Letter from the NEW OWNERS !!!     December 2002

From the owners of the Clarion poor farm.

The Clarion poor farm was built in 1898 and was an 800 acre working farm for the poor and outcast. This farm was totally self sufficient., everyone on the farm had some kind of job.

In you happen to be in a wheelchair you might help inside by peeling potatoes or doing anything you were capable of doing. Other then raising chickens and pigs this farm had a full running dairy which produced milk, cheese and meat. Fruit trees and vegetable gardens were also raised for food. Some of this food products would be used to barter for other goods that the farm needed. And this would be done mostly in the local community.

The building is built from brick, in fact the walls have three rows of brick making up the walls. The three rows gives the building its thermal values as in the winter, the inside row of bricks will heat from your heat source "Fire place" and keep the heat within the first row. The second row of bricks acts as a barrier between the inside bricks and the out side bricks. And in the summer time the out side bricks will heat up leaving the inside bricks nice and cool. Don’t need AC. The inside will be 10 to 15* cooler then the outside temps. All the floors are cast concrete 1 ft thick with big steel I-beams every 15 feet. The place is built like Fort knox.

In the old red photo you can make out where the main house and the right wing come together on the roof you can see that, in 1898 that they had installed skylights for natural light. This I did not know in till I was under the left wing in the assess tunnel that leads under the main left wing and found this old five pane window unit. At the time I thought it might have went to a porch roof. But the more I looked at it, I thought to myself that this must be a skylight! The skylight is made of copper and has leaded glass in a zig zag design in it. I would like to have them reinstalled. But that’s another day.

The main house in front was the superintendents home. It has three living rooms on the first floor. Three bedrooms on the second floor with an bathroom and a reading room. Each room in the house has its own fire place. Sometime in the early 1900’s a third story was added to the main house adding four more bedrooms to the main house .The left wing was the women’s side and the right wing was the men’s side. Your right no hankey pankey here. There’s a big kitchen in the back not shown in the old photos. With a big walk-in pantry. It also has what I believe to be four office rooms and one bathroom also in the back.

We still have a lot of research to do and finding new things about this place. And theirs so much more to tell, but that will be in the next update.

We plan to register are place as an Historical Institution with the Federal park service.

God Bless all of you!