Whether they’ve been schoolhouses, courthouses, churches, or infirmaries, I’ve seen a lot of old buildings over the years that have smacked me in the face by being far more grand than I expected. Dearborn County’s old County Home, down near Cincinnati, was one of them. I’d seen photos beforehand, but they didn’t prepare me for the real thing: a sprawling red-brick building stretched across a hilltop, framed by enormous old trees and crowned by a white wooden cupola that rises above everything else. What a landmark!
Dearborn County’s first poor farm was established in its northwestern reaches1 in 1835 on a fifty-acre site purchased from Phoebe Pate2. A second asylum was built in 1853 after the county bought property from C.F. Wood. The home that survives today was completed there in 18823. Designed by Captain Alex Pattison and built by Seth Platt4, the $21,754 building contained sixty-four rooms arranged across two stories and a vast cruciform plan5.
Facing south toward County Home Road, the old infirmary is even more imposing up close. Its long brick wings rise from a limestone foundation and converge on a projecting central pavilion beneath a steep gable. Otherwise, the Late Victorian6 exterior is surprisingly restrained. Rows of tall windows are topped by shallow arches of brick voussoirs, while patterned brickwork provides much of the building’s limited ornamentation.
Then there’s the feature that immediately caught my eye from a distance: the cupola. Perched above the intersection of the building’s wings, the tall wooden structure provides a vertical counterpoint to the home’s enormous horizontal footprint. Better yet, it’s not just decorative: unlike any of Indiana’s other surviving county homes I’ve visited, Dearborn’s retains its detailed wooden cupola and its original bell7! It’s hard to imagine the building without it.
From what I understand, the innards of the Dearborn County Home reflected the same rigid organization as its outards. On the men’s side, the first floor contained five single bedrooms, while the second held fourteen more along with a recreation room, chapel, storeroom, and bathroom. The women’s wing featured six single bedrooms and a bathroom downstairs, with another eight single rooms above8. I gather the central portion contained the superintendent’s office and living quarters, a common arrangement in county homes of the era.
The Dearborn County Home was only the centerpiece of a much larger operation. At its peak, the property encompassed a massive 380 acres! Just under half was devoted to crops, with another five acres set aside for a garden and four planted as orchards. Pastures, outbuildings, and a manmade reservoir occupied much of the rest. As late as 1948, the working farm supported eight milk cows, additional cattle, twenty-five hogs, two mules, two horses, and a whopping three hundred chickens! A barn, woodshed, granary, implement sheds, brooder house, and garage kept the whole operation running9.
By then, though, the enormous home itself was becoming increasingly empty. In 1948, the sixty-six-year-old building housed only twelve residents, all men10. Ten were older than sixty-five, and the entire eastern wing had already been closed. Dearborn County wasn’t alone: dwindling populations had become a common problem for county homes across southeastern Indiana by the late 1940s. Officials in Decatur County investigated sending their residents elsewhere, while Jennings County commissioners transferred theirs to neighboring Jefferson County11.
After years of watching its resident population decline, Dearborn County officials finally put the old infirmary up for sale in 1980. Its remaining occupants had already been transferred to facilities in other counties, but the institution hadn’t quite shut down. The county continued financing the operation and kept its superintendents on the payroll- not to care for residents, but to manage the infirmary farm and its herd of about a hundred cattle12. The people were gone, in other words, but the poor farm was still a farm.
Fortunately, the enormous building didn’t sit empty for long. By 1982, Youth Engagement Services, a foster home for children and teens, had acquired the property. Appropriately enough, the organization celebrated the building’s 100th anniversary that same year13. Youth Engagement Services still occupies the old home today, which was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 200114. Much of the former poor farm surrounding it has taken on a public role of its own as County Farm Park.
The combination of preservation and continued use at the old Dearborn County Infirmary probably explains why the place made such an impression on me. Plenty of Indiana’s old county homes have disappeared, while others survive as ruins or heavily altered remnants. Dearborn County’s still looks unmistakably like the monumental institution it was built to be more than 140 years ago. The farm animals and residents are gone, but the sprawling brick wings, old trees, and that remarkable cupola still command the hilltop. Wow! What a building.
Sources Cited
1 National Register of Historic Places, Dearborn County Asylum For The Poor, Manchester, Dearborn County, Indiana, National Register # 00001143.
2 History of Dearborn And Ohio Counties, Indiana (1885). F.E. Weakley & Co. [Chicago]. Book.
3 (See footnote 1).
4 (See footnote 2).
5 (See footnote 2).
6 (See footnote 1).
7 (See footnote 1).
8 County Home Inspected, Improvements And Repairs Recommended By Official (1948, August 5). The Dearborn County Register. p. 3.
9 (See footnote 8).
10 County Infirmary Is Operated Below Capacity (1948, May 13). The Aurora Journal-Press. p. 1.
11 (See footnote 8).
12 County home for sale or lease. (1980, May 22). The Dearborn County Register. p. 1.
13 YES benefit is 100 birthday for home (1982, June 10). The Dearborn County Register. p. 3.
14 Robinson, B. (2001, January 4). YES Home, County Farm named to National Register. The Dearborn County Register. p. 1.
