The leprosy asylum at Almora was founded by Sir Henry Ramsay, who was stationed there in 1835 and returned in 1840 as a civil officer in Kumauru. It was handed over to the London Missionary Society (LMS) in 1851, and was supported by The Mission to Lepers (later The Leprosy Mission).
The mission separated healthy children from parents infected with leprosy and cared for them in the orphanage. The mission also had a women’s hospital, run by a woman doctor. In the first half of the twentieth century the LMS withdrew from a significant part of its work in North India, transferring the hospital at Almora to the Methodist Episcopal Church of America in 1925.
As of 2015, TLM’s home at Almora, called Snehalaya (a Hindi term meaning ‘a house of love’) remained open as a home for elderly people affected by leprosy who have been abandoned by their families because of leprosy. It housed 26 residents with an average age of 60 and older.