The Brunswick Alms House on Water Street, as it appeared in 1925. Courtesy of the Portland Press Herald, April 18, 1925

Alongside Brunswick’s busy Route 1, next to the Public Works garage and parking lot on Industry Road, lay the remains of a “Potter’s Field,” where the once poor of the town rest in anonymity.

For many years, the town of Brunswick — with full support of the community — humanely treated and cared for the poorest of our residents. Homelessness, illness and old-age infirmity appear to have been leading causes why these unfortunates needed assistance.

In 1807, a vote of Brunswick’s residents mandated the selectmen to purchase an “Alms house … for the town’s poor.” A few locations came to serve these needs, but each house was soon outgrown and necessity repeatedly required larger facilities.

By 1831, a farmhouse with 27 acres was acquired on Water Street, just below the home of Narcissa Stone, and served as Brunswick’s “poor farm” for more than century. The farm was originally owned and built in 1775 by Thomas Thompson, cousin to Topsham’s famed Brigadier General Samuel Thompson.

Since many of the poor were often elderly and sometimes ill, a number had died while residing on the farm and Brunswick’s “overseers of the poor” set aside “a piece of land near the poorhouse for a pauper’s cemetery.”

A small memorial of the Alms House Cemetery for paupers was laid by the Brunswick Rotary Club in 1995. Lori-Suzanne Dell photo

Thompson’s two-story farmhouse served as “quarters for the [superintendent[ of the farm and his family,” with a large barn and “an ell” extension on the main building. This extension became home to Brunswick’s paupers.

Over the next 25 years, Alms House grew with additions built to fulfill its needs. By 1859, the poorhouse also served as a work house with a debtor’s jail and a “cell room” for those so sentenced. The town selectmen “authorized to hire out … town paupers … to perform labor and bind out their children.”

In the years following the American Civil War, many war widows and their children came to the farm, while disabled soldiers also resided at Brunswick’s Alms House. However, not everyone who stayed on the Water Street farm were always as deserving.

In August 1906, the Alms House became the scene of “a drunk’s carnival” and the farm’s superintendent, Mr. Henry Brawn, was forced to handle the situation. Brawn “loaded two of the men into a dump cart and hauled them to the police station.” But one man, a “Mr. Michael Walsh … an inmate serving a 30-days sentence,” proved difficult.

The inebriate “made an assault” on Brawn, who was able to recover and finally “corralled [Walsh] and put him into the cell-room of the Alms House.” Brunswick’s “Marshal McFadden” was summoned and soon arrested the drunken man. Walsh was “sentenced to 30 days for intoxication and ninety days for assault.” Walsh asked to serve his sentence at the Alms House, but his request was denied.

Alms houses were found in most American communities, and deaths at these poor houses were not uncommon. One local newspaper account, in February 1892, reported “three deaths at Alms House within the past twenty-four hours.”

By the 1920s, the old Alms House was judged to be in terrible structural condition. In 1925, the building was repaired and expanded, and within 30 years, the old poorhouse had morphed “into a nursing home.”

Through the years, the financial needs of the poor was met by the town. In March 1951, the Town of Brunswick asked the voters to approve more than “$11,045.00 … for the support of people in the Alms House” as well as an additional “$21,000.00 for support of the poor [living outside] of the Alms House.”

On Aug. 11, 1969, the old poorhouse was reborn yet again, this time as “the Riverview Day Care Center,” which operated until the early 2000s. But the structural condition was once again in question. Despite attempts to save the building, the structure of Brunswick’s historic and former Alms House was scheduled to meet the wrecking ball.

In 1995, Brunswick’s Rotary Club placed a stone monument on the grounds of the old Alms House cemetery to remember those anonymous unfortunates who were buried, and forgotten, after they “died on the town.”

Some of the surnames of the known unfortunates buried there include Bailey, Merryman, Toothacre, Eaton, Jones, May, Haley, Werter and Wentworth.

Today, 44 Water St. is a vacant lot used for parking, and its Potter’s Field is all that remains of the Alms House. Little information survives to tell when the first or the last burials occurred.

Sadly, no headstones remain, if there ever were any. Few records have been discovered to identify the number of the poor souls who are buried in lonely anonymity. And this “pauper’s cemetery” is now all that is left to remind us of those less fortunate people whose lives have faded into the sad and more anonymous of our Stories from Maine.

Lori-Suzanne Dell is a Brunswick author and historian. She has published four books and runs the “Stories from Maine” Facebook page.

The seemingly vacant lot of the Alms House cemetery for paupers lies sandwiched between the busy Public Works Department and the even busier Route 1. Lori-Suzanne Dell photo