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1955 — the doors closed 31 July 2023
The poor farm became a mental-health institution — for this city's residents too: The 1906 infirmary on Portage Prairie, whose relief record stands in Charities, spent its last seven decades as Portage Manor, and from 1955 the law itself assigned the role: the Division of Mental Health could place psychiatric-hospital patients in the county home at the state's payment, with quarterly visits to judge each placement. The home's population became predominantly psychiatric — "virtually every resident was on the RCAP program," the county's timeline records of the 2000s — and its care was supplied by the county's community mental health center, Madison Center and after 2012 Oaklawn. The institution stood in Portage Township, across the river, and it is South Bend's to tell whole; Mishawaka's share is the share it has held since 1857, when the home was sited for the admissions of Penn and Portage townships: the residents from this city inside a census the county published only as a whole. No Mishawaka-specific census of the Manor was published in any source reached, and none is separated out here. What closed on 31 July 2023, when the last two residents left, was therefore also Mishawaka's: the county's principal residence for people with mental illness, 192 years of public relief's last building, removed from the system without a successor — its Mishawaka charges dispersed to the same community placements as the rest.
Sources:
- St. Joseph County, "Historical timeline of the St. Joseph County Home" — the 1955 placement law, the RCAP census of the 2000s, the Madison and Oaklawn service arrangements, and the closing of 31 July 2023, as read whole in the South Bend record.
- South Bend section of this history, "Portage Manor's second life" — the institution's mental-health course told whole; this entry carries only Mishawaka's share, at boundary size, as briefed.