The old Noble County Home is a sprawling institution that has spent decades trying to pass itself off as something more ordinary. From the road, it looks less like a relic of public welfare than a massive old house that’s seen better days. That only makes its past more intriguing.
Jason Foster deeded eighty acres and the buildings that stood on them for a Poor Farm in 1860. Over time, a larger facility became necessary. The Jefferson Township site was exchanged for 160 acres in York Township, a mile and a half northwest of Albion. The facility moved in 18721.
The extant Noble County Home was built by George Harvey and Son, who also erected other public buildings in the county2. Information’s hard to come by, but the home housed twenty-four residents -sixteen men and eight women- in 19153.
By 1949, the home housed thirty-three people but was large enough for forty-two. Thirteen milk cows, six heads of cattle, twenty or twenty-five hogs, and a number of hens also called the 258-acre working farm home4. That year, a reporter with the Kendallville News-Sun toured the property. “…one realizes that here is the end of the line for 33 human beings at one time members of the world at large, but now citizens of a community as isolated from Kendallville as a Ural mountaintop5.”
It appears as though the Noble County Home closed in 1957. Afterwards, the facility became a privately-owned nursing facility. As of 2013, it had been converted to apartments6. It looked every bit the part when I passed by in March, but a quick dive into the Noble County Assessor’s office database revealed something different. Today, the building’s a single-family dwelling seemingly in poor repair7.
The building still retains its old-fashioned fire escapes, which are cool, but its value was lowered by the assessor in 2014 due to its condition and the lack of heating in most of the home. Two years later, officials corrected the room count. In 2022, they removed its extra living units and reclassified the building as a single-family home8.
Places like the old Noble County Home don’t disappear all at once. Instead, they fade in stages as each new use sands a little more down of what they once were. That tension -the ordinary house it appears to be now versus the institutional past it will never shake- is exactly the kind of thing that keeps pulling me back to Indiana’s old county homes and infirmaries.
Sources Cited
1 Mount Salem (n.d.). Noble County Genealogical Society [Albion]. Web. Retrieved March 21, 2026.
2 Alvord, S.E. (1902). Alvord’s History of Noble County, Indiana. B.F Bowen [Indianapolis]. Book.
3 Ligonier News (1915, July 16). The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. p. 17.
4 Gagen, B. (2006, February 28). Infirmary was county’s home of last resort. KPCNews [Kendallville]. Web. Retrieved March 20, 2026.
5 (See footnote 4).
6 Hassett, K. (2014). The County Home in Indiana: A Forgotten Response to Poverty and Disability. Diss. Ed. Vera A. Adams. Ball State University. Web. Retrieved March 24, 2026.
7 Parcel 57-15-11-200-002.000-021 (2026). Office of the Assessor. Noble County [Albion]. Web. Retrieved March 24, 2026.
8 (See footnote 7).
