Photo: Lunenburg County Home, June 12, 1932. Courtesy of the DesBrisay Museum, Bridgewater.
If you’ve ever gone to the Municipal Activity and Recreation Complex (MARC) in Dayspring to walk the trails, snowshoe or play disc golf, you may have noticed a small cemetery on top of the hill, with great views in all directions.
Unlike at other cemeteries in the county, the graves here at Hillside Cemetery are marked only with small, numbered granite stones. The two hundred or so people buried here were once residents at the Lunenburg County Asylum and Poor Farm, later known as the Lunenburg County Home. It opened in late 1888 or early 1889 as a home for the poor and homeless in the county, on land in today’s Dayspring (then called Summerside or Summerville) that was donated by the prominent lumber merchants E. D. Davison & Sons.
People receiving aid from the county were required to move to the asylum, and while it was originally intended for the poor, people with disabilities or mental illnesses were also often placed at the institution.
In the crucial period between Confederation and the beginning of the First World War, over thirty such institutions were founded in the province, marking a gradual turn from placing the poor at farms in “pauper auctions” to institutions like poorhouses and almshouses. Under the previous system—sometimes known as “farming out the poor”—provincial Overseers of the Poor would quite literally auction off people who were too poor to take care of themselves to the lowest bidder: the bidder would be paid the amount they bid by the province to feed, clothe, and house the person—who was then required to work for them for free in return.
For example, in 1852, twenty-two paupers were auctioned off in this way in Lunenburg County. This system, commonplace in Western and Northern Europe as well as in North America, was rife with abuse and neglect, and was quickly becoming untenable in the late nineteenth century (although pauper auctions are documented in the Maritimes as late as the second decade of the twentieth century). In Elizabethan England, the Poor Laws—initially passed in 1601 and amended into the nineteenth century—first provided for a parish tax to support the poor, who, if they were perceived as unable to work (the “worthy poor”), would be sent to an almshouse, or, if found to be vagrants or the “idle poor,” to a workhouse, where they would be set to work.
For the first time, institutions like poorhouses and almshouses provided a rudimentary safety net for people in need, but they also criminalized poverty and especially vagrancy, for which one could be imprisoned. A new system was established in Nova Scotia in the late 1880s, under which the responsibility for the poor previously borne by the province was divided between the local and provincial governments.
A poorhouse was established in every county by the end of the nineteenth century. Institutionalization was seen as a more progressive policy than distributing people among private farms, but also as one that would be more efficient and fiscally responsible for governments.
By the 1880s, provincial officials urged counties to build what were then called insane asylums and poorhouses for their residents, instead of sending them to provincially-funded institutions, like the Mount Hope Asylum for the Insane in Dartmouth. Unlike the increasingly specialized provincial institutions and like most such county poorhouses, the Lunenburg County Poor Farm took in the poor, the aged, and the insane—in fact, many people unable to provide for themselves and whose families were unwilling or unable to take care of them undoubtedly fell under more than one of these categories, which were not clearly defined at the time.
These institutions generally relied on inmate labour to defray their costs, and reports typically emphasized the variety of products and the volume of labour that the residents provided. This meant that unlike those described as the “harmless insane” or “quiet insane,” the elderly—no longer able to work—posed a particular problem to government officials, especially as the emphasis on inmate labour grew towards the end of the nineteenth century, and many institutions focused on improving their farms.
In Dayspring, the residents tended the farm’s vegetable gardens and took care of livestock in order to provide income that would offset the institution’s costs—such as producing their own milk and butter instead of having to buy them—but also because outdoor activity was considered therapeutic. As soon as the 1890s, the home was considered very crowded.
Though originally intended as a poorhouse, the home also always housed some people considered mentally ill or disabled, and their numbers continued to grow until, by 1917, a new wing had been constructed to separate them from those considered healthy. Some people, deemed “criminally insane”—dangerous, yet unable to stand trial—were placed there indefinitely without their consent under the Lieutenant Governor’s warrant system—which has been reformed, but remains in effect in Canada today.
The lines between poverty, mental illness, and mental disability remained blurred into the early twentieth century, and most officials and Victorian social reformers considered poverty a moral failing that needed to be remedied. At the same time, the hundred years during which the Lunenburg County Home operated also saw the gradual transition from provincial poor asylums to county poor farms and, eventually, the first nursing homes for the elderly in the 1930s and 1940s. By the 1960s and 70s, most mentally ill or disabled residents had been moved to specialized facilities that had by then replaced the single County Home model.
In October 1980, most of the buildings of the Lunenburg County Home complex were demolished—though the barn and the main brick building still stand and are now used for MARC operations—and the last remaining residents were transferred to LaHave Manor, a newly-opened nursing home (which was, until 2024, Riverview Enhanced Living, and is now Balsam Care).
Legendary Lunenburg County genealogist Betty Rhodenizer has always known about this history, because her father worked at the Lunenburg County Home, and she knew people who were living there. Her friend Yvonne Rafuse, on the other hand, discovered the cemetery by accident when she was walking on the trails in the area during the COVID-19 restrictions. Yvonne was shocked to see the graves marked only by numbers and reached out to Betty to research who was buried at Hillside Cemetery.
In 2019, the Municipality of the District of Lunenburg (MODL) placed a plaque and an interpretive sign at the site—imprecisely referring to the institution as the Lunenburg Municipal Hospital—but without mentioning the names of any of the people buried at the cemetery. This did not sit well with Betty and Yvonne: it was as if the stigma that had been attached to institutionalization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had not gone away and still stood in the way of proper commemoration.
Numbered gravestones like these are generally only found at prisons and former asylums. While some people, such as elderly people with dementia, may have had very supportive families and received the specialized professional care they needed and that their families would not have been able to provide at home, others ended up in the Home because of the stigma associated with mental illness or disability.
Betty and Yvonne did not accept that the dead of the County Home should be forgotten. The staff generally maintained meticulous records: the first death was recorded almost as soon as the home opened in the late 1880s and the last in 1966, and over two hundred people died at the Home, though there are only one hundred and seventy stones in the cemetery, as some death records do not clearly note the gravestone number, and some families buried their relatives in family plots in community cemeteries.
In January 2024, Betty and Yvonne presented their four years of research to Council and requested that MODL erect a new memorial at the site that would collectively list the names of people who passed away at the Home. This would be similar to fishermen’s memorials, or the memorial to the Foreign Protestants in Lunenburg (for which Betty also did the research).
The Council, led by former mayor Carolyn Bolivar-Getson, refused, and repeated the earlier recommendation that “names of individuals not be posted for privacy reasons.” The Council argued that those descendants who want to, can place individual gravestones at the cemetery.
It is not always possible to say with certainty who is buried under which number, and, of course, those families that were unwilling to recognize their mentally ill or disabled relatives decades ago may not show more understanding today. This would continue to erase the memory of some of the most vulnerable people in Lunenburg County.
Since then, and with a new Council, MODL has awarded a grant to the South Shore Genealogical Society—of which Betty was the first President, and which she co-founded in 1979—to go over Betty and Yvonne’s research in order to update the existing signage. Even though to our knowledge, no one has complained about their ancestors possibly being commemorated on the future memorial, there are currently no plans to include the names of the people who lived and died at the Lunenburg County Home.
Death records for the Lunenburg County Home are available to search at the South Shore Genealogical Society, located in the Lunenburg Academy.
Special thanks to Betty Rhodenizer and Yvonne Rafuse.
Further Reading
Cheryl DesRoches, “For Them but Never Really Theirs: Finding a Place for the ‘Aged’ Within State-Funded Institutions in Nineteenth-Century Nova Scotia,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 20, no. 1 (2009): 57-83.
Judith Fingard and John Rutherford, Protect, Befriend, Respect: Nova Scotia’s Mental Health Movement, 1908-2008 (Fernwood, 2008).
Judith Fingard, The Dark Side of Life in Victorian Halifax (Pottersfield Press, 1991).
Allan E. Marble, Surgeons, Smallpox and the Poor: A History of Medicine and Social Conditions in Nova Scotia, 1749–1799 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993).
Allan E. Marble, Physicians, Pestilence, and the Poor: A History of Medicine and Social Conditions in Nova Scotia, 1800-1867 (Trafford Press, 2006).
Senior Scribes of Nova Scotia, Poverty, Poorhouses, and Private Philanthropy (Communications Nova Scotia, 1996).
Brenda Thompson, A Wholesome Horror: Poor Houses in Nova Scotia (SSP Publications, 2017).
Jay Lalonde is a local resident and a historian.
