Editor’s note: Mark Bushnell is a Vermont journalist and historian. He is the author of “Hidden History of Vermont” and “It Happened in Vermont.”
It’s an odd photograph. The people, thrown together by happenstance and bad luck, gather beside a farmhouse they don’t own. Four women stand formally in a line, hands clasped at their waists. Other women, most of them younger, stand on the porch above, keeping their children focused on the camera. Men mostly inhabit the fringes of the photo, sitting in pairs and standing alone.
This is the face of poverty in Vermont as it appeared at the turn of the last century. These are the residents of the Sheldon Poor Farm in the year 1912. If they are like other poor farm residents, many of them will live out most of their days on this property. Those who can, will work. Those who are too infirm will spend their days wandering the grounds or talking or reading the castoff books and magazines that have collected in the farmhouse.
Poor farms had been a fixture on the Vermont landscape for a century when the photo was taken. They would remain a fixture for more than another half century, until the last poor farm – this one, in fact – closed in 1968. Today, the only reminder of them is the many Poor Farm Roads that still dot the state.
Poor farms started almost as soon as Vermont did. In 1797, the Legislature of the young state passed a law requiring that “every town and place in this state, shall relieve, support and maintain their own poor.” The law ordered overseers of the poor to care for any “poor, lame, blind, sick and other inhabitants” who were not able to maintain themselves.
The idea that towns should care for their own was nothing new. New England colonies had operated on that principle. They had imported the idea from England, where the practice had been put into statute as part of the Elizabethan Poor Laws during the early 1600s.
The Vermont law caused strife between communities. The problem was the part of the law that required towns to keep their poor inhabitants from “strolling into any other town or place.” In reaction, towns began to “warn out” new arrivals. These warnings served to label these people as new arrivals who were not the town’s responsibility. Towns were willing to care for “their own,” as long as they could limit who fit that definition.
Towns contracted out the work of caring for their poorest residents. Poor individuals or families were essentially put up for bid each year. The town would assign these unfortunates to the care of whomever promised to care for them for the lowest fee.
This system, however, proved inadequate in the face of the economic troubles that rocked Vermont and the rest of the nation. Currency was in short supply during the state’s early days, making it difficult for borrowers to repay loans to lenders who would not barter. On top of that, the United States suffered a series of economic panics and depressions triggered by wild land speculation and disputes over the national banking system. Vermont communities suddenly needed to find a way to care for large numbers of poor people. They hit on the idea of poor farms.
Burlington opened its first poor house in 1816, and later its own poor farm. Middlebury established a poor house in 1822 and three years later purchased land for a poor farm. In 1834, St. Albans, Swanton, Sheldon and Fairfield pooled their resources to buy the 150-acre parcel that became the Sheldon Poor Farm and hired a farming couple to run the place. Soon most Vermont communities had established their own poor farms.
If depressions and panics set off the first series of poor farms, another series sprang up during the 1840s and ’50s in order to handle the influx of destitute Irish immigrants fleeing the potato famine in their country.
Poor farms housed two kinds of residents: permanent and transient. The transient population consisted largely of able-bodied people who were in a temporary financial crisis. Often they would live at the farm for a winter, then leave in the spring in hopes of finding better prospects. (During the severe economic disruptions of the 1870s, Burlington was overwhelmed with transients and took to housing them in the jail.)
The permanent residents were those who were old or infirm, or had physical disabilities or mental illness. In the days before nursing homes and psychological institutes, when families couldn’t care for these people, the only solution was the poor farm. In 1850, the state had 1,878 people in poor farms and poor houses. Of these, nearly two-thirds were classified as disabled in some way – 140 were blind, 148 were either “deaf or dumb,” 299 were termed “idiots” and 560 were physically injured. The remainder were presumably either elderly or able-bodied and unemployed.
The presence of people with undiagnosed mental illness, and the way they were treated, had a profound impact on life on the state’s poor farms. A visitor to Hartford’s poor farm during the mid-1800s described the appearance of three residents: “These men were raving crazy most of the time, and there, caged up like wild beasts in narrow filthy cells, the writer often saw them, and viewing their scanty, ragged attire, their pallets of straw, and their pitiable condition, was impressed that the inhuman treatment to which they were subjected, was sufficient of itself to make lunatics of all men.”
Poor farm residents were usually called “inmates.” If the word implied guilt, it was no accident. Most poor people were regarded as deserving their condition. Exceptions were made for the “worthy poor,” who were physically unfit for labor.
So residents were often treated much like prisoners. The 1797 poor-relief law allowed overseers to whip inmates for misbehaving. Later, whipping was replaced by a form of solitary confinement in the small “pest house” on the property. The term presumably comes from the French word “la peste,” meaning “the plague,” since these shacks were originally built to quarantine residents who contracted smallpox. At some poor farms, overseers would withhold food from misbehaving residents.
Overseers were encouraged to set a moral tone at the farm. The sexes were strictly segregated when they slept and during meals, and residents were encouraged to attend church services. If they didn’t go to church, they were at least expected to observe the Sabbath quietly.
Since poor farms were local solutions, conditions varied widely between them. Much depended on the character of the overseer. At their worst, overseers could seem like cruel characters straight out of Dickens. The late Andrew E. Nuquist, who studied poor farms while a professor at the University of Vermont, wrote during the 1960s that the “prime requirement for the office is the ability to be ‘hard-boiled’” with those who needed help. Nuquist said he had once overheard an overseer of the poor say that “$5 a week was enough relief to keep a family with five children, and was a bit boastful of the fact that he had made such an arrangement with the (family’s) somewhat feebleminded father. The overseer had originally planned on giving him $8 a week, but had been able to ‘save’ the town $3 a week!”
At their best, overseers could seem like guardian angels. During the early 1900s, Barre City had a kindly overseer, who willed his house to the city to serve as a home for the poor.
Poor farms began to close in the early 1900s as people began to trust the farms’ functions to specialized organizations, institutions and government agencies. The American Red Cross and the Salvation Army began providing assistance. Women, particularly those raising families, found help from the recently founded Elizabeth Lund Home for unwed mothers and the new State Department of Public Welfare. Other state agencies started caring for those with mental and physical illness. As farms became the solution for only those who didn’t qualify for other aid, their numbers shrank.
The Great Depression of the 1930s only accelerated the federal funding of relief organizations. In response, poor farms began to close across the state. Hartland closed its poor farm in 1938. Others soon followed suit: Stowe (1948), Brattleboro (1951), Bennington (1953), Montpelier (1956), St. Johnsbury (1958), Burlington (1958), Middlebury (1959) and Rutland (1966).
Eventually, the Legislature decided to end the last remnants of the state’s poor farm system. In 1967, it passed the Social Welfare Act, which removed the towns’ responsibility to care for the poor and with it their right to run poor farms.
The move was intended to remove what was seen by many as an embarrassingly antiquated system. In the years since its demise, however, the poor farm has found new supporters. Some Vermont lawmakers have gone so far as to propose reinstating the system. If the poor farm may never live again, one idea won’t die: that at some level we should take care of our own.