Crowded, cold and harsh: Sad legacy of poorhouses
In Capital Region, traces remain of county-run facilities
In 1829, Lily Ingleston was in a bad way.
Her husband, Jabez, abandoned her and their nine children and she was struggling with a bout of typhus. With no way to support her family, the 35-yearold dragged herself and her children to the town’s superintendent of the poor. He deemed them paupers and then relegated them all to the poorhouse.
Admitted that January almost 200 years ago, the family became what was known as inmates. In exchange for room and board, they were expected to labor on the poorhouse farm. And if they didn’t, they could be locked in solitary confinement on a diet of bread and water until they “perform the same labor ... and obey, conform and observe the rules.”
Ingleston died three weeks later.
The story sounds like Dickensian England. But this sad happening took place in Argyle in Washington County. It is just one of thousands of similar tales in the early decades of America when each county in New York was tasked with housing the poor, the elderly, the disabled and the mentally ill together in a common house.
“They were not the best of places,” said Loretta Bates, Washington County’s deputy historian, of the county poorhouses that were mandated by the state Legislature in 1824. “They were overcrowded, there were complaints about not enough to eat and it was cold.”
Within six months of Ingleston’s admission, Bates said, three of her children also died of typhus, including her 13-month-old baby Mary Jane. While she said she has no record of what happened to the two oldest surviving boys, William, 17, and Charles, 11, she said the other four — Mary Ann, 13, Harrison, 6, Lucinda, 4, and Lucina, 3 — were indentured.
“Each one went to a different family in four different towns,” said Bates, who wrote the selfpublished 2013 book “Those Called Paupers.” “It’s not like they could see each other on Sundays. That’s what got me interested in the subject. These poor kids.”
While the county poorhouse has long since faded from public consciousness, their remnants linger in the modern world. For example, when anything is built on the site of a poorhouse — for example, the new Saratoga County public safety building that
opened in 2020 — an archaeological study is required to ensure the graves of the poor are not disturbed. Moreover, most of the land acquired for the poorhouses was, and still is, owned and used for county purposes.
While the use of the land has changed, caring for the poor remains a challenge. But in 1824 New York thought it had an answer — mandate every county to erect a poorhouse. It was the only state, according to Saratoga County Historian Lauren Roberts, to require indigent shelters, which were later known as almshouses.
Many historians agree that officials were wellintentioned. Yet the poorhouses turned into warehouses for what was then listed as drunks, lunatics, idiots, cripples and paupers where conditions, as noted in an 1864 report to the state Legislature, “were filthy, disgusting and repulsive.”
Inmates were often dirty with inadequate water for bathing. With little to no ventilation, the houses were described as foul-smelling. Worse, those who were considered mentally ill or mentally disabled were often isolated, sometimes chained or shackled to walls, to control unwanted behavior.
The same state report from Dr. Sylvester D. Willard, the secretary of the Medical Society of the State of New York, reviewed each county poorhouse. In Saratoga County, it was noted that corporal punishment was administered and that 10 inmates had “neither shoes or stockings.” In Greene County, those “confined to cells are in a wretched state. None are cured or improved.” He described Columbia County’s poorhouse as “a sad spectacle to humanity.”
Treatment fell under the purview of the overseer who had the discretion to determine a pauper’s fate. That often included children as young as 2 years old being sent to servitude. In some cases, including Schenectady County, they remained in debt to their master until age 28.
At the end, the freed servant would be provided a Bible and two sets of clothing (one for church and one for work). Depending on the county, they might receive $50 if a man or a feathered mattress if a woman for their years of labor.
Michael Diana, the Schenectady County Historical Society’s education and programs manager, said “it was common practice.”
“The poor farm only had so much room for people, so they ended up sending some of these kids out as servants,” Diana said. “Even as slavery comes to an end in New York in 1827, that is not the end of bonded labor. Unfortunately for a lot of Black kids, whose family just came out of slavery, that was what happened. They had nowhere to go so the overseer would pawn them off on anyone. I have documents of a kid going to Amsterdam to work on some random guy’s farm.”
Bates said this was a perfect setup for child abuse.
“If you wanted a child, they would line up the girls or the boys and you could choose which one you wanted,” Bates said. “This was perfect for some pervert to come along. They took the child and you never heard from them again. We can’t comprehend what that was like.”
Jim Benton, Columbia County Historical Society researcher, said indigent care was inspired by Calvinism, which taught that the poor and disabled were predestined by God to suffer that fate.
“The belief was pervasive in England and in the Northeast,” Benton said. “In 1784, even before the Constitution, each town was required to appoint an overseer of the poor. The responsibility of this guy, of course it was always a guy, was to hand out money to the needy (directly).”
City of Albany historian Tony Opalka said he has found evidence of help for the poor and destitute taking place in Albany as early as 1790. And in Saratoga County, Roberts said that the help was called “outdoor relief.” The county would pay a family or individual to take in the needy to live with them, usually in a barn.
“The family would go to the lowest bidder,” Roberts said. “Someone would say I can take care of the family for $1 a week. And then someone else would say I can do it for 75 cents and that person would get them. There was no regulation on clothes or how warm the barn needed to be or medical care. There was a lot of abuse and neglect.”
The idea of the poorhouse grew in popularity with state lawmakers, Roberts said, because it was considered less expensive. More oversight was possible, too.
The new plan, said Jonathan Palmer, archivist and researcher for Greene County Historical Society, was hardly an ideal, however.
“The poor farm system in New York state was really fraught,” Palmer said. “You have a good overseer of the poor who is a nice person or you have a bad overseer of the poor who is a bad person. It’s just like anything, it’s highly subjective; and a little more than draconian.”
In 1859, the Troy Daily Times reported on the Rensselaer County almshouse. Here’s an excerpt:
“We saw the paupers eat,” the article read. “There were a hundred of them at the table. At the ringing of the bells, they came huddling in like a flock of sheep, ragged and dirty, halt and infirm, young and old, anxious to reach their seats with the greatest possible haste. … As each man sat down (to) address himself to the consumption of a huge slice of dry meal bread and a basin of unseasoned tea which constituted the entire repast.”
It went on to describe the house as being “in good order” and all the “filth noticeable is on the paupers and in their personal surroundings.”
As the houses included the elderly, many died in the poorhouse. Bates said that Ingleston and three of her children were interred in unmarked graves. In Argyle, now the site of the Washington Center, a nursing home, Bates said the graveyard is the final resting place for about 600, but only 80 — those who died between 1930 and 1964 — are named.
The unmarked cemetery for the almshouse in Albany became controversial in 2003 when a biomedical research center, developed by the Charitable Leadership Foundation of Clifton Park, was to be built on the graveyard on New Scotland Avenue across from Albany Medical Center. Researchers removed the remains of about 1,200 of at least 2,400 individuals known to have been buried there. The remains have been reburied at Albany Rural Cemetery.
In Saratoga County, Roberts says that nothing can be built on the old poorhouse site on County Farm Road (so named because of the poorhouse) before it undergoes an archaeological survey in order to preserve the graves.
“We don’t know the exact location,” she said of the cemetery. “We worked with an archaeologist to do soil stripping before building the building to make sure we were not building on top of the cemetery. Luckily, we did not find it.”
While no graves were discovered in Saratoga County, public institutions persist on county poorhouse lands.
In addition to the public safety building, Saratoga County’s property houses the county jail and animal shelter. The Washington County location on Route 40 is now a private nursing home. Albany County’s Almshouse Square is now home to Albany Medical Center, the Veteran’s Administration and the Capital District Psychiatric Center. Originally, the Albany County nursing home was located there too.
“It’s no coincidence,” Opalka said. “That area was never built on anything other than institutional uses.”
Troy’s almshouse location is the site of Griswold Heights public housing complex. In Greene County, the Cairo home is now a county office building housing the Office of Mental Health and recreation fields.
“Certainly, in modern context, the poorhouse was reprehensible,” Benton said. “But in terms of what they wanted to do, what they had in mind, maybe it’s not noble, but there was a sense of a better instinct.”