For nearly three centuries, Cecil County’s destitute, elderly, sick, and mentally ill, as well as other cast-asides from society who couldn’t make it on their own, found help at the county almshouse poorhouse. Today, this institution, on the road between Childs and Cherry Hill, is home to Mt. Aviat Academy. However, until the 1950s, it served as the place where local government cared for the less fortunate, with nowhere else to turn.
Before the advent of social security, Medicaid, and homeless shelters, this was the safety net for indigent men, women, and children. In the taxpayer-funded residence, paupers were housed, fed, and buried. Those that were able worked the farm to help raise crops and livestock for the residents. For many of these forgotten people, their final resting places were across the road in the Potter’s Field, the county cemetery.
The Cecil County Almshouse or poorhouse around 1900, showing the men’s dormitory and the caretaker’s house & women’s dormitory. (Source: Cecil Whig, June 21, 1968)
The Maryland Legislature directed the commissioners in each county to create an almshouse in 1768. For a while, Cecil used some temporary arrangements. But in 1788, the county purchased about 174 acres, on Childs Road, from Henry Hollingsworth. Within a few years, a dormitory for the unfortunate was built on the farm.
The annual report for 1855 provided some details on the operation of the almshouse. Seventy-one inmates lived there at the farm and aided in producing wheat, corn, oats, potatoes, turnips, pork, and beef. Most of the products from the farm were consumed on the premises, but the commissioners made $125 in excess product sold to the public.
The County’s last public execution occurred at the almshouse. Large, disruptive crowds typically showed up to watch hangmen do their work. As a result, Sheriff Boulden moved this execution outside of Elkton. On the appointed morning, December 5, 1879, the county seat was astir as a mile-long line of carriages made the trip from Elkton to Cherry Hill with the condemned man, Medford Waters. According to the Cecil Democrat, a crowd of nearly fifteen hundred assembled at the paupers’ burial ground to watch the man forfeit his life on the gallows for murder.
An Execution at the Poorhouse
The sheriff had a squad of the local militia, the Groome Guard, escort the group on the trip. When the procession reached the gallows, the sheriff, accompanied by the prisoner and Deputies Janney and Cooling, ascended the platform. Following some prayers, the entire crowd joined in singing a hymn. At 11:35 A.M., the executioner severed the cord and the drop fell. At the next meeting of the Trustees of the Poor, the trustees voted never again to allow an execution at the poorhouse. The next hanging occurred inside the walls of the jail on North Street.
By the 1880s, Cecil County was searching for a more cost-effective way to meet the needs of the mentally ill. Some ended up at the jail in Elkton. Others wound up at the poorhouse. The most acute patients went to “insane asylums” around the region. Considering the growing number of people needing institutionalization at distant facilities, the expense for the county was becoming a burden. Consequentially, the commissioners decided to build the Cecil County Insane Asylum.
After examining other institutions around the region, the commissioners approved the erection of a substantial three-story brick building on the grounds of the county almshouse. The $5,942 contract was awarded to C. A. Walt & Son of Westminster. The asylum had apartments for thirty-one inpatients. The structure was across the road from the poorhouse, near the Potter’s Field.
One day in August 1887, thirteen patients scattered around the state were brought to their new home. Sheriff Robert Mackey, helped by ex-Sheriff Wm. Boulden, went to Frederick to get three people confined there. Elkton’s bailiff, Mr. King, and poorhouse trustee, E. W. Janney, took the train to Baltimore to pick up patients from Spring Grove, Monevien, and Mount Hope. All of them were brought to Singerly Station on the B & O Railroad and taken, from there, to the new asylum in carriages without incident.
According to Dr. William Lee, the Secretary to the State Board of Lunacy, the new institution was a “credit to the county.” He suggested it would be well to take patients from other areas at the expense of those locations since there was plenty of capacity.
By 1893, two counties supported “hospitals for the insane, independent of the almshouses,” according to Maryland, its Resources, Industries and Institutions. Allegany County’s Sylvan Retreat, near Cumberland, had sixty inmates. The Cecil County Insane Asylum in Cherry Hill had twenty-seven inmates.
When the American Medico-Psychological Association, the forerunner of the American Psychiatric Association, met in Baltimore in 1897, Elkton’s Dr. C. M. Ellis, the president of the state medical association, addressed the group. This is an era “of renewed interest in the general welfare of our insane,” he remarked. He noted that much needed to be done as our “almshouses and jails are still tenanted by the idiotic and distraught… Some effort is being made to awaken the state’s conscience to its further duty toward those of the insane who are deprived of the opportunity for betterment in wards of well-equipped hospitals,” The Baltimore Sun reported. “Every insane man, woman, or child whatever their condition… should be entitled to certain minimum provisions within the confines of hospitals or asylums sustained by the state for their care or their cure.”
Gradually, the state assumed responsibility for providing inpatient mental health. In May 1915, the Eastern Shore Hospital for the care of the insane opened in Cambridge. That month, twenty-six patients took the long ride to Dorchester County, where they were admitted into the new institution. A few months earlier, nine African-American residents of Cecil’s asylum were transferred to the “state hospital for the colored insane at Crownsville, Md.,” the Cecil Democrat reported. The county’s insane asylum was torn down, in 1935, when C. B. Van den Huevel was paid $50.25 to remove it.
The poorhouse, once a refuge for those with nowhere else to turn, survived well into the twentieth century. However, in 1940, Governor Herbert R. O’Connor decided it was time to close these institutions.
Cecil County Almshouse Sold
In 1952, the 175-acre county farm and almshouse went up on the auction block, marking an end in Cecil County to one method of caring for indigent people. This ended one of the oldest county institutions and closed one of the few remaining almshouses in the state. It was purchased by Daniel Bathon for $36,200. Bathon donated the property to the Oblate Sisters of St. Francis de Sales, which opened a school.
Soon, weeds and vegetation took over the abandoned paupers’ field where perhaps two hundred people, destitute, insane, vagrant, criminal or transient, were buried. John Beers, who had grown up in the neighborhood, launched a project to have the cemetery cleaned and marked with a marble monument.
The job of memorializing those unknown persons who rest there, many having spent their final days inside the poorhouse, and commemorating the burial plot was completed in 1968. The marble stone read, “Potter’s Field, 1776 – 1950, may their soul’s rest in peace.” Today, the sisters bury members of the order in the graveyard.
By the mid-1950s, the days of the county poorhouse had ended due to the modernization of social services, advances in treating the mentally ill and the social safety nets provided by various governmental programs. Only the small cemetery with many nameless graves and the exhibit maintained by the Oblate Sisters of St. Francis de Sales remind the twenty-first-century citizen of the many people who lived and died there. —CSM
“In Potters Field” — a Poem
We will bury them in potters’ field, the criminals and the unknown.I hear the B & O Freight train coming in on the siding and see the hoboes heading for a warm night’s sleep in the county home.
On my way to the little schoolhouse by the tracks, I count them one and all.
We will give them coffee for the road for I know they will not return. We have had a burial in potters’ field today; he was found floating in the Bay.
When his widow arrives from New York she will identify him as her own, for he was a millionaire without a home.
I see my brother Lawrence Beers passing on the freight, for this was his line of duty for the B & O.
—Johnny “Cash” Beers
This is very useful information for my McCrea research.. Samuel McCrea and his wife Jane Stevenson were manager and matron of the poorhouse 1798-9. Samuel died. David McCrea and his wife Eleanor Smith were manager and matron 1799-1800. David died. Joseph McCrea became manager in 1800 and David’s widow Eleanor McCrea remained as matron. In the 1800 and 1810 census, Joseph McCrea’s household includes all the residents of the poorhouse.