Cemetery tour highlighted ‘forgotten’ at Poor House in Albion
Photos by Tom Rivers
ALBION – About 75 people attended a tour on Sunday evening at the cemetery for the Orleans County Alms House on County House Road.
The event is part of the Sunday evening cemetery tours this month organized by the Orleans County Historical Association. The first tour on Aug. 4 featured the West Ridgeway Cemetery. The next tour at 6 p.m. will be at St. Mary’s in Medina followed by Mount Albion on Aug. 25.
Tim Archer, a retired teacher at Albion, speaks during Sunday’s evening highlighting a once-forgotten cemetery.
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.
Bill Lattin speaks during Sunday’s tour of the cemetery. In 2010, Lattin visited Tim Archer’s classes and Lattin mentioned there was a cemetery behind the former Alms House. At the time the site was overgrown and largely inaccessible.
Archer went on his own and found a headstone with a number on it. He then brought three students and they found 10 more head stones with numbers.
Archer and his class addressed the County Legislature about having the site cleared and cleaned up. The students researched the site and found old records with names of 250 people who died at the Alms House.
An interpretive panel was unveiled in 2019 with the names of 250 people who were buried in the cemetery. Some had headstones with numbers, and others were just buried with no marker.
Lattin praised Archer and the students for their concern and action in pushing to get the site cleared and to provide a more fitting final resting place for the residents.
“Tim is a great citizen, a great teacher and a lifetime friend,” Lattin said about Archer. “He did a great job cleaning up this mess. Tim you’ve put a great of your heart and soul into this.”
The reclaimed stones were reset at the cemetery in 2011. The project led by the Albion students garnered widespread media attention around Western New York. Archer said it was perhaps the most ambitious and most meaningful of all the service-learning projects during his career.
He spoke to the crowd on Sunday about the residents of the alms house, some whose stay was short-term for a few weeks while they “dried out” from intemperance.
Others were there for years, suffering from mental and physical disabilities. Some of the oldest records from the alms house were destroyed in a fire. But Archer has looked through an annual reports about the alms house, where staff lists why people needed to stay there.
Some of the reasons listed that caused people to be at the alms house: vagrant, homeless, “pain in the bones,” delinquent, paralysis, dropsy, consumption, syphilis, hernia, “feeble minded,” “bad business management,” senile, lunatic, opium habit, breast cancer, “peg leg,” “frozen hands,” skull wound, “one arm off,” cirrhosis of the liver, crushed foot by railroad car, fingers cut off by a buzz saw.
He saw 1,500 entries over decades for the “inmates.” They weren’t prisoners or in trouble with the law. But they were away from their home, or they didn’t have a home.
“These were real people with real lives that ended unceremoniously,” Archer said.
The cemetery is in the back behind the Emergency Management Office, surrounded by a corn field. When the cemetery was rededicated in 2011, 74 grave markers were reset.
The site is open to the public and continues to be maintained by Orleans County.
Scouts from Albion’s Troop 164 raised the flag at the cemetery during Sunday’s event.
