Workhouse

Royal instructions to New York's governors in the 1690s called for public workhouses to employ the poor. Maine law later let towns build workhouses for paupers and for able-bodied people who would not work, lived as vagrants or wasted their earnings. A Massachusetts committee in 1821 favored almshouses run as workhouses.

By the late 1800s, people convicted of drinking or loitering were usually sent to a workhouse or house of correction, while the almshouse held mostly the elderly and sick.