Richland County Infirmary

Richland County bought a 160-acre quarter section in 1845 and built a poor house to care for paupers, orphans, the mentally ill and disabled residents. The site grew into a working farm complex of about 200 acres in rolling countryside north of Mansfield. The first residence burned in 1878. The surviving core includes a 1889 pressed-brick laundry and boiler building with polychrome arches and Palladian windows, and a 1925 two-story brick Colonial Revival main building on a Y-shaped plan, arranged so sunlight reaches every room. A 1938 basement barn uses Shawver plank-frame construction. Other resources include a silo, corn crib, machinery sheds, a slaughter house, a root cellar, a pest house, a pump house and an unmarked pauper cemetery. Together they illustrate how a county institution housed and fed its residents, who also did much of the farm and household work. Recent additions, such as a garage, field house, picnic shelter and observation deck, are noncontributing.