Holley Rotary donates new flag pole for Alms House Cemetery
Photos courtesy of Tim Archer
ALBION – A group of Albion Middle School enrichment students recently joined Craig Lane, the Orleans County DPW Commissioner, at the cemetery for the Orleans County Alms House.
Lane is also a member of the Holley Rotary Club which donated a new flag pole for the cemetery. The Alms House was a place for the poor, indigent and infirmed from 1833 to 1960. It is located at 14064 W. County House Rd., behind the Emergency Management buildings.
The cemetery contains the graves of about 250 people, and many of the sites are marked by simple numbers or have no marker at all. The site was reclaimed and restored beginning in 2010 through projects led by Albion Middle School students and the county.
Lane is shown with student Elizabeth Colmenaro, Oliver Beyrle, Elliot Pettit, Colton Moreland and Maelynn Taylor.
The DPW installed the new flag pole which replaced one that was worn, said Tim Archer, who assists with the enrichment program and spearheaded several of the projects at the Alms House Cemetery.
Students look over some of the gravesites at the cemetery which is visible from Route 31A near Keeler Construction.
Archer was working as a service learning teacher at Albion in 2010 when his seventh-grade students became interested in the site. Bill Lattin, the county historian at the time, was speaking in Archer’s class about how there used to be the Alms or “Poor House” on County House Road from 1833 to 1960. The Alms House closed in 1960 when the county nursing home opened on Route 31 in Albion.
The Alms House was torn down and now the site is the Orleans County Emergency Management Office with a fire training tower.
Maelynn Taylor and Elizabeth Colmenaro visit the gravesite for Daniel Walterhouse, a Civil War soldier buried at the cemetery.
Walterhouse lived at the Orleans County Alms House or Poor House for about 15 years until his death in 1910.
The new headstone was unveiled during a ceremony at the cemetery on May 18, 2025. Two Albion eight-graders – Kendall Peruzzini and Mary McCormick – secured the 230-pound Civil War era headstone from the Veterans Affairs office in Washington, DC. The stone was installed by the DPW.
