A brief history lesson...........................

Meanwhile, the times only grew harder.  In Boston at midcentury, the rich grew richer and the poor grew poorer.  Never before in New England had such inequality of wealth been known.  The French and Indian War had ended in 1763, leaving in its wake a crippling depression.  Massachusetts had sent more men to that war than all the other colonies put together.  One in three men of age in Massachusetts went to fight.  Boston was a city of widows and orphans.
      The poor roamed the streets and huddled in doorways.  A wooden almshouse had been built before 1661, destroyed by fire in 1682, and replaced by a brick almshouse, built near the Common in 1686.  A brick workhouse, also run by the Overseers of the Poor, was erected in 1739, next door to the prison that housed, mainly, debtors.  The Society for Encouraging Industry and Employing the Poor built the Manufactory House in 1754.  At midcentury, the number of admissions soared, from an average of 93 a year between 1759 and 1763 to 144 between 1763 and 1769.  Only the size of the building stopped the number from rising higher.  At capacity, some 300 people lived in the almshouse every year;  600 more received poor relief at home.  Hundreds more, refugees, were warned out of town, their names recorded in the city's Warning Out Book, where the number of names grew from an average of 63 per year between 1745 and 1752, to 100 between 1753 and 1764, to 450 between 1765 and 1774.  The ranks of the poor swelled.
-Jill LePore,   Book of Ages:  The Life and Opinons of Jane Franklin