ORANGE COUNTY POOR HOUSE / COUNTY HOME

1891 Tate Map. (LOC)

An 1870 report to the North Carolina Board of Public Charities described the Orange County poor house and property: "The poor house which has been in operation for the past forty-five years, is five miles from the county seat and consists of two brick buildings one story high and one hundred feet long. Six rooms in each. A supply of water is gotten from well and pump in yard. Fire-places are used for warming the buildings; one quart of meal or flour, one-fourth pound of bacon or pork, one gill of molasses, one pint of coffee and one pint of milk, is the allowance of food; one dollar and twenty-five cents the average weekly cost of the maintenance of each. The buildings are well arranged, neat and in good condition. Four hundred acres of poor qualiity land belong to the poor house tract of which seventy-five are in cultivation. Corn, wheat, oats, hay and cotton, and the different vegetables are raised and used for the support of inmates. Ashes and manures used in improving land. Jas. M. Bain, Overseer. Salary one hundred and seventy-five dollars per annum. Dr. Edmund Strudwick, Physician. Salary seventy-five dollars per annum. Fifty or sixty inmates could be accommodated with the present arrangement. There were eighteen inmates in the poor house on July 1st, 1868--thirty-three admissions since. There have been ten deaths since that time. No. in poor house at present, forty-one, of which ten are able to do light work."