's record and in the South Bend file of this history: Dorothea Dix's 1847 account of a keeping building "very defective in construction" and an insane man found in the woods with frozen feet; the Board of Charities' 1889 description of an average forty-seven inmates, the chronic insane usefully employed, the violent insane kept in cells; and a superintendent charged by law from 1848, as a person of the medical profession, to care for "the sick, infirm and insane." The relief whole — the farms, the superintendents, the burials, the building of 1906 on Portage Prairie — belongs to this history's Charities record. What belongs here is the share: for the first century of its existence, Mishawaka's public provision for madness was a township's contingent in a county poorhouse across the river, under a keeper whose medical qualification the law stated and whose enforcement the county's own timeline leaves unrecorded. No institution of care for the mind stood on Mishawaka ground until the orphans home of 1882 — and that, when it came, was for children, and was private charity rather than public provision.

Sources:

1. St. Joseph County, "Historical timeline of the St. Joseph County Home" (sjcindiana.gov), as read whole in the South Bend mental-health record of this project — the 1821 act opening county asylums to the insane; the 1831 rented houses; White Hall, 1846; Dorothea Dix's 1847 account as the county's record quotes it; the 1848 medical-superintendent charge; the 1852 purchase and the 1857 poorhouse between Penn and Portage townships as the two supplying most admissions; and the Board of Charities report under 1889.
2. South Bend section of this history — the county asylum's whole course, carried here at Mishawaka's share as briefed; and Charities section of this history — the county home's relief course whole, 1831–2023, and the orphans home of 1882 on Mishawaka ground.