I have placed a cache here to replace a cache that had been originally placed here a while ago. I thought the history to the original cache was well worth remembering.
If you take a drive from Lurgan Town centre along Union Street and onto the Tandragee Road, as you pass through the traffic lights at Lurgan Hospital you will notice a mural on the flats in Russell Drive immediately on your left. This mural was painted in 2006 by some of the local residents in partnership with Craigavon & Banbridge Community HSS Trust, and with the help of the artist Caroline Jeffrey, in memory of the many people who lived, worked and died in Lurgan Work House.
Lurgan Work House was built in 1840 and initially could accommodate 800 inmates. The first of these poor unfortunates were admitted on the 22nd February 1841. (Although work houses were never prisons their occupants were referred to as inmates.)
In 1929, the workhouse became Lurgan and Portadown District Hospital, and later Lurgan Hospital. Much of the original buildings have now been demolished although the main and chapel blocks survive, with parts of the entrance block incorporated into the present hospital frontage.
People ended up in the workhouse for a variety of reasons. Usually, it was because they were too poor, old or ill to support themselves. This was often due to lack of work or no family to support them as they grew older. Umarried mothers also often found themselves with no alternative but to enter the workhouse.
During the famine in the mid-1840s, accommodation, both temporary and permanent was erected to house an additional 1200 inmates. A fever hospital was also built with the dead being buried in an adjacent graveyard near to the well that supplied the workhouse water.
Entry to the workhouse was often voluntary but you will appreciate it was a last resort and a painful decision to make. Families would have been split up as there was separate male and female accommodation. Many people died inside the workhouse.
So, when driving along this road, take note of the building, Lurgan Hospital, and the mural across the road and spare a thought for those who had to make that difficult decision to enter the workhouse and those who died within its stonewalls.