Deserted by her husband, she begged for shelter then lay down on the street. Surrounded by a crowd of boys, it was where she gave birth to her third child.
Three days later, Mrs. Wellesley Knowles, clutching her newborn baby, climbed 24 steps to the front door of an imposing limestone building. Etched above the entrance were the words “County Poor House.”
Knowles’ two older children, about two and five, had already been taken to the house by horse-drawn wagon. Each time, members of the family were accompanied by the township reeve.
“You couldn’t just come and knock on the door of the poorhouse. You had to be accepted as the `deserving poor.’ It was the reeve and township council that decided who the deserving poor were,” said Susan Dunlop.
Dunlop is curator of the Wellington County Museum and Archives, which is housed in the 19th century building in the rolling countryside between Elora and Fergus, where Knowles, who’d immigrated just six months earlier, was taken on Sept. 23, 1884.
“In the poorhouse” wasn’t just an expression in Canada.
Though more commonly associated with Victorian England and novels by Charles Dickens, such as Oliver Twist, the poorhouse was part of Canada’s social fabric for more than 60 years and one of its earliest legislated responses to poverty.
“Poorhouses have been forgotten,” said Dunlop. “They are part of our local history.”
These “houses of industry and refuge,” as they came to be known, were shelters of last resort for the destitute, homeless, “feeble-minded” and elderly. In exchange for their labour, they were provided with spartan accommodation, clothes and simple food, much of it grown themselves. At Christmas, there might be small gifts, perhaps a handkerchief, a pipe or an orange.
The oldest surviving example of a poorhouse in Canada is in Wellington County. The building, a national historic site, opened in 1877, a time when “pauperism” was considered a moral failing that could be erased through order and hard work.
The poorhouse system was the foundation for today’s government-funded social assistance programs.
It was also something Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe had very much wanted to avoid when he arrived in Upper Canada in 1791.
In his native England, more than 100,000 people were swallowed up in work houses, funded by a “poor tax” on landowners and criticized for being costly and creating cycles of dependency.
“When he came over to take up his position here, he was absolutely convinced he wasn’t going to allow anything like that to develop,” said David Wood, a professor emeritus of geography and urban studies at York University’s Atkinson College.
Yet poverty was inescapable. Crops failed. People starved. On farms and in cities, as the province slowly started to become industrialized, many couldn’t work because they were sick or injured or old.
The only option for indigent people in the province’s earliest days was to seek shelter for a night or two at the local jail, said Wood, who has written on the legislative history of Ontario’s poorhouse system and admissions in Wellington County.
Dunlop ran across a newspaper account from the early 1870s of one elderly man who was living in a hollowed-out log on a farmer’s field in a township outside Fergus, partly paralyzed and in danger of freezing to death. The council was debating what to do.
Across Canada, elected officials were struggling with similar problems. Handouts of food or clothing known as “outdoor relief” became common and, in New Brunswick, one solution was to auction off care of the poor to the lowest bidder at “pauper auctions” that were compared to slavery in the American south.
In Ontario, the province passed the Houses of Refuge Act in 1890, which provided county governments with grants of up to $4,000 to purchase at least 45 acres of land and construct a suitable building.
By 1903, new legislation required every county in Ontario to have a house of refuge.
Much earlier, in 1876, Wellington County officials had purchased 50 acres of land between Fergus and Elora for a poorhouse, intended to function as a self-sufficient industrial farm. Residents, who were called “inmates,” a term used at the time to describe anyone living in an institution, tended livestock, looked after 30 acres of crops, an orchard, a garden and a strawberry patch.
Their labour provided most of the food for the 70 inmates and staff.
As new inmates arrived, it was entirely possible they might see the body of another inmate, such as 70-year-old George Kerr, who died in the fall of 1892, making its final journey to the poorhouse cemetery for burial in an unmarked grave.
Dunlop, along with archivist Karen Wagner and conservator Patty Whan, have documented these stories after poring through admission and discharge records, medical files, council minutes, old newspaper stories and tracking down relatives to find out more about the people who lived there.
Since they died more than 30 years ago, their names can be used, which Dunlop and her colleagues felt was important for appreciating the history.
“Poverty doesn’t often have a face or a name or the (documented) family connections you see here,” Dunlop said, standing near photographs of the Everson family of Harriston, near Mount Forest, whose story helps illustrate poverty’s generational cycles.
At eight months pregnant, Mary Jane Everson entered the home in 1889 with her children, Julia, 7, Leonard, 5, and George, 3. Her husband, Alfred, had become sick, couldn’t work and spent more than a year in Guelph General Hospital. The family had no source of income.
Everson’s baby, John, was one of three children born in the house. The family had returned to Harriston to live, possibly when Alfred had recovered, but Mary Ann and her older children were eventually readmitted to the house.
Leonard and George were apprenticed out as farm labourers at ages 12 and 13, as was Julia. But in her case, it didn’t work out and she remained at the poorhouse for the reset of her life, dying at age 67 in 1948. Her mother and brother, William, born in 1894, both discharged, continued to write and send Julia family photographs. (George later enlisted with a county battalion and was killed in action three months before the end of World War I).
Meanwhile, Mary Ann’s parents, George Hollingshead, 82, and his wife Ann, 80, were admitted to the house in 1907 because of “old age and destitution” and died there.
Much like today, misfortune seemed to hit society’s most vulnerable people the hardest – the unskilled, the elderly, the disabled and children.
Leonard Howson of Eramosa Township entered the house in 1877 at age 9 and drowned on the property in May, 1903, at age 35, while searching for a lost fish hook.
During his 26 years there, Howson would have only walked through the front doors once. After arriving, inmates were required to enter and leave through the back doors.
Photographs show male residents wearing patched trousers and women in dresses made from the same bolts of cloth. Uniforms were sewn by inmates and staff.
Men and women, even elderly married couples, were housed in separate sections of the building, in dormitories at times so crowded the only way to get into bed was by climbing in from the end.
A stone washhouse was erected in 1877 and served as a laundry, a woodshed and “dead house,” or morgue. Three jail cells were sometimes used for temporarily housing inmates suffering from mental illness or what today would be known as dementia. The staff weren’t trained to deal with these challenges.
A hospital wing was added in 1892, with the help of a $4,000 provincial grant and the physical labour of inmates such as Jimmy “the giraffe” Allen, so nicknamed because of his height and bright red hair, who operated a lime kiln during construction.
A hospital wing was needed because the composition of the inmate population was changing, partly as a result of society’s attitudes toward poverty itself.
With the advent of the poorhouse system had come recognition, for the first time in Ontario, that governments had a responsibility to provide for the less fortunate. Other social programs aimed at reducing poverty and dependence on the poorhouse followed, including a children’s aid system and early forms of worker’s compensation, as well as legislation to improve workplace safety.
While women and children continued to seek sanctuary in these institutions, they were increasingly becoming senior citizens homes and, by 1947, Wellington County’s House of Refuge had officially been renamed the Wellington County Home for the Aged. It remained such until 1972, reopening three years later as a museum.
While Canadian society has evolved and a sophisticated social safety net has developed to ease the burdens of those who’ve fallen on hard times, Dunlop is struck by how some attitudes toward poverty remain the same.
“Sometimes when people go through the exhibit, they say `Things haven’t changed very much’ and I can understand their thinking,” Dunlop says.
“They see, I think, the harshness and sometimes the judgments (society made about the poor.) I think we still carry that ideological base...that if you are not successful in work you are morally a failure. Those are strong roots in our western society.”
For directions to the museum and more information go to www.wcm.on.ca
