It started so simply.
I just wanted some old bricks.
So I did what people do these days when they’re looking for something on the cheap: I cruised Craigslist.
And right there, in the “building materials” section, I came across an ad for salvaged bricks in Loysville.
The price was right. Even better, the bricks were local.
The nice young fellow who had placed the ad was named Ben King. He told me that the bricks were clean and palletized. We struck a deal.
A few days later, Ben and his dog Jasmine, an Australian shepherd with startling blue eyes, delivered two pallets of bricks to us on St. Peters Church Road. While he was unloading them, I asked where the bricks had came from.
Ben told me he’d helped take down the old County Home on Rte. 850, just outside Loysville.
I remembered the building, an imposing, four-story institution with a copper roof and a sad little Victorian porch. We’d driven by it a few times on our way to Jeff’s Auction in Loysville.
I asked Ben how many bricks he had for sale, exactly.
“Oh, about a million,” he said.
So if any readers are considering building a patio, or any other project that might benefit from a pallet of 19th century bricks, you might want to get in touch with Ben at 275-2532.
As Ben backed his trailer down the driveway, I brushed the snow off one of the bricks. Its color had mellowed over the decades to a very pleasing pinkish red. Its surface had a hand-made feel, unlike a modern industrial brick, with its pretensions to perfect uniformity. One edge of the brick was painted. I wondered if I could use the painted edge in my patio design.
I was happy to have these nice bricks to work with, but sad about the demolition of the old building. It had certainly fallen on hard times, but its outlines were grand, almost like a university lecture hall. I wondered why it had been torn down.
So I started looking into the history of the County Home.
Ben mentioned that he thought the building had been built in 1871, based on a plaque he’d found at the site. And, in fact, Silas Wright’s History of Perry County mentions the Home as being under construction at the time of publication, in 1873:
“About one-half mile south-east of Loysville [are] the farm and houses appropriated for the use of the poor in the county. The old buildings, two or three in number, have been superceded by the most expensive edifice in the county [emphasis mine], estimated to cost, when entirely finished, upward of $30,000.”
The most expensive edifice in the county! Now that was interesting. Why such a magnificent poorhouse? Wasn’t that a kind of oxymoron?
Cost estimates for public works were just as bad then as they are now. According to H.H. Hain, who picks up the story of the County Home in his History of Perry County (1922), the final cost of the grand brick building was more on the order of $60,000.
I’m not an expert on inflation, but I’m pretty sure that $60,000 in the 1870s would be a figure in the millions today.
Hain’s account of the Home is much more thorough than Wright’s. He extends the story of the Home backwards in time, to the beginning of the 19th century:
“Before the formation of Perry County, the county home of Cumberland County was located at the site of the present Perry County Home. On April 12, 1810, the directors of the poor and of the House of Employment of Cumberland County purchased from Adam Bernheisel, of Tyrone Township, his farm of 112 acres, the same having been warranted by William McClure in 1763…the cost of the first building was $3,980…When Perry County was formed the institution became the property of the new county, with the proviso that the poor of Cumberland County be allowed to remain for several years…In 1839, the almshouse was burned to the ground and rebuilt at once.”
This little piece of history also raised some questions. What were these strange job titles, “Directors of the Poor” and “Directors of the House of Employment?” And what, exactly, was an “almshouse?”
The more I dug into the history of the Perry County Home, the more I came to understand that various names people used to describe it, from “almshouse” to “Home for the Destitute” to “County Home,” were reflections of changing attitudes towards the county’s needy. Who was deserving of the county’s care? And why?
It was when I dug into the census records for residents of the Home—or “inmates,” as they were called, even into the 1920s— that I realized what a strange and disturbing place this was for much of its history.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 17 December 2009
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
