5620 Meadows Road
Dewittville, NY 14728
Town of Chautauqua
Shown on the 1854 Wall Map of Chautauqua County as the “Poor House,” and on the 1867 Atlas of Chautauqua County as the “County Poor House,” the farm at approximately 5620 Meadows Road was shown again on the 1881 Atlas of Chautauqua County as the “County Farm,” with an “Asylum” and an “Alms House.” The alms house had been replaced about 12 years earlier. By the late twentieth century, it had disappeared. The following information is extracted from an article entitled “Over the bridge of Sighs: Like Former Residents the Old Poor House is Abandoned and Run Down,” by Jim Fox, Mayville Bureau, Evening Observer, Dunkirk-Fredonia, NY, Wednesday, December 6, 1972.
Across the little bridge that spans the creek they brought their luggage, a carpetbag of ragged clothes, a copper kettle and the fragments of their broken lives. These were the poor, the insane, the bastard child, the unwed mother, the orphan boy and girl. Before them loomed, through the elm and pine trees across a carefully tended lawn, what seemed like a vision of paradise: the warm red brick of imposing buildings, the sharp redolence of barns, and more distantly, the honking of geese and confused mutter of a chicken house in full session. This was the “poor house.” This was Dewittville, that final port of call for those who lived bad or luckless lives, lost their property or violated the laws of morality and thus were called upon to pay the price. This was the place which, down to this day, boys and girls are schooled to avoid, because to go there meant falling into that final degradation, the public charity, the poor house and the twilight end of a wasted life. In coming to the mansion and its outbuildings, truly a self-sufficient world and society closed in upon itself, they passed by what must be their end: the grass covered little plot under the trees beside the brook, downstream from the bridge, where in largely unmarked, unmourned graves, those who had died “on the dole” were put away in pine coffins hewn from trees that grew upon this land and fashioned by hands bound to the same labor of poverty into which they were now entering.
Across this bridge in the late fall of 1878 came one Silas Grant, and his wife Rebecca. With them came “one horse, one old gray mare, a copper kettle and a clean linen sheet in which to wind themselves when they were dead.” No one knows how this old man and his wife came to pass over the bridge of sighs across Dewittville Creek and seek public charity. They were entered upon the rolls that November, but in spring they were discharged. Next fall, “they did return as before, yet without said gray mare which they had, during the summer, eaten.” Today the same buildings can be seen from the road that branches northeastward from Dewittville. In 1961, the county sold this complex and its approximately 400 acres to private interests, and within recent months, it has been sold again, having passed through a number of hands in the last 13 years. The great main building with its five-story tower, 17 feet square, still looms above the trees like a lighthouse of hope in a cold world. The red brick, butter soft and manufactured on the premises by the Cherry Creek builder (Silas Vinton) who erected the structure in 1867-70, glows warmly in the late fall afternoon sun, trying to hide the scars which lack of attention and time have afflicted. Like Daphne DuMaurier’s great house of Mandalay, its windows seem to flicker with the fire of life, hiding the collapsed wall where the bricks exploded and fell some winters before, when water between their courses froze and expanded. The second building, which was the hospital (and originally the insane asylum), stands gap-doored, many of its windows missing, a torn shade flapping in the wind. In back, the long veranda of what was the “married quarters,” a wing connecting the two main buildings, is empty and silent and hiding in its shadows the ghosts of men and women who spent their last days there.
The huge elm tree which guarded the center of the lawn is now amputated of limbs and stripped of bark, a gray spectre among the evergreens’ brilliance. The fountain is gone, its cast metal boy pouring water from a boot translated to Dunkirk and the new infirmary. It is one of two such fountains. The other is in Hershey, PA. It pays tribute to an Austrian drummer boy who, during the battle of Austerlitz in 1805, carried water to the wounded in his boot. The structure itself was a monument to the wounded. When it was erected in 1867, it was a source of great pride to the men, the supervisors of Chautauqua County, who found the $32,000 needed to build it. Aaron Hall of Jamestown designed it….By 1830, the county was growing and had attracted many immigrants, some of them unable to feed and clothe themselves. The township “poor masters” were in competition to drive these indigent people from town to town, so that they could not claim a year’s residence and thus become a charge upon the township taxpayers. The county as a whole paid for them if they lacked residency in a given town for 12 consecutive months. The county poor were, before the first poor house was built in 1833, “farmed out.” The poor, the unwed pregnant girl, the orphan, the insane, were all put upon the auction block each December and they went to the family which bid the least for them. Some went for as little as a penny a week, 52 cents a year, charged to the county by the family that took them.
This soon, of course, became a scandal. In 1830, the supervisors purchased the 90-acre Todd farm near Dewittville for $900, and in the next three years, erected thereon a poor house of brick. Its first inmate was Jacob Lockwood, “a lunatic (who) remained a permanent boarder for over 30 years….” The man who looked after him was William Gifford, the first keeper of the poor, who set up housekeeping “with his wife, and a cow, a barrel of good beef and shoats” before January 1, 1833. Though made of brick and sturdy, the poor house lasted only about 35 years. It had cost about $3500 to build. Rather than try to patch it, the supervisors decided in 1867 to build a new one. Said Mr. Bishop at the conclusion of his history, “The work has been well and wisely done….It will probably meet all the wants of the Poor Department for many years to come…perhaps until the first decade of the new century.” It lasted longer than that, just short of a hundred years. Burton G. Miner, last resident superintendent at the home, recalls into what a state it had fallen when he began his career there. The first night, he said, he and his wife had to keep moving their bed around the room because the rain was pouring in through the roof. Not only that, but because the floors had settled badly, they had to take the casters off the bed to keep it from rolling by itself. Yet, even so, the colony was self-sustaining. A huge Dutch oven in the basement baked 200 loaves at a time. The farm provided beef, pork, lamb, grains, vegetables and fruit. There was a schoolhouse for the children of the poor and the staff. For a while the colony had its own direct current electric generating plan run by a steam boiler. Water came from two reservoirs formed by damming the creeks in the hills above the farm. In the tower was a huge cypress water tank for firefighting and in the basement, a big steam pump. Also in the basement, fixed to the stone walls, were arm and leg irons for those among the insane deemed to be “unruly,” an appliance to which Mr. Miner never had recourse because the insane and retarded had long before been removed from the establishment. Now there are only a few workmen cutting down timber or tending the chickens who inhabit the old cow barn. The main buildings stand vacant, falling slowly into the ground, an historical monument inhabited only by the ghosts of the forgotten men and women who ended their days here, never to be viewed as an historical monument, perhaps, because of its associations. There also remains the quiet and peace and the whisper of a long past time. For whatever else it was, and whatever end of the road it represented, the Poor House was a haven against all storms, a brick fortress against life. Now time and the elements are claiming it. There are none to mourn except the dead.
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