Eastern Shore museum boasts rare almshouse

MACHIPONGO -- One of the nation's best and last almshouses for blacks is still standing on the Eastern Shore, and federal funding has been secured to restore the wooden building as a museum.

The Barrier Islands Center Museum will operate the 29-foot-by-78-foot museum next to a mansion that served as a charity center for poor whites in the area.

Executive Director Laura Vaughan said a Virginia Transportation Enhancement Funding grant worth $289,000 already has paid for a new slate roof and evaluations by an engineering firm to analyze foundation issues.

"We hope to have it open sometime next year," Vaughan said. "One of the rooms will be dedicated to be an authentic exhibit of the African-American history and experience here."

Museum tour director Jerry Doughty said: "It was built in 1910 and has 10 rooms and a large common room. It replaced a 'less nice' facility for the African-American poor. There was free black population in [Northampton County], and there were some who lived in the almshouse."

The dirt-floored building had room for 11 people to live and it was one of only two black almshouses. The other house was at Fisher's Corner in Accomack County.

In 1804, Doughty said, the county opened a white almshouse, which burned in the 1840s and was replaced. That house was replaced in the 1890s with the current mansion off U.S. 13 on several acres.

"In the main building, the poor lived on the second floor in 13 rooms. The poorhouse manager or superintendent who oversaw both almshouses used the first floor as his home. Both almshouses also had black and white children placed here during its 150-year operation," Doughty said.

"A lot of people, black and white, who came here never left. There's a potter's field cemetery along the edge of the woods. Years ago, some of the unmarked and caved-in graves were adjacent to a pigpen," Doughty said. "There was an attempt to close the almshouse in 1930, but it didn't close until 1952."

The Franklin Gibb family bought the houses and property at the U.S. 13 site before selling it to the Barrier Islands Center and its 1,500 members in 1998.

"We have not been able to find anyone who lived here by the time the almshouse closed in 1952," Doughty said. "We have many in the community who recall visiting people that were housed here. There was a bench on the side of the road where people from here waited to be picked up by farmers during harvest time.

"Others had seamstress work for women or household jobs. Toward the last, the residents were just a few elderly people here, apparently treated very kindly."

Vaughan said the black and white almshouses and the quarter-kitchen on the site are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

"I have been told this is the best extant example of an almshouse farm left in the country," she said. "We may have one of the nation's last black almshouses."

That's why Vaughan said they're planning to host large socials with bigger crowds than the almshouse was designed to hold. But the state and federal grant will pay for experts to analyze the building's underpinnings and make sure it can support the extra weight.

"The Barrier Islands Center and the history it exhibits is unique to this area. But the almshouse farm is a concept that people, for example, from Kansas, can identify with because after the Revolution every county had a county home or almshouse, which was a social remedy concept that people can relate to," Vaughan said.