“Bold Bad Girls in a First-Class Institution”: A Microhistorical Account of the 1893 Inquiry into Abuse at the Waterloo County Poorhouse

Abstract

The study of Poorhouse is a study of power. This article presents a microhistorical account of the 1893 investigation into allegations of abuse at the Waterloo County House of Industry and Refuge (1869-1951), the first municipally operated poorhouse in Canada. The poorhouse offered shelter, food, clean clothes, and medical care to people who had few alternatives during a time before broader social welfare protections. Drawing from administrative archives, newspaper coverage, and public records, we reconstruct the inquiry and contextualize it within broader patterns of institutional governance, carceral care, and epistemic injustice. Through a critical disability and social work lens, we explore how the institutional logics of discipline, containment, and moral judgment shaped the lives and deaths of residents, most of whom were destitute due to lack of protections for people with disability, illness, aging, mental health and substance use challenges, parental loss, or lone motherhood. The public reports of the inquiry offer a rare glimpse into the perspectives of residents and servants from the poorhouse, whose voices are mostly absent from the decades of poorhouse archives. The result of the investigation led to modest administrative reforms and left the institutional model intact. By centring resident experiences, highlighting local community advocacy, foregrounding moments of resistance and testimony, and critically engaging with the silences and biases of the archive, this article offers a counter-narrative to institutional histories that privilege administrative perspectives, illuminating how a carceral approach has been embedded in Canada’s social welfare systems from inception.