Pennsylvania Memorial Home
Brookville, Jefferson County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Established in 1890 by Kate Scott and Annie Wittenmyer of the Woman's Relief Corps, an advocate for Civil War veterans. It was the first home in the nation to accept not only former soldiers, but also their wives, children, widows, and orphans.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
A generation after the Civil War, the men who had served the Union were aging, and their families often had nowhere to turn. In 1890 Kate Scott and Annie Wittenmyer of the Woman's Relief Corps founded a home in Brookville that broke new ground: it took in not only veterans but also their wives, children, widows, and orphans. It is remembered as the first such home in the nation to care for whole families.
Why it matters
The home reflects how women organized to answer the long aftermath of the Civil War, redefining veterans' care to embrace the families who had sacrificed alongside the soldiers.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
By 1890, the Civil War had been over for a quarter century, but its cost was still being paid in kitchens and parlors across the North. The young men who had marched off in the early 1860s were now approaching old age. Wounds that had healed badly, lungs damaged by camp disease, and the simple arithmetic of aging left many Union veterans unable to support themselves.
Pennsylvania had sent enormous numbers of men into that war, and it carried the aftermath for decades. Small towns like Brookville, tucked into the wooded hills of Jefferson County, were full of families whose lives had been reshaped by service — and by the absence, injury, or early death of the men who had served.
This was also the era of a great flowering of American voluntary organizations, especially among women. Reform, relief, and charity work gave women a public role and a measure of organized power at a time when they could not yet vote. It was into that current that the founders of this home stepped.
People & events
The home was the work of Kate Scott and Annie Wittenmyer, both connected to the Woman's Relief Corps, an organization devoted to supporting Civil War veterans and their cause. Annie Wittenmyer had built a national reputation during and after the war as an organizer of relief efforts, and she brought that experience to bear here.
What they created in 1890 broke with the usual pattern of veterans' homes. Most such institutions took in the old soldier alone. This home opened its doors to the whole family — not only former soldiers, but their wives, children, widows, and orphans.
That choice reflected a clear-eyed understanding of how war's cost is actually carried. A soldier's service did not fall on him alone; it fell on the household. By caring for families together rather than splitting them apart, the founders answered a need the more conventional institutions had left unmet.
Its place in the American story
Remembered as the first home in the nation to take in veterans' families alongside the veterans themselves, this Brookville institution marks a genuine shift in how America thought about the debt it owed those who served. It widened the definition of who deserved care.
It also stands as evidence of what organized women could accomplish a generation before they won the vote. Working through the Woman's Relief Corps, they identified a gap in the country's care for its veterans and built an institution to fill it — a reminder that much of the era's social welfare was created not by government but by determined volunteers.
The home's model — keeping families intact rather than treating the veteran in isolation — anticipated ideas about family-centered care that would take the wider world many more decades to embrace.
If you visit
Brookville rewards the traveler who slows down. It's a small Pennsylvania town with a well-kept historic character, set among the rolling, wooded country of Jefferson County, and the marker here invites you to think about the long tail of a war most visitors associate only with its famous battles.
Standing at the site, picture not just aging soldiers but the wives, widows, and children who came with them — an entire community of people whose lives had been bent by the war and who found a place here when they had nowhere else to turn.
If you're planning a route through western Pennsylvania's small towns, this makes a thoughtful stop. It pairs the drama of the Civil War with its quieter, human aftermath, and it puts a spotlight on the women whose organizing made this place possible.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Kate Scott
- · Annie Wittenmyer
Themes & tags
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