Nearly 300,000 gallons of water from a burst pipe damaged the interior of the Will Carleton Poorhouse, according to Darin Sheffer, Hillsdale Historical Society vice president and curator of the poorhouse.

A pipe under the kitchen sink burst during the stretch of cold weather Hillsdale experienced at the end of January. Water leaked into the kitchen building for about the past two weeks, according to a Hillsdale Historical Society post on Facebook.

JoAnne Miller, a Hillsdale Historical Society board member, said she discovered the leak when she went to turn up the heat in the poorhouse for a board meeting.

“As soon as I opened the door, it sounded like a waterfall,” Miller said. “Obviously, what I assume is that we’ve got a water leak. I went down to the basement, and there it was, up to my ankles.”

Water entered the basement and crawl space underneath the kitchen and seeped into the foundation of the building. As the snow melted, a sinkhole was also found, according to Sheffer.

“There’s a sinkhole on the south side of the kitchen foundation,” Sheffer said. “We’re assuming the majority of that 279,000 gallons went under the kitchen foundation and out that south wall. There is some structural damage. We’re not sure of the extent yet until the ground warms and the severity of the sinkhole is known.”

Sheffer said he has been on the historical society board for 23 years, and the poorhouse has never shut off its water during the winter.

“We’ve always kept it on,” Sheffer said. “But this year was an especially severe cold snap. It’s very rare that we have weeks of zero degrees or even lower. I think it was just a test of it and unfortunately, we had a failure.”

The poorhouse formerly housed Hillsdale’s impoverished population and is named after Hillsdale alumnus and poet, Will Carleton. It was donated to the historical society in 1987. The water damage should not disrupt the poorhouse’s next event, which is a car show scheduled for June, according to Sheffer.

The historical society used the basement of the poorhouse, one of the areas that filled with water, to store some of its historic items, according to Miller.

“We didn’t have a horrible loss,” Miller said. “We lost some priceless things that are probably worth zero, but they’re priceless because they come from the past, and we can’t replace them.”