Tag: Erie County Almshouse

The Erie County Almshouse: now UB’s Hayes Hall

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

The 1880 map of the City of Buffalo loses its way as it gets to the most northern reaches of Buffalo, so it’s a bit difficult to tell which, if any, of the drawings represent the Erie County Almshouse, but the institution was a landmark on what was then the rural northern border of the City of Buffalo.

Today, the august limestone building that was built as the “Insane Department” of the county poor house is now UB’s Hayes Hall. Hayes Hall was famously taken over in March 1969 by students protesting the Vietnam War. It was also the site of marches and protests during the much larger and widespread student protests in 1970.

The Erie County Hospital, 1896.

Next door is Wende Hall, which was built in 1885 as the maternity ward for what had become the Erie County Hospital.

In 2012, work to replace sewer lines on the South Campus had to wait while another, more personal excavation took place first. UB archaeologists and students removed  crumbling coffins, interred more than a century ago, that held the remains of more than 300 men, women and children who died at the almshouse between 1850 and 1913.
Some still had with them remnants of their impoverished lives – shreds of clothing, rosaries and crosses, and deteriorating books and newspapers, most of them in German and French.