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items 1 and 5 — the county home's whole course, and its second life
For this county, the asylum and the poorhouse were one building: the St. Joseph County Infirmary — the county home, at South Bend, to which Olive Township's poor and its insane charges alike were the county's to keep. The standing building was erected in 1906 and opened in 1907, when some forty inmates were transferred from the old home into a house built for 285 — the county's whole custodial population, the insane among them, under one roof and one superintendent, as the commissioners' system then ran everywhere in Indiana. The institution's second life is the floor's own pattern, and it is this county's: in the 1980s the infirmary was renamed Portage Manor, and the poorhouse finished its course as a county residence whose population was by then largely the mentally ill and the elderly poor — the asylum become a nursing home without ever moving. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on 15 June 2000 (reference 00000670). The end is dated exactly: Portage Manor closed on 31 July 2023, its last 83 residents redistributed to other care — the county home system's 117-year course on that ground, from the 1907 opening, closed. The conditions and numbers inside that course, year by year, stand in the county commissioners' and asylum reports at South Bend, named here as the residue's settler; the frame, the renaming, the listing, and the closing stand whole.
Sources:
- The National Register nomination record for Portage Manor (the St. Joseph County Infirmary: built 1906, opened 1907, capacity 285; listed 15 June 2000, ref. 00000670) and the county's closing record (closed 31 July 2023; 83 residents redistributed).