Almshouses

Boston (ca. 1685), Philadelphia, and New York (the 1730s) were the first cities in the United States to establish almshouses (also called poorhouses). Almshouses were initially supported with a combination of poor taxes and private donations and originally intended to temporarily house community members who were of good character but who were “unfortunate” and who had no family to support them: the poor, the elderly, abandoned or illegitimate children, the injured, or the insane or mentally defective. Almshouses supplemented, and occasionally replaced, the older “outdoor” relief system of payments in cash or goods to relatives of the afflicted or to community members who offered to take responsibility for paupers' support. In some areas (e.g., New York City's outlying counties, and in parts of New Jersey), overseers alternated between outdoor relief and housing the poor in rented or purchased residences, depending on how many folk were in need of care and how much money the town had to spend. Private aid from religious organizations or charitable organizations existed alongside institution-based aid, but focused on particular categories of need (e.g., their own congregations, widows, orphans, prostitutes).

Almshouses played a range of important roles in the social, economic, and political lives of both urban and rural communities. In addition to aiding the poor, poorhouses provided jobs for many of the working poor who would otherwise have been dependent on poor relief. The institutions worked to lower their operating costs by selling manufactured goods and by exchanging goods and produce with local residents. As public institutions, alms-houses served as foci for debates over the use of public funds, the conduct of local elections, responses to crises such as epidemics, and other issues of concern to the public.

[Page 19]Urbanization and industrialization in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe and North America were accompanied by universal problems of population dislocation, economic insta bility, and increasing tension between adminis trators, the public, and the poor over entitlement to relief. While the establishment of the British workhouse system in the 1830s was of considerable interest to administrators in the United States, and British manuals for providing residential institutions with adequate plumbing and ventilation were certainly consulted, U.S. poorhouses did not generally employ British or other non-American institutions as models. Instead, poor relief exhibited significant regional variation, and administrators adapted government regulations to local conditions and individual cases as they saw fit.

Between the mid-eighteenth century and the 1830s, most American cities adopted an institution-based system of poor relief in order to more efficiently spend and account for public funds (which now included regular appropriations for poor relief) and for more effective supervision of the poor. Poverty was a matter of increasing concern in both urban and rural areas as the numbers of applicants for relief grew and expenditures on relief increased in spite of local officials' efforts to take responsibility only for poor folk who lived in their communities. Real increases in poverty were accompanied by widespread public perception that the ranks of the poor were increasingly composed of the “vicious” poor, who did not deserve the support to which paupers of good character were entitled.

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