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1821 — the Portage Prairie building, 1906
Care of the mind began as poor relief: Indiana's first framework was the county asylum. The act of 1821 that provided for houses for the employment of the poor opened the county asylums to the insane as well — the county's own historical timeline of its county home states it in so many words — and in St. Joseph County the commissioners began, in 1831, by renting houses in South Bend for the destitute. The law filled in around the arrangement. In 1840 the legislature made it the duty of a justice of the peace, after a hearing before a jury, to appoint a suitable person to take charge of any dangerously insane person, compensated from the county funds. The county's permanent asylum came in 1846: White Hall, near Nutwood — its acreage standing in the record two ways: the county's online timeline gives the 1846 asylum 120 acres, while the National Register nomination form and the county history give the purchase of 10 June 1846 as nearly 200 acres, bought from Matthias Stover for 2,000 dollars, and put the 120 acres on the successor farm bought about ten years later.
The next year Dorothea Dix, touring Indiana's poorhouses, recorded this county's in her report: the poor house and farm "is situated on Michigan Road, six or seven miles from South Bend," its keeping building "very defective in construction," and among its inmates — she found only two dependent on the public at her visit — "one, an insane man, who had in the winter been found in the woods with his feet frozen." In 1848 the superintendent was by law to be a person of the medical profession, charged to care for "the sick, infirm and insane" and to bury the dead; the state constitution of 1851 then wrote the duty into the state's frame, requiring care of the insane, the deaf, and the blind. In 1852 the commissioners bought 240 acres, and by 1857 a new poorhouse stood deliberately between Penn and Portage townships, the two that supplied most of its admissions.
The State Board of Charities' report, carried in the county's timeline under 1889, describes the working institution: an average of forty-seven inmates, most of them feeble and old; "the chronic insane were able bodied and could be usefully employed," and when keepers judged the paupers and the insane recovered enough to rejoin society they were discharged forthwith — while "the violent insane were kept in cells." The discharges of 1928–29, in the timeline's summary of the admission books, ran "left, run off, died," or "sent to…" — usually a family member, or an insane asylum. The relief whole — the farms, the superintendents, the burials, the building of 1906 on Portage Prairie that closed as Portage Manor in 2023 — belongs to this history's Charities record; what belongs here is the charge the poorhouse carried from 1821 forward: this county's first, and for two generations its only, public provision for madness was a farm that also kept the aged, the orphaned, and the destitute, under a keeper whose medical qualification the law stated and whose enforcement the county's own timeline leaves unrecorded.
Sources:
- St. Joseph County, "Historical timeline of the St. Joseph County Home" (sjcindiana.gov) — the 1821 act opening county asylums to the insane; the 1831 rented houses; the 1840 justice-of-the-peace keeper law; White Hall, 1846; the 1848 medical-superintendent charge; the 1851 constitutional provision; the 1852 purchase and 1857 poorhouse; the Board of Charities report under 1889 (forty-seven inmates, the chronic insane employed, the violent insane in cells); and the discharge forms of 1928–29.
- Dorothea Dix, report on Indiana poorhouses (1847), as quoted in the county's timeline — the Michigan Road poor house six or seven miles from South Bend, the defective keeping building, and the insane man found with frozen feet, quoted as the county's record gives her words.
- Charities section of this history — the county home's relief course whole, 1831–2023, cross-referenced here in a line as briefed.