The Home to Be a Home Again

Gossips learned today that the former Home for the Aged at 620 Union Street has new owners: John Knott and John Fondas. Knott told Gossips earlier this afternoon that they had closed on the house today.

Knott and Fondas plan to return the house to a private residence--what it was built to be in 1835 but hasn't been for 119 years. Before it became the Home for the Aged in 1895, the house was the residence of Robert and Sarah McKinstry. Sarah McKinstry founded the Orphans' Asylum, originally located at Seventh and States streets. After their deaths, Augustus McKinstry, Robert's nephew and heir, sold the house to the Home for the Aged.