Donnie Maughmer was happy.

After five strokes and a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, the 54-year-old former contractor had finally found friends, family and somewhere that he felt safe — a home.

On July 14, everything changed.

That was the day the Cass County commissioners met privately with the residents of the Cass County Home to tell them the home would be closed at the end of August. The residents would have to find somewhere else to live.

“We were told to get out of our home,” Maughmer said in an interview last week. “People were just devastated. Several residents were crying and trying to accept the situation. I’m still trying to accept it.”

But the center — a home for people with some assets but no place to live — was losing money, the commissioners told the remaining residents, huddled together in the spacious first-floor living room of the place they called home. Interest was dwindling, the commissioners said; the old building was deteriorating.

The residents tried unsuccessfully to argue, countering with a single point: They were happy.

The building wasn’t perfect, they said, but it wasn’t in any worse shape than five years ago. A sizable group of residents remained, and as many as five more people wanted to move in, Maughmer said. But the commissioners had instructed administrators not to let anybody else in.

“It was all about money and the budget,” Maughmer said.

The home was losing money, he acknowledged, but that had never been a problem before.

“County homes weren’t made to make money,” said former administrator Mary Jo Jacko, who ran the home from 1983 to 2003. “That wasn’t what they were for.”

In interviews last week, the commissioners each said they understood the idea of the county home, but it was no longer needed due to similar services available elsewhere.

“The county home is an outdated thing because of the care provided by Medicaid and Medicare,” said Dave Arnold, calling the decision to close the home the toughest he’s made in his two years as commissioner. “The service outlived itself.”

Over the past few weeks, the 10 remaining residents have found new places to live — nursing homes, group homes and county homes in other counties — and the staffers, mostly women in their 50s, have started looking for new jobs.

At the beginning of last week, three residents and two staffers remained at the home. One resident left on Wednesday, another on Thursday, and the last one departed on Friday.

Today, the home will shut down for good.

Big happy family

To understand the meaning of the ending, you have to understand the beginning, residents said.

It started in 1846, when the county board established the home, then called the Poor House, according to a half-page excerpt in John Powell’s Cass County History. Written in 1913, it’s the only book in the Cass Historical Society to mention the home.

Established at Woodlawn Acres — a large tract of land on the outskirts of town, near where the 4-H fairgrounds are today — the facility was a residence for the homeless of the county. It was self-sufficient; the 40 residents worked the land for food, earning the building the secondary title of the Poor Farm.

The County Home of today looked little like the original version.

At the new home, on Logansport’s Pleasant Hill, it was much less of a farm and much more of a group center. Instead of housing the community’s poor, it mostly served as a residence for retired people unable to live on their own or in a nursing home.

The average occupancy was 18, said the home’s final administrator, 62-year-old Stan Grimes, who is now unemployed. The residents paid what they could, usually about $900 per month, he said. They went to sessions at Four-County Counseling, in addition to making crafts, playing board games and reading.

There were also routine visits by church groups and other organizations, he said.

“Every other month, Captain Crunch would come in and we would have a dance,” Grimes said, referring to the local disc jockey. “The residents loved that. It was a karaoke kind of thing, and they all enjoyed getting up there and singing.”

“It was a nice place to live,” said Maughmer, who lived in the home for three years. “We were quite content. We were happy — one big happy family.”

Slow decline

Those who have followed the history of the county home said the closing was the unsurprising bottom of a slippery slope of decisions and circumstances.

It started in 2003 when the home left its 150-year site at Woodlawn Acres to go to the building on Pleasant Hill, Jacko said.

The move was made to allow the Family Opportunity Center to relocate at Woodlawn Acres, said 68-year-old Julian Ridlen, a former Cass Circuit judge who advocated the move. The troubled juveniles had a greater need for the vast land area, he said. Meanwhile, the county home residents would be closer to the hospital and other town resources.

“It was a win-win,” Ridlen said.

But Jacko said it was a big loss for the county home.

“I went to the new home once or twice,” said Jacko, who retired after the move due to health reasons. “But it depressed me to see the difference. I’ll just remember it the way it was.”

The move took away the identity of the home, Arnold said.

The building on Pleasant Hill, formerly the Cass Children’s Home, was already in poor condition by the time the County Home moved in, residents said.

Four years later, in May 2007, the county contracted with the Four-County Counseling Center to run the home. Grimes, a former Four-County social worker, was brought in to be the administrator.

The county and the counseling center never saw eye to eye, Grimes said. The county had a specific idea of who they wanted for the home — longtime Cass County residents who were “down on their luck.” The center, on the other hand, saw the home as another location to place patients, he said. The center often sent over people with behavioral problems, who had to be sent away, he said.

“There was really a lack of capable management,” Maughmer said.

The population at the home began to diminish.

In April, with a tight budget year approaching, the commissioners started informally looking into the cost-effectiveness of the home. By May, they told Grimes that “it wasn’t looking good,” the former administrator said.

On June 7, a guest column by Grimes appeared in the Pharos-Tribune. The column, “Cass County Home: Seeking those in need” prompted several people to contact Grimes about becoming residents, he said. But the commissioners, unhappy with the column, made it clear that no new residents would be accepted until their research was complete, Grimes said.

Rumors of impending closure swirled. The residents became restless, said home employee Patti Armstrong, 61. They stopped eating and sleeping.

Later in June, Four County was told to expect the closure of the home, said Dick Farrer, the center’s director of marketing.

At the commissioner’s meeting on July 7, Arnold officially announced that he would be conducting a 90-day feasibility study of the home.

The study pointed to a home with a mission different than the original goal, according to Arnold’s report. It pointed to a run-down building, costing the county thousands of dollars to provide facilities to five staffers and 12 residents — several of whom came from out of the county — in an era where nursing homes and group homes have dispatched many county homes across the state.

But the commissioners had made up their mind before the study was conducted, Maughmer and Grimes said.

Amid the feeling of the inevitable closure, Four County sent the commissioners a letter on July 8, announcing they would be terminating their services to the home in a month.

Just days later, the commissioners found themselves standing in the large living room, trying to explain their decision to the stunned residents.

“There were a lot of tears,” Armstrong said. “How would you feel if someone came in and said you were losing your home?”

Looking ahead

While the fate of the county home has been sealed, the future of the building and its inhabitants is uncertain.

With Grimes’ help, the residents have found new homes, Armstrong said. The former “family” has spread out across the area, going into nursing homes, private residences and county homes in other counties.

Although the family has been separated, the individual members are all probably better off, said commissioner Jim Sailors, adding that he “didn’t really know why it’s going to hurt anybody in the community.”

The “parents” of the family, the home’s employees, are now unemployed.

Grimes, Armstrong and 28-year home cook Beverly Reynolds are all about 60 years old — almost old enough to retire, but not able to do so because of concerns about lack of health insurance. So they’re all looking for jobs.

They expected help from the commissioners, who promised to set them up with another county job, Armstrong said. But so far, the only offers have been working in the county jail or at a one-month temporary job, she said. Neither was appealing.

“I never thought us grandmas would be job hunting,” Armstrong said.

A bigger question might be what the commissioners should do with the building on Pleasant Hill.

Although it’s a little run down, there’s no denying its historical significance, the commissioners said. It was believed to be a hospital in the Civil War, and it was a home for orphans and underprivileged children from 1882 to 2003.

Some Logansport residents say they believe the building should be preserved as a historic structure.

“Can you imagine if those walls could talk?” said 53-year-old antiquer Gilliea Cole, describing a recent visit to building. “Walking up the stairs, I felt like I could feel that building tell me to save this building and save this history.”

Parts of the building have already been sold, Cole added. She said she bought a fireplace from the home last November.

Grimes said the sale that Cole attended was a yard sale of “junk furniture.” The money went to help pay for the needs of residents. The building is not being sold off, he said.

Meanwhile, there appears a good chance the building will be sold to an area group home or assisted living agency.

While commissioner Dick Rusk said the county had “no plans” for what to do with the building, county home staff reported that representatives of Peak Community Services Inc. had visited the site at least three times.

Peak is an agency that envisions “a world in which children with developmental disabilities would no longer be shunned by society,” according to its Web site.

A representative from Peak confirmed that the agency was interested in the old county home.

Regardless of what becomes of the building, Maughmer said the community would never forget the county home and the idea behind it.

“It was about giving people a home — people that needed that extra help — but the budget came first,” he said. “I heard that the commissioners just wished the whole place would disappear. Well, it’s not going to disappear in the hearts and minds of the people of this community.”

Brian Rosenthal can be reached at (574) 732-5148, or via e-mail at Brian.Rosenthal@pharostribune.com