The Poorhouse: America's Forgotten Institution

In The Discovery of the Asylum (1971), David Rothman memorably described the origins of the American poorhouse in idealistic early nineteenth century schemes of deterrence and character improvement. Now David Wagner, a professor of social work and sociology, uses data from six New England poorhouses to show that poorhouses in the years after 1870 varied widely depending on pragmatic local decisions about how to deal with poverty. No such wholesale building of poorhouses occurred in antebellum America as in England, where the workhouse became a hated symbol of “less eligibility” (with relief conditional on institutionalization). Wagner argues that in most American communities, township trustees continued to dispense outdoor relief (Wagner does not mention the abolition of poor relief in New York), and that by the early twentieth century the American poorhouse was less a site of punishment than an institution to cushion those who came and went as labor markets fluctuated. Although he acknowledges that there was corruption, hardship, and abuse, notably the appalling practice in the years after 1920 of sterilizing the disabled poor, he portrays the poorhouse as a benign, if casually run, institution. Called the “city home,” “county home,” or “poor farm,” it was a refuge rather than a place of punishment, more shelter than deterrent, that functioned as a catch-all for the sick poor, deserted mothers with children, orphans, the disabled, and substance abusers. At their most relaxed, poorhouses allowed residents to receive visitors, be paid for their work on the farm or in the kitchens, go to town and get drunk, and generally come and go at will. The Rockingham County, New Hampshire, poorhouse had a library of four hundred volumes.