Volume 2008 Article 20

2008

Indigent Care in : A Study of Poor Farms and

Martha Doty Freeman

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Cite this Record Freeman, Martha Doty (2008) "Indigent Care in Texas: A Study of Poor Farms and Outdoor Relief," Index of Texas Archaeology: Open Access Gray Literature from the Lone Star State: Vol. 2008, Article 20. https://doi.org/10.21112/ita.2008.1.20 ISSN: 2475-9333 Available at: https://scholarworks.sfasu.edu/ita/vol2008/iss1/20

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Licensing Statement This is a work for hire produced for the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT), which owns all rights, title, and interest in and to all data and other information developed for this project under its contract with the report producer. The report may be cited and brief passages from this publication may be reproduced without permission provided that credit is given to TxDOT and the firm that produced it. Permission to reprint an entire chapter, section, figures or tables must be obtained in advance from the Supervisor of the Archeological Studies Branch, Environmental Affairs Division, Texas Department of Transportation, 125 East 11th Street, Austin, Texas, 78701.

This article is available in Index of Texas Archaeology: Open Access Gray Literature from the Lone Star State: https://scholarworks.sfasu.edu/ita/vol2008/iss1/20 INDIGENT CARE IN TEXAS: a study of poor farms and outdoor relief

by

Martha Doty Freeman

Principal Investigator: Douglas K. Boyd

TECHNICAL REPORTS NO. 79

Prewitt and Associates, Inc. Cultural Resources Services Austin, Texas

ARCHEOLOGICAL STUDIES PROGRAM, REPORT NO. 111

Archeological Studies Program Environmental Affairs Division Texas Department of Transportation Austin, Texas

CSJ No. 0015-14-109

August 2008 INDIGENT CARE IN TEXAS: A STUDY OF POOR FARMS AND OUTDOOR RELIEF

COPYRIGHT © 2008

Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) and Prewitt and Associates, Inc. (PAI)

TxDOT and PAI jointly own all rights, title, and interest in and to all data and other information developed for this project under Contract 577XXSA001, Work Authorization 57704SA001. Brief passages from this publication may be reproduced without permission provided that credit is given to TxDOT and PAI. Permission to reprint an entire chapter, section, figures or tables must be obtained in advance from the Supervisor of the Archeological Studies Program, Environmental Affairs Division, Texas Department of Transportation, 125 East 11th Street, Austin, Texas, 78701.

jointly published by the

Texas Department of Transportation Environmental Affairs Division Archeological Studies Program Scott Pletka, Ph.D., Supervisor, Archeological Studies Program

Archeological Studies Program, Report No. 111 CSJ No. 0015-14-109 Al McGraw, Series Editor

and

Prewitt and Associates, Inc. Cultural Resources Services Austin, Texas PAI Project No. 207020

Technical Reports, Number 79

Printed by Morgan Printing in Austin, Texas

ISBN 1-930788-80-0 Table of Contents

Abstract ...... vi Acknowledgements...... vii PROJECT BACKGROUND AND SCOPE OF WORK...... 1 METHODOLOGY...... 1 HISTORICAL LANGUAGE ASSOCIATED WITH PAUPER CARE...... 2 REVIEW OF CONTEXTUAL LITERATURE ABOUT PAUPER CARE...... 4 PAUPER CARE IN EUROPE AND THE AMERICAS...... 17 PAUPER CARE IN TEXAS...... 30 PAUPER CARE IN BELL COUNTY, TEXAS, 1850s–1969...... 49 CONCLUSIONS...... 56 PRELIMINARY INVENTORY AND ASSESSMENT OF THE 1898–1912 BELL COUNTY POOR FARM...... 58 REFERENCES CITED...... 61

iii List of Figures

1. Numbers of native- and foreign-born paupers supported by counties, 1850...... 31 2. Counties offering monetary support for paupers, 1850...... 32 3. Numbers of native- and foreign-born paupers supported by counties, 1860...... 33 4. Counties offering monetary support for paupers, 1860...... 34 5. Numbers of native- and foreign-born paupers supported by counties, 1870...... 37 6. Counties offering monetary support for paupers or levying a special tax for lunatics and paupers, 1870...... 38 7. Counties with and numbers of paupers and indigents in institutions, poorhouses, and asylums or in private homes, 1880...... 39 8. Counties with poor farms and numbers of paupers, 1887–1888...... 42 9. Counties having a county , city poorhouse, almshouse, or poor farm and numbers of paupers in almshouses, 1890...... 43 10. Counties having a county poorhouse, city poorhouse, almshouse, or pauper farm, 1903–1904...... 45 11. Counties having poor farms or other institutions for housing paupers, 1910...... 46 12. Counties having poor farms or poorhouses, numbers of insane on poor farms, and numbers of feebleminded in jails and on poor farms,1911–1912...... 49 13. Modern aerial photograph showing Interstate Highway 35, the Bell County Pauper Cemetery on Pepper Creek, and the complex of historic buildings and features on the 1898–1912 Bell County Poor Farm property...... 63 14. Map of historic resources located on the 1898–1912 Bell County Poor Farm property west of Interstate Highway 35...... 65

iv list of tables

1. Summary of Texas Department of Transportation work authorizations issued to Prewitt and Associates, Inc., for historical research and archeological investigations pertaining to the Bell County Pauper Cemetery on Pepper Creek (41BL1201) and the 1898–1912 Bell County Poor Farm...... 2 2. Inventory of existing and possible historical resources on the 1898–1912 Bell County Poor Farm property...... 66

 Abstract

Indigent Care in Texas: A Study of Poor Farms and Outdoor Relief was prepared by Prewitt & Associates, Inc., for the Archeological Studies Program, Environmental Affairs Division, Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT), as one of a series of investigations concerning pauper cemeteries and poor farms. The investigations are an outgrowth of planning for road improvements to Interstate Highway 35 between Belton and Temple that has been ongoing since 2002. The purpose of this most recent investigation has been to provide context for properties associated with pauper care in Texas and to present the findings of a preliminary field investigation of one such property in Bell County. The author concluded that indigent care in Bell County occurred most frequently outside of institutions, but that the poor farm model was an important one in the history of pauper care in Texas and the United States. Standing structures and the records associated with poor care in Texas are rare, making the surviving examples of both unusually noteworthy.

vi Acknowledgments

The rarity of physical remains associated with poor farms in Bell County and Texas meant that the authors were particularly dependent on firsthand accounts and individuals who had taken on the subject of pauper care as something of interest. Joy Worley, granddaughter of the owners of the Bell County Poor Farm property, and her husband, Carl, met the principal investigator and the author at the poor farm site and generously spent several hours pointing out site features. Her childhood memories of the property were helpful in locating now-demolished buildings that might have been associated with Bell County pauper care between 1898 and 1912. Her relatives, Charles Ruble of and Joanne Ruble Miller of Centerville, had less-detailed memories of the property in the 1930s and 1940s, but they generously shared what details occurred to them.

Principal investigator Douglas Boyd shared articles, books, correspondence, and online information that he collected in the time between different phases of the project. In particular, the information he received from Patricia Benoit of Temple and Linda Crannell, who has established a website about , included data from local records and obscure publications that were of great assistance in providing a state and nationwide context.

A chance conversation with an acquaintance, Susan Cotton, led to her donation of a 1926 master’s thesis by Mary McKenney Nelson. That thesis, in turn, referenced primary documents in the Legislative Reference Library and Center for American History that appeared in no other scholarly treatments of indigent care in Texas.

Employees of the Bell County Clerk’s office were helpful to a fault, as were librarians at the Belton Public Library and the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor. In Austin, the staffs of the Legislative Reference Library, Texas State Library and Archives Commission, and Center for American History at The University of Texas at Austin filled the same functions, while the librarians at the Perry-Castañeda Library at The University retrieved historic texts that had been sent to storage. Michelle Mears, archivist at the University of North Texas, made portions of a master’s thesis available, and friends at Lopez Garcia, a design and engineering firm in Dallas, went far beyond the author’s requests to try to make a hard-to-find and impossible-to-copy text available. Sandra Hannum provided her usual help in producing illustrations for the report, which editor Elaine Robbins capably produced.

vii viii Project Background of Prewitt and Associates, Inc.; Joy Riley Worley, and Scope of Work the granddaughter of H. R. and Minnie Pearl Smith, who owned the property from 1929 to As part of the continuing historical and 1959; and the author. Mrs. Worley’s husband, archeological investigations of 41BL1201, Carl Worley, also was present. Worley identi- the Bell County Pauper Cemetery on Pepper fied and described numerous features on the Creek, the project historian completed histori- site but, with the exception of a jail structure, cal research and limited field investigations was unable to verify the functions or ages of pertaining to the associated Bell County Poor other buildings. Other individuals interviewed Farm. The goals of the research and investi- included Charles Ruble of San Antonio and gations were: (1) to complete historical narra- Joanne Ruble Miller of Centerville, who were tives about the cemetery and the associated related to Minnie Smith and visited the Smith Bell County Poor Farm at its pre-1913 location; property in the 1930s and 1940s. Neither Ruble (2) to clarify the location and extent of historical (2008) nor Miller (2008) was knowledgeable remains that were or may have been associated about buildings on the property that might with the 1898–1912 Bell County Poor Farm; have been associated with its use as a poor and (3) to compile archival and field research farm. into a historical narrative that considered the Archival research consisted of the comple- relationships among the Pepper Creek Pauper tion of an annotated bibliography and acquisi- Cemetery, the various Bell County poor farms tion of additional contextual information. The and county home, and the broader historical historian focused particularly on acquiring context of the Texas system of poor farms and information from a variety of Internet sites county homes as they relate to national, state, about other poor farms in Texas and from the and local indigent care policies. Texas Historical Commission about poor farms This project was completed for the that had been listed in the National Register Archeological Studies Program, Environmental of Historic Places or designated as Registered Affairs Division, Texas Department of Texas Historical Landmarks. Because Texas Transportation (TxDOT). The author, an inde- was a part of Spain and, later, of Mexico, the pendent consultant, conducted the work for author also collected supplemental information Prewitt and Associates, Inc., under TxDOT about pauper care in European countries rela- Work Authorization No. 57704SA006. This tively unaffected by the Reformation and about project is the eleventh in a series of tasks the traditions of poor care in Latin America, authorized and funded by TxDOT since 2002 Mexico, and Mexican Texas. Late in the project, (Table 1). These studies were initiated because a chance conversation with an individual unre- of planning for road improvements to Interstate lated to the project resulted in the acquisi- Highway 35 between Belton and Temple tion of a previously unknown M.A. thesis that (TxDOT CSJ No. 0015-14-109). This road described poor care in Texas through the 1920s. improvement project is still in the planning The thesis bibliography included references stages, and no final decisions have been made to several early twentieth-century studies of regarding construction details. Consequently, pauper care in Texas that the historian had not the potential impacts of this project on the his- seen cited in any other scholarly works. torical resources in question—which include Completion of the research phase resulted certain structures and features associated with in a review of current scholarship about the the 1898–1912 Bell County Poor Farm west of precedents for pauper care in the United States IH 35 and the Bell County Pauper Cemetery and Latin America. A focus on poor care in on Pepper Creek just east of IH 35––are not Texas included broad studies about legislation, known. the locations of pauper facilities, and public policy governing care of indigent classes, as Methodology well as narrowly focused studies of facilities in Anderson, Bell, Bexar, Bowie, Cass, Collin, Work on the project started with a field Dallas, El Paso, Ellis, Fannin, Galveston, visit to the site of the 1898–1912 Bell County Grayson, Harris, Hill, Hunt, Hutchinson, Poor Farm by principal investigator Doug Boyd Kaufman, Milam, Navarro, Parker, Tarrant,

 he al – – – LR LR 539/550 reprints unnumbered LR LR 539 LR 550 unnumbered unnumbered Cemetery on Pepper Creek (41BL1201) and t Cemetery blic meeting held in Belton on arch historyto define the of the pauper cemetery and identify pauper people cemetery likely and to have been buried there. to search authorization for graves unmarked at the pauper cemetery. resulted in the Work the cemetery. pauper at discovery graves of 97 unmarked 2 and burial features. theunmarked graves at for research search and the pauper cemetery. interested and to relatives information disseminate parties. people likely to have been buried in the pauper relocation cemetery draft a cemetery. Developed plan and sent it to relatives and interested parties cemetery final relocation a for comment. Produced plan. and identity to confirm relatives possible Contact relationship to person likely to have been buried in the pauper cemetery. condition occurred yearssince excavations two before. Made forrecommendations temporary stabilization. March 26, 2003. Interested parties March were to parties invited Interested 2003. 26, participate. Completed project planning a developed and work Completed pauper cemetery the Visited current to assess Combined and printed letter reports printed and on historic Combined research living relatives to identify Conducted of researchrelatives. living Continued to identify Planned public meeting for public meeting pauper cemetery the Planned to Conducted rese Conducted pu in Participated thorizations issued to Prewitt and Associates, Inc., for historic Inc., and Associates, Prewitt to issued thorizations Conducted Work Completed by Prewitt and Associates, Inc. PAI Report No. Year Work 2004 2002 2003 2003 2003 2003 2002–2003 gravesarcheological search for unmarked Conducted 2003 2002 pertaining to the at the Bell County Pauper at the Bell pertaining to the Number PAI Project Number TxDOT WA 57411SA002 203042 57208SA005 202010 57212SA005 203002 57302SA001 203012 57305SA001 203003 57306SA001 203018 – – – Reference Boyd Boyd 2003a Boyd 2003b (draft for public comment); Boyd 2003c (final) Freeman 2002Freeman 57207SA005 202005 Boyd 2003a 57211SA005 2002; Freeman 202010 2003a; Freeman 2003bFreeman 57310SA001Boyd 2004 203040 Table 1. Summary of Texas Department of Transportation work au work of Transportation of Texas Department Table 1. Summary research and archeological investigations Poor Farm 1898–1912 Bell County  unnumbered not yet numbered; unnumbered story of indigent care story of indigent cemetery. In October 2007, In cemetery. of unmarked graves of unmarked and tion of all burial remains in care perpetual a remains tion of burial all Work Completed by Prewitt and Associates, Inc. PAI Report No. The cemetery status was of pauper work on the summarized, including legal issue involved with possible excavation and relocation of unmarked graves.document The offeredrecommendations also for planning cemeterya relocation, including archeological excavations in cemetery. perpetual a reburial define visit history of Texas; site care indigent in and historic research toresources evaluate 1898–1912 associated the with County Poor Bell Farm; development of a cemetery stabilization plan. Prepared a “Cemetery Relocation Plan” document. Plan” Relocation Prepared a “Cemetery Conducted Year Work 2006 2007–2008 research to work includes: This Current project.* search pertaining to the 1898–1912 Bell 1898–1912 to the County poor search pertaining hi farm the and to develop a cemetery stabilization plan was added. was plan stabilization a cemetery to develop Number PAI Project ogical excavation of reloca unmarked graves and Number TxDOT WA 57545SA006 206044 57704SA006 207020 Reference cemetery planstabilization yetnot completed. policies in Texas; and (2) archeol the archeological tasks were deleted and the task Boyd Boyd 2006 This document; Table 1, continued required: original (1) *The work authorization historical re  and Travis Counties. Finally, primary source avoid the public expenses that accompanied materials, consisting largely of census data, housing the indigent in institutions (Wagner provided information about pauper care both 2005). Beginning in the nineteenth century, nationally and in Texas. paupers in poor farm settings were, in effect, The research does not purport to be auctioned off as a group when the facility itself exhaustive. Study of scholarship about the was auctioned off by the county to the highest history of pauper care was limited by the pub- bidder. lications available at The University of Texas Blind: Federal censuses enumerated at Austin, where the Perry-Castañeda Library paupers who were both totally blind and semi- included nineteenth- and twentieth-century blind, but not any individual who could see primary and secondary texts about pauper well enough to read. Blind persons could be care in the United States, Latin America, and self-supporting or partly self-supporting. Those Europe. Collections at the university’s Center who were totally blind were “unable to distin- for American History, the Legislative Reference guish forms or colors; the partially blind [could] Library of Texas, and the Texas State Library distinguish forms or colors, but [could not] see and Archives Commission all had primary and to read, or at least not without such effort as secondary materials that pertained to indigent to making reading practically impossible” (U.S. care in Texas. Bureau of the Census 1880). Like deaf mutes, idiots, and the insane, blind individuals some- Historical Language times became part of the pauper class and, Associated With thus, part of the population of poor homes and Pauper Care pauper farms. Boarding out: By at least the eighteenth Prior to the early twentieth century, century, the old, ill, poor youth, and disabled society at large and public officials interested individuals having a “strong back and weak in policies supporting pauper care developed mind” who could do farm and other work were language that was used to describe and classify boarded out to households who were paid by individuals who were members of the indigent a town or county to take care of the indigent class and to explain the structures of public (Wagner 2005:8). and private care that evolved to meet their Deaf mutes: Census enumerators were needs. Many terms used historically, particu- cautioned to identify within this category only larly those that described various medical and those who could not speak because they could nonmedical conditions that afflicted certain not hear well enough to learn to speak, and to classes of people, sound harsh to twenty-first- differentiate them from semi-mutes and semi- century sensibilities. deaf individuals. Enumerators were told to take However, in the interest of conveying the particular pains to identify those deaf mutes sense, as well as the historical facts, associated who had suffered the condition from birth as with the history of indigent care, the author opposed to those who had become deaf mute has retained much of the language contained at a later age. Pains also were taken to iden- in historical literature that described various tify all deaf mutes within a given community, indigent classes. Some historical terminology a task that was relatively simple because “The is still used in current literature. Other termi- class feeling of the deaf and dumb, arising from nology has been changed to reflect changes in their isolated state, is so great that they seek public and professional attitudes. Terms that each other out for the sake of companionship, appear in the body of the report include the and ordinarily know every deaf-mute for miles following: around” (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1880). Auctioning off the poor: Sometimes, the Homeless children: Children in institu- poor were auctioned off to the lowest bidder, who tions “designed for the care of poor or homeless then used the labor of the individual pauper. In children, or in any poor-house or other asylum turn, the bidder was expected to provide board, for the destitute” were of particular interest nursing care, and clothing; doctor’s bills and to census enumerators. Enumerators were funeral charges were extra. In the eighteenth requested to ask questions about children’s century, auctioning off was seen as a way to “antecedents” that were “designed to bring out

 the proportion of children in institutions who that “extensive residency laws for the purpose belong to the respectable and to the vicious of and other benefits violated the classes severally” (U.S. Bureau of the Census Constitution.” 1880). Occasional or temporary poor: This class Idiots: The word “idiot” had a special was comprised of individuals who were sup- meaning and referred to a person whose mental ported sporadically, often during times of bad facilities were arrested in infancy or childhood, weather or economic distress. Such individu- or a person who had become idiotic as a result als often cycled in and out of institutions and of scarlet fever, measles, meningitis, a blow to usually were physically capable of working. the head, a fall or fright, or some other event. Outdoor relief: Outdoor relief was care Such a person was different from demented provided outside of a community-, county-, or or insane individuals who might display some state-owned facility that required no removal signs of apparent idiocy because their mental from the home and placement in an institution. powers had deteriorated as a result of insan- Often public funds were given to an individual ity. Idiots could be self-supporting, partly self- who continued to live in his own home, or to supporting, or not self-supporting at all. They a family member or acquaintance who then might be maintained or treated in an institu- housed and cared for the pauper. tion at their own expenses, or at the expense of Permanent poor: The permanent poor were a town, county, institution, or state agency. As those who were regularly supported on a long- with deaf mutes, the government in 1880 was term basis at public expense. Typically, these particularly interested in identification of indi- individuals were children or the elderly or were viduals who had been idiots from birth (U.S. physically or mentally afflicted in some way Bureau of the Census 1880). that precluded their working. Indoor relief: Indoor relief was relief pro- vided to an indigent individual in the context of historiography of an institution such as a poorhouse, , contextual literature or poor farm (Wagner 2005:8). about Pauper Care Insane: According to the 1880 census, forms of insanity included “mania, melancholia, Literature about the history and charac- paresis (general paralysis), dementia, epilepsy ter of pauper care and public policy consists of or dipsomania.” Insane persons could have primary and secondary source materials that multiple attacks of insanity, and enumerators are organized geographically from the national were instructed to determine how old the indi- to the local levels and chronologically from vidual was when the first attack occurred, how the Middle Ages through the Reformation, the many attacks he had suffered, and how long American colonial period, and industrializa- the most recent attack had lasted. They also tion and urbanization that occurred during were to describe the ways in which insane indi- the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. viduals were cared for and restrained, whether Additionally, the literature discusses the reli- in an institution or at home (U.S. Bureau of the gious, philosophical, political, and sociologi- Census 1880). cal underpinnings of pauper care that had an Legal settlement: Also known as settle- impact on public and professional perceptions ment, legal settlement was the requirement of the pauper class and resulted in the formu- that an individual seeking assistance from lation of theory and legislation that directly a county be able to prove that he or she had impacted poor care. lived there for a set period of time, the length As early as the 1820s in the eastern United of which was established by the town, county, States, officials responsible for or interested in or state. Some states required that individu- poor care visited almshouses to collect informa- als pay taxes before receiving aid. A few states tion about the buildings that housed paupers had no requirements, and one county would of all types, the policies and laws that governed accept indigent individuals from another their care, and the governmental structure county. According to Wagner (2005:153 n10), associated with each institution (Philadelphia the principle of settlement was not overturned 1827). Perhaps the best- until the 1960s, when the Supreme Court ruled known of these studies was that of John Yates,

 New York Secretary of State, who reviewed the prior to the annexation of Texas by the United laws governing and expenses associated with States were similarly weighted to a particular poor relief in New York, Massachusetts, Rhode point of view. Commentary by the Honorable Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Delaware, William Lowndes Yancey of Alabama, for Pennsylvania, Illinois, Virginia, Vermont, example, pointed out that the “proportion of New Jersey, Maryland, North Carolina, South colored prisoners and paupers to the entire Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. He classified colored population” was larger in Boston, the poor, stating that the permanent poor were New York City, and Philadelphia and progres- those “regularly supported, during the whole sively smaller in Richmond and Charleston. year, at the public expense.” This class included He believed that statistics showed that “bond idiots, lunatics, the blind, extremely aged and and free negroes stand higher, physically, and infirm, lame or those incapable of labor, chil- morally, in the slave, than they do in the free, dren, and men and women who could not earn States” (Yancey 1845:14). Theodore Sedgwick a living. According to Yates, the second class of also presented statistics that showed a lower poor were the occasional, or temporary, poor proportion of dependent classes in the slave- who received relief sporadically, usually in the holding versus the non-slaveholding states. fall or winter. Yates concluded that the great- He concluded, however, that a slave, “for all est number of both classes were found in large intents and purposes” was “but a pauper—fed cities, villages, and towns because of the density by another, clothed…” (Sedgwick 1844:43). of population and their proximity to commer- A last pre–Civil War study by Thomas cial and navigational facilities. He remarked R. Hazard (1851) identified four systems for on the impact of alcohol on individual paupers poor relief: parceling the poor out to the lowest and their families, and he analyzed the pauper bidder, contracting with a committee for their class by sex and place of origin, noting that maintenance, placing them in a town-owned 52 percent were female and 48 percent male, asylum, and providing what was called outdoor and a disproportionate number (27 percent) relief (outside of a community-owned facility) were either aliens or naturalized foreigners. (Hazard 1851:85). While Hazard’s classifica- A very large number (about 40 percent) were tion system focused on Rhode Island paupers, children younger than 14, and Yates introduced it was, in fact, broadly representative of care a theme that became pervasive in literature systems throughout the eastern half of the about : uneducated children would one United States at mid-century. day “form a fruitful nursery for crime.” Finally, Hazard also attempted to identify the Yates touched on laws that pertained to resi- causes of poverty, and he listed a broad range dency as a requirement for receiving care, of situations that included both conditions on the high proportion of paupers in Europe over which an individual theoretically had (10 percent of the total population), and on the some control (disagreements with a husband; virtues of the poorhouse system, which had a intemperance; and insanity due to high temper, history of diminishing “the evils and expenses immorality, impurity, and use of opium), and of pauperism” (Yates 1971:939–1111). those for which an individual might not be The studies of the 1820s were followed responsible (intemperance by others, ill treat- in the 1830s and 1840s by a report by Samuel ment, imbecility, insanity due to heredity, loss Chipman and increasing numbers of comments of an industrious husband, loss of property by members of Congress, who were concerned through fraud, old age, and ill health) (Hazard about the potential annexation of slave states. 1851:10–11, 15, 32). Hazard recognized the Chipman’s study of poorhouses, jails, and other variety and complexity of factors that might public institutions in the Middle Atlantic and result in a condition of pauperism, and he iden- New England states highlighted links among tified tools developed by communities to deal intemperance, poverty, and criminality. While with that heterogeneous population. he described his work as the first to system- Intemperance remained a theme through- atically classify paupers and criminals, his out the nineteenth century, but its identification emphasis on the effects of alcohol overrode all as a cause of pauperism was not without detrac- other explanations for the existence of a pauper tors. G. Thomann (1884:3–5), for example, dis- class (Chipman 1834). Remarks by politicians puted prohibitionists’ arguments that inebriety

 was the condition most responsible for insanity, Based on collected statistics, the census pauperism, and crime. Rather, he pointed to the- office concluded that from greatest to least the ories that the use of new steam manufacturing assigned cases of pauperism in almshouses processes in factories and on farms had “created (where men were in the majority) and benevo- an army of involuntary idlers” and that over- lent institutions (where women were in the production and over-speculation, accompanied majority) were: want of any other home; old by lockouts, strikes, and financial crises, were age and infirmity; being crippled, diseased root causes of pauperism (Thomann 1884:40). (rheumatism, paralysis, epilepsy, and syphilis), He pointed out that many theorists believed deformed, or bedridden; and being a tramp. that abuse of alcohol was “not the cause, but an The exception to the similar lists was the con- effect of poverty.” Thus, “[i]n reality, intemper- dition of lying in, which was more prevalent in ance is quite often the effect; poverty the cause, benevolent institutions (U.S. Department of the and pauperism the ultimate result” (Thomann Interior, Census Office 1896:302, 355). 1884:43). He pointed to Europe, where humani- The growing interest in statistical data tarians were trying to improve living conditions about the poor was reflected in studies of spe- for the poor, and he concluded that, “aside from cific populations, such as that by Mary Roberts physical ailment, and the results of economic Smith, who studied 228 women in the San evils and scant natural resources, indolence Francisco, California, almshouse in 1892–1894 and improvidence are the chief sources of pau- (Smith 1896), and other studies by the federal perism.…” To support his theory, he pointed to government. In 1904, the Bureau of the Census one New York poorhouse where 68 percent of examined paupers in almshouses and focused the indigent males were disabled, 15 percent on an enumeration of poor laws passed by had no work, and 11 percent were intemper- state legislatures. Specifically, the bureau was ate. Of the last class, 53 percent were from interested in the kind and extent of outdoor Ireland and 39 percent from the United States relief, how a person qualified for outdoor relief, (Thomann 1884:40–41, 45, 47). the classes of people who were entitled to aid, While statistics for pauperism were how almshouses were administered and gov- recorded in every U.S. census beginning in 1850, erned, treatment of destitute children, and and the 1880 census provided detailed data extent of state supervision of almshouses (U.S. about the condition of every individual receiv- Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of ing public assistance, the 1890 census was the the Census 1906:41). first to be accompanied by specific studies by In Texas, Dr. M. L. Graves, superinten- the federal government (U.S. Department of dent of the Southwestern Insane Asylum the Interior, Census Office 1895; 1896). These in San Antonio, turned his attention to the studies dealt with paupers who were residents percentages of the insane in Texas as a pro- of almshouses and with inmates of benevolent portion of the general population, critiqued institutions, some portion of whom were “objects the state lunacy laws, analyzed the cases of of charity” or had some connection with the insanity (with special emphasis on heredity), pauper class. The analyses performed on the and concluded that the burden of taxation collected data for both classes sought to answer would become insupportable if the root causes questions about the number of female residents of mental defectiveness were left untreated. who had borne children, the causes of pauper- Touching on a topic that would become widely ism or other dependence, the type of institu- discussed by World War I, Graves lamented the tional support offered, the number of residents lack of consideration given to inappropriate who had relatives in the same institutions, breeding and its inevitable impacts on heredity educational opportunities for inmates younger (Graves 1905:3–16). than 16 years old, the number of illegitimate Six years later, in 1910, the federal gov- children, the number of children born in an ernment again studied the pauper population institution, the number of children with living in almshouses, which it defined as “an institu- parents, the number of children surrendered to tion supported or controlled by town, munici- the institution, foundlings, and the number of pal, county, or state authorities and used for able-bodied inmates (U.S. Department of the the shelter of persons who are without means Interior, Census Office 1896:1–3). for self-support and who have no relatives

 able and willing or legally bound to aid them” almshouse depended on whether the individual (Harris 1915:11). The report’s author pointed was what he defined as one of the larger group to changes in general trends, such as the of “temporary inmates, who come in times decreasing use of almshouses to house tramps of misfortune or unemployment and gener- and petty criminals and to house women and ally leave within a year” or the smaller group children, for whom there were more care options of “permanent paupers, who have definitely available (Harris 1915:11). He noted that not failed in the economic struggle and who go to only had the percentage of paupers within the the almshouse to spend their declining days” general population declined in every census (Harris 1915:10). The size of the first group since 1880, but that almshouse paupers were probably accounted for the statistics that enu- a “rapidly shifting group,” moving in and out of merated large turnovers within the space of almshouses relatively quickly (Harris 1915:9). a single year. He concluded from that pattern He also summarized state laws that indicated that “paupers in almshouses are an unstable, that the preponderance of care was offered on rapidly shifting, group.…” Indeed, many of a county level and supervised by county com- them were “not paupers at all in the generally missioners, supervisors, or the county court. accepted sense of the word ‘pauperism,’ which However, in some cases, care was provided by usually implies a permanent condition of indi- towns. In general, there was a trend for states gence as contrasted with ‘poverty,’ which may increasingly to supervise charities (Harris be temporary” (Harris 1915:12). 1915:12). Harris’s study supplemented a study Harris summarized a number of national (U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the patterns, noting that the greatest number of Census 1914) of state laws that pertained to paupers per 100,000 population was in New dependent classes and noted changes that had England and the smallest number was in the occurred in perceptions and treatments of those West South Central division, which included classes. According to the federal study, public Texas. Statistics pertaining to age demon- and government agencies no longer considered strated that about one-third of paupers were the insane, feebleminded, epileptic, leprous, younger than 55, another one-third were ages and inebriated to be “drags upon the commu- 55–69, and the final one-third were 70 and nity, who must somehow be taken care of,” but older. A full 1 out of 60 individuals over the age rather “unfortunates to whom the community of 79 were in almshouses. On the other hand, owes relief and support” (U.S. Department the proportion of paupers younger than 50 had of Commerce, Bureau of the Census 1914:6). declined in every census. The ratio of men to Traditional language itself was thought to be women during the same period had increased changing, so that “pauper” had been replaced steadily (Harris 1915:9). by “poor,” “indigent,” and “dependent”; “pauper Nationally, the ratios of whites and asylum” and “poorhouse” were being replaced Negroes relative to general population were by “infirmary,” “hospital,” and “home for the roughly equivalent, but foreign-born individu- aged and infirm”; “insane asylum” was being als were disproportionately represented (Harris replaced by “state hospital”; and “charity” by 1915:9–10). Paupers also were more likely to “aid.” Simultaneously, the structure of aid was be single and illiterate. Men were most likely becoming more centralized, so that care previ- to have been unskilled laborers and women to ously provided by local authorities was shift- have been domestic servants. In 1910, about ing to the state, which increasingly oversaw 80 percent were either unable to do any work private as well as public care institutions or had diminished capacity. Almost 64 percent (U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the were physically or mentally defective, but Census 1914:5–7). the number of insane and feebleminded was Analysis by the federal government was declining in almshouses due to the establish- paralleled by state-level studies in the early ment of special institutions for their care. A twentieth century, including one by the Kansas relatively high percentage died each year, with Board of Control. That state’s poor relief the leading cause of death being tuberculosis through county almshouses began in the early (Harris 1915:9–10). 1860s and was regulated by state legislation. Harris noted that the length of stay in an Although the state had established specialized

 institutions to house special classes of people, tecture for poor farms and poor homes. Written the county almshouse persisted as a refuge primarily by a new vanguard of reformers, the (albeit humiliating) for the destitute aged publications included Alexander Johnson’s (Kansas Board of Control 1908:255–256). analysis of almshouse construction and man- In Texas, C. S. Yoakum discussed the cases agement. Johnson, who was General Secretary of feeblemindedness, the place of defectives of the National Conference of Charities and in society, the benefits of segregating defec- Correction, sounded the then-common alarm tives by means of state care, the proper care against outdoor relief because he believed that and treatment of the insane, and changes in it was the system most likely to be abused public policy that needed to occur in Texas. He (Johnson 1911:2–3). On the other hand, institu- provided examples of public institutions that tions that were overly large usually resulted in cared for defectives, including jails and poor aggravation of underlying problems and encour- farms. A recurrent theme in his study was the aged the multiplication of degenerate popula- need to prevent the growth of defective popula- tions such as those in Great Britain, where the tions through sterilization and other methods sheer number of “defectives” threatened the to end their reproduction while providing them country’s “national existence” (Johnson 1911:4– with “the highest degree of training, protection, 6). Johnson advocated the care of paupers in care, and enjoyment, of which they are capable” relatively small units that would facilitate the (Yoakum 1914). simultaneous care for and control of “defective George Warfield (1915) conducted an inmates” (Johnson 1911:5–6). examination of outdoor relief in Missouri Johnson addressed several topics that that urged reform and struck a different tone were key to the appropriate housing and care from the earlier study by the Department of of paupers. The location of facilities should Commerce. Warfield criticized those respon- be in the country, but proximate to popula- sible for overseeing local relief because they tion centers. A country setting allowed for the were not properly trained and gave monetary cultivation of an institutional food supply and relief in such a way that it tended to encourage disposal of waste from the kitchen and dining various forms of immoral behavior. Echoing an room. The setting also provided opportunities increasingly common theme, Warfield pointed for beneficial labor (Johnson 1911:8–10). to the tendency of the feebleminded to propa- An appropriate site should be accessible gate and noted that many who received relief and it should include a good supply of potable were related by blood or marriage: “So strik- water. The site should have both well-drained ing was this fact that it raises a question soils and soils that were in good enough condi- whether the dependent element of the popula- tion to farm. It was useful to have a wood lot tion, and, from many indications, the defective for fuel and for its aesthetic and recreational and criminal elements also, do not belong to attributes. An additional plus for any site was a comparatively small number of families in its natural beauty, which could be enjoyed which degeneracy is marked.” Warfield then by inmates having few other pleasures. An strongly urged that Missouri through its board almshouse constructed on such a site should of State Charities maintain county records of be organized with specific points in mind: the outdoor relief, investigate those requesting aid, appropriate classification of the various classes authorize the board to act as the coordinator of paupers according to their conditions, abso- of the various public and private charities, and lute segregation of the sexes, abundance of develop “a system of county or district asylums fresh air and light, adequate floor space for on the cottage plan” to provide appropriate cus- various uses, accessibility of every part of the todial care for “indigent defectives, especially facility to the administration, and “the comfort the mental defectives…” (Warfield 1915:iv–v). and convenience of all the inmates” (Johnson These state-level studies were accompa- 1911:11–13, 16). Johnson then provided certain nied in the first two decades of the twentieth standardized plans for facilities that incorpo- century by broad studies concerning the history rated specific planning principles. of poor care, evolving policies, attempts to Johnson’s analysis of almshouse archi- define the types of individuals in need of care, tecture included a number of appendices that and even an investigation of appropriate archi- consisted of short studies concerning the draw-

 backs of mingling different classes of paupers lock and key were not appropriate residents in a single institution, the roles of county hos- in an institution that was relatively open. pitals, systems to classify paupers in Great Finally, city almshouses tended to be large, but Britain and Denmark, the persistence of the the vast majority were relatively small insti- concept that some almshouses should also serve tutions that served fewer than 100 inmates. as houses of correction, and problems associ- Therefore, “[a]ny classes of dependents…who ated with imbeciles and feebleminded individu- cannot properly and economically be cared for als. The appendices also investigated the roles in small numbers, are not suitable almshouse that public relief and private philanthropy inmates” (Johnson 1911:173–174). In conclu- play in the perpetuation of indigency, the need sion, the author stated that classes such as for control of the population, advice to super- children; and the blind, deaf and dumb, idiotic, intendents, appropriate work for defectives, feebleminded, insane, epileptic, consumptive, the need to restrain “vagrant and degraded acutely diseased, and pregnant did not belong women” who frequently became mothers of ille- in almshouses due to the specialized care gitimate paupers, examples of the ill treatment they required. Rather, appropriate residents of insane paupers, and a discussion of plans for were “those aged and infirm persons who are model institutions. unable to support themselves and are without One appendix concerning the function of relatives to support them.” For that population, the almshouse was a paper given to the National an institution “something between a hospital Conference of Charities and Correction that and a home” was most appropriate (Johnson summarized changes that had occurred to 1911:174–180). the institution. Stating that almshouses were In 1916, Edward Devine applied scientific characterized by their individuality because principles to the analysis of pauperism. Unlike they represented different stages of develop- other authors who categorized members of the ment in the care of the dependent class, the pauper class itself, Devine created two broad author maintained that earliest almshouses categories of condition: 1) poverty, which he were “public dumping ground[s] for all classes believed was “the larger and more important of dependents and defectives and for some problem” with links to economic reform, health, classes of delinquents.” These classes included housing, and the administration of justice children, idiots, epileptics, insane and feeble- and capable of being reduced by “economic, minded individuals, deaf and dumb, blind, sanitary and social reforms, public hygiene sick, tramps, criminals, and “the respectable and social insurance, effective organization of aged poor.” Over time, some of these dependent charity and the development of educational classes were removed in part or whole to spe- measures…”; and 2) pauperism, which was dis- cialized institutions (Johnson 1911:171–172). tinguishable from poverty because it consisted The author enumerated factors that deter- of “the habitual receipt of public relief” and of mined how effective an almshouse could be: the the habit of making little rather than needing character of the head public figures in positions much (Devine 1916:3–4). He distinguished his of authority, the extent to which almshouses classification system from the legal concept were open institutions whose inmates were rel- that underlay English and North American atively free to come and go, and the numbers of poor laws, “recognize[d] a legal right to relief individuals who could reasonably and economi- [and] create[d] an elaborate machinery for the cally be cared for. administration of this poor relief” with the About the first factor, the author concluded almshouse, poorhouse, poor farm, or county that, because people in charge of almshouses home at its center. He also distinguished the tended to be elected or appointed officials North American classification system from the with no scientific skills specific to the defec- religious concepts that underlay the charity tive classes, those dependents who required of Catholic countries in Central and South “special scientific treatment” were not “proper America, where benefaction was “a means of almshouse inmates.” spiritual edification of the giver.…” Its central About the second factor, the author feature was the “privilege of giving” rather believed that individuals such as prisoners than the “right to relief.” Devine’s “new” view of or other delinquents who must be kept under poverty and pauperism, the “natural view,” held

10 that it was possible to abolish poverty and pau- burial between 1880 and 1918, but that the perism by providing for the “segregation and potter’s field remained “a relic of barbarism humane care of the feeble-minded, the preven- and a disgrace to modern civilization” (Hoffman tion of alcoholism, and the development of social 1919:10–12, 93). insurance against sickness.” Fundamental to The 1920s saw a reexamination of the achieving abolition were professional sanitari- subject of paupers on a national scale by the ans in the public health service and the “profes- federal government, which published its study sional and technical training of social workers of paupers in almshouses in 1923 and a follow- for the tasks of relief and prevention” (Devine up study of the cost of American almshouses 1916:6–8, 18–19). in 1925. The first study omitted recipients of Like many others of his generation, such outdoor relief and inmates of other institu- as Margaret Sanger, and contrary to the tions, focusing instead on those poor who lived conclusions drawn by the U.S. Department of in almshouses. It defined the almshouse as “an Commerce (1914), Devine was a proponent of institution supported or controlled by town, eugenics, the science of racial improvement. municipal, county, or State authorities and He believed that pauperism was a “distinct used for the shelter of persons who are without hygienic problem,” one primarily of “mental means of support and who have no relatives defect,” and that it could be controlled or able and willing or legally bound to aid them” eliminated by the “segregation and humane (U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the treatment of individuals and the gradual elimi- Census 1925:2). nation of defective strains…” (Devine 1916:5). One of the most important contributions of He maintained that, while the mentally defec- the 1925 analysis was that it looked back at the tive were unfit for parenthood, they were statistics from the 1850, 1860, 1870, 1880, 1890, people “whose minds cannot be cured but who 1904, 1910, and 1923 censuses of paupers and can transmit their defect, with its strains of drew certain conclusions. First, in the United pauperism, prostitution, criminality, and other States generally and most states individually grievous consequences” (Devine 1916:11–12). there had been a marked decrease in the number He suggested that the scientific community of almshouse paupers between 1880 and 1923 distinguish between pauperism, which was a and a particularly large decrease between 1904 “mental disease or mental defect” capable of and 1922. Exceptions to this pattern occurred being eliminated or relieved “by eugenic and in the West North Central, West South Central, sanitary measures”; and poverty, which was an and Mountain divisions; the states comprising “economic and social condition” that could be the West South Central division (, eliminated or mitigated by economic progress Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas) increased, and social reform…” (Devine 1916:5). and in Texas, the numbers doubled from 1880 Three years after Devine’s study, Frederick to 1904 and declined only slightly in the 1910 Hoffman concentrated on one aspect of pauper and 1923 censuses. However, at no time did the life—the issue of burial in large cities. His numbers of almshouse paupers in Texas exceed book was largely an advertisement for indus- 27.2 per 100,000 population, or .027 percent trial insurance, life insurance offered to less (U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the prosperous wage earners on an “industrial” or Census 1925:6–7, 9). Another important con- weekly payment plan and often used to pay tribution of the study was its conclusion that burial expenses. Hoffman identified the disfa- “paupers in almshouses are a rapidly shifting vor with which pauper burials were viewed and group and…many of them are not paupers at the impact that industrial insurance had in the all in the sense of being permanently indigent” United States beginning in 1875. He main- (U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the tained that the availability of such insurance Census 1925:3). This conclusion confirmed that had dramatically reduced the rate of pauper of Harris (1915:12) a decade earlier. A second government study, this one by  Sanger, founder of the American Birth Control League, particularly emphasized the need to prevent the Estelle Stewart in 1925, traced the origins feebleminded, physically unfit, materially poor, racially of the American almshouse and workhouse inferior, and mentally incompetent from propagating. (including poor farms) to English poor law, and she compared the almshouse system from state

11 to state. She noted that in 40 of 47 states, alms- posited that biological poverty could only be houses were run by the county, while in the countered by an increase in “superior stock” remainder, paupers were cared for on a town or (Evans 1926:93–99). township level or through outdoor relief. Only The philosophies of eugenics and nativ- 1 state (Michigan) had a state department with ism implicit in arguments by Evans and others powers to enforce recommendations and admin- during the first two decades of the twenti- ister state laws. Thirteen out of 48 states had eth century, as well as criticism of state- and agents of state boards who made yearly inspec- locally run pauper care, appear to have spurred tions of almshouses. She provided state-spe- a number of state-specific studies. Among the cific statistics for the numbers of institutions, first was a study by the Texas Eleemosynary inmates by sex, numbers of acres held by insti- Commission. Created by the state legislature tutions, monetary values of assets, numbers through H.C.R. No. 15, which was approved of inmates per institution, and the cost per on June 23, 1923, the commission was charged inmate of support. She also summarized state with making a statewide study of depen- laws governing almshouses (Stewart 1925). dents and “unfortunates”; considering ways to Stewart sharply criticized small alms- prevent insanity, feeble-mindedness, and other houses, which she characterized as being conditions; examining the custody and care of dilapidated, inadequate, and indecent (Stewart the criminally insane; and reviewing and revis- 1925:41). She also referenced the contempora- ing laws pertaining to inmates of state elee- neous and even more critical study undertaken mosynary institutions. Commission members by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in coopera- hired experts to conduct surveys of institu- tion with fraternal organizations. Written by tions, including 18 almshouses and poor farms, Harry C. Evans and describing 2,183 alms- which they recommended should be abolished houses in 48 states, The American Poorfarm because they were filled with a heterogeneous and Its Inmates (1926) was a scathing indict- mixture of dependent classes, were providing ment of the poor farm system. Evans argued no useful service, and were not only a waste of strongly for the abolition of poor farms, listing public money but also “relics of medieval igno- 13 conditions or practices that he believed rance…” (Texas Eleemosynary Commission argued for abolition of the system. He pro- 1925:3–8). The commission’s call for special- vided summaries of the financial and social ized mental and occupational therapy and for conditions at poor farms in each state (Evans the involvement of psychiatric-social workers 1926:3, 6–20, 21–92). Then, in a chapter enti- reflected the increasingly important and visible tled “The American Pauper—His Ancestry and role those professionals were assuming in the Progeny,” Evans presented his own conclusions United States. Their conclusion that nothing about the identity of the American pauper. would work in the long term unless steps were Echoing the ideas of Thomas Robert Malthus, taken, perhaps through sterilization and mar- Margaret Sanger, and Edward Devine, Evans riage laws, to prevent the propagation of mental concluded that the vast majority of American defectives (Texas Eleemosynary Commission paupers were feebleminded, and he believed 1925:12–13, 15) reflected mainstream thought that the disproportionate number of foreign- within the professional and charitable com- born paupers had, through their children, munities interested in the care of dependent “added to the pollution of American Society” classes. (1926:93–94). He wrote allegorically of the Arthur James’s The Disappearance of principle of cleansing life, refining, casting out the County Almshouse in Virginia: Back from the dross, and maintaining purity. He wrote “Over the Hill” (1926) echoed Evans’s criticism more directly of the need to eliminate “the of the almshouse system. James characterized sources that pollute life” and advocated not the county-run poorhouse as “an institution just placing “mental defectives” in the per- symbolic of the uttermost despair of mankind, manent custody of the state but also making a word to connote poverty, neglect, disease, sure that they were prevented from “leaving a filth, loneliness and death itself…[and] a con- progeny of their own kind to take their place.” spicuous example of inefficient and reactionary Using terms such as “final solution,” Evans government” (James 1926:3). He also linked eventually used the term “sterilization” and county almshouses and the problem of poverty

12 and poor relief, concluding that the perpetua- empowered wardens in seven counties to pur- tion of the almshouse system was contributory chase land and build almshouses for the poor to poverty (James 1926:22). and those generally “deprived of their senses.” At the same time, James was critical The idea, which spread to other counties and of Evans’s work, asserting that Evans had evolved during the nineteenth century, eventu- pointed out “a few of the worst institutions” and ally encompassed the practice of farming opera- described “the conditions in the worst alms- tions in connection with almshouses. As Brown houses and the worst aspects of the system as a summarized the philosophy, the idea developed whole,” while failing to describe the “improved that “the poor might be supported wholly or places” that showed “the recent and present mainly by their own labor or by their labor sup- change and development in the system.” Further, plemented by that of certain classes of misde- Evans’s publication had left without comment meanants” (Brown 1928:10–19, 26–29, 32–33). “some splendid successes in alleviating the The mid-nineteenth century represented very conditions it exposes” (James 1926:5). something of a turning point for pauper care in Specifically, Virginia was changing its system North Carolina in several respects. The public by reestablishing a system of child placing; accepted the idea of taxing itself to provide replacing the older practice of providing doles for pauper care, officials identified the -educa with “family aid and individual pensions under tion of both whites and African-Americans trained, welfare workers”; abolishing indi- as a method to help prevent poverty, and the vidual county-level almshouses with regional state established and opened a hospital for “hospital homes”; establishing hospitals for the the insane (Brown 1928:67–68, 94–95), thus care of the insane, deaf, blind, feebleminded, providing an early mechanism for segregating and epileptic; subsidizing hospitals that cared at least one particular class of paupers. After for the indigent; and establishing a govern- the Civil War, North Carolina’s new 1868 con- ment for the care of dependent and neglected stitution transferred control of county affairs, children (James 1926:16). As a result of these including poor care, to boards of county com- changes and a county system of outdoor relief, missioners while simultaneously making care the pauper population now consisted primarily of the insane, blind, and deaf mutes the respon- of the indigent poor. Supervisors had been able sibility of the state (Brown 1928:69, 95). Despite to close some county institutions so that the 96 these changes, Brown described county homes county and 12 city and town almshouses active in early twentieth-century North Carolina as in 1909 numbered 65 and 10 in 1926. James being “dumping ground[s] for the wrecks of admitted that the existence of some “unplace- every type” (Brown 1928:98, 125). able” individuals meant that almshouses might Charitable work was reorganized in North persist, and he urged the establishment of dis- Carolina in 1917–1919, when care was orga- trict or regional homes because they would be nized on a county basis and each county had more economically viable (James 1926:16, 22). a local board and superintendent of public Two years later, Roy Brown described welfare. On the state level, a new Board of North Carolina’s system of public poor relief. He Charities and Public Welfare was reorganized outlined the history of pauper care in England, and charged with supervision of charitable where specific important principles developed organizations. Nonetheless, Brown saw little concerning the law of legal settlement, which to recommend the system in the 1920s: in entities should be fiscally responsible for the 1922, 94 counties owned poor farms, which poor, and how children and other classes should were poorly equipped and run as a tenant be treated (Brown 1928:2–7). He traced the farm would be; supervision and the quality of history of poor relief in North Carolina to the superintendents were inadequate; the system early eighteenth century and the beginnings of of outdoor relief was rife with the potential for legislation to 1749, and he identified 1785 as graft; and inmates of poor farms remained a the year when the North Carolina legislature heterogeneous group, despite actions taken by the state to remove certain classes of inmates  This criticism of Evans’s work was echoed more to specialized institutions. Interestingly, Brown than 70 years later by Tuten (1999:48), who pointed out noted that the population of needy and depen- numerous inaccuracies in Evans’s work as it pertained to Jefferson County, Alabama. dent individuals was shrinking, and that the

13 numbers in county homes by the 1920s were so public institutions, and the establishment of small that it made classification impracticable institutions to care for special classes, such as the (Brown 1928:100, 109, 113–114, 118–119, 125, indigent insane and children. Simultaneously, 132–135, 164, 171–173). the number of poor farms or almshouse farms The depression of the 1930s increased increased. By the early 1940s, New Jersey still the population of the poor, and the University had a complicated system that consisted of of Minnesota began a study in the early thir- institutions on the municipal, county, and state ties to identify types of individuals who might levels, with almshouses being one component benefit by settlement on farms. Proposals of the system (Stafford 1941:48–49, 51, 53–56, by congressmen and others had provided for 59–63, 74, 164–167). “the settlement of the unemployed on subsis- By the 1960s, with the disappearance tence farms, and R. W. Murchie suggested the of most county farms and homes, studies of establishment of relief farms where single poorhouses, poor farms, and pauper care had unemployed men and marginal workers would become scholarly investigations that empha- live and work on a supervised colony farm sized the history of poor care in specific cities, (Murchie 1933:5–8, 24). Studies by other state states, and regions of the United States, and in committees and scholars, however, continued other countries. Ethel McClure’s study of the to emphasize the persistence of poorhouses development of poor farms and homes for the and poor farms as central features in efforts to aged in Minnesota (1968) reiterated the English provide relief and care. Studies of the institu- roots of poor laws; described the origins of New tion and state policies in Kansas, for example, World systems and institutions; identified key reviewed the English roots of poorhouses, the national events that impacted pauper popula- trend to establish state-run institutions, the tions such as the panics of 1857, 1873, and 1893, impact of the Social Security Act, the growing and passage of the Social Security Act of 1935; trend to provide outdoor relief, and the lack of and discussed the impacts of lengthened life caretakers who were properly trained (Kansas spans, shifts of population from rural to urban Emergency Relief Committee 1935:v, 1–2, settings, and changing attitudes on the part of 31–32). They also summarized the state’s laws a youth-centered society concerning care for that provided for a plethora of public welfare elderly parents. She also identified the studies programs and institutions on state and county of the 1920s, that were largely critical of poor levels (Lowe and Staff 1937). farms, as helping to further the nascent move- Studies of state-level public assistance pro- ment for state and federal programs, including grams persisted during World War II and after. pensions and social security. Paul Stafford’s study of poor care in New Jersey Other narrowly focused studies of the mid- summarized the history of public assistance to-late twentieth century included Woodrow from the establishment of and Borah’s assessment (1966) of social welfare efforts to care for orphans in the late 1600s, the and obligation in New Spain, its roots in pre- creation of mechanisms for public funding, and Reformation Spain, and the continuing influence the establishment of outdoor relief as the prin- of the Catholic Church, which had retained the cipal form of assistance during the eighteenth property and endowments necessary to provide century (Stafford 1941:25, 27, 31). In the late relief to all classes. Borah traced the transfer of eighteenth century, the New Jersey legislature that system to Latin America and Mexico, where created a new structure in the form of county associations of the pious, hospitals, and church poorhouses or almshouses for all classes of the and civil authorities combined with help within poor, and county workhouses for offenders who extended families to create a network of care. were incarcerated (Stafford 1941:26–27). The The extension of that network through law and nineteenth century was characterized by the community practice into Spanish Texas, as well further development of the almshouse system as its persistence during the Mexican period, is in preference to outdoor relief, an emphasis on described in De la Teja and Wheat (1985:7–34).  The author, R. W. Murchie, and others noted that The best-recorded efforts at providing charity between 1930 and 1932 there was a “decided reversal and welfare were those undertaken in Bexar of the rural-urban population movement in the United in the 1820s and early 1830s, when a citizens’ States, and in those two years over a million people had been added to the farm population” (Murchie 1933:28). board provided food for destitute soldiers who

14 were sometimes left without pay or supplies. 1856–1919, when the state emphasized insti- Individual families sometimes took in citizens tutional care; 1919–1939, when public welfare left homeless by epidemics and floods. was organized under the board of control; and Priscilla Clement’s study (1985) of welfare 1939–1949, when the state decentralized its and the poor focused on Philadelphia in the public welfare services. Cathey’s work was fol- first half of the nineteenth century but asserted lowed by Ruth Whiteside’s study (1973) of the that the policies, concerns, and institutions impact of the Texas Constitution on welfare. She that developed in that one city were typical of a identified the articles within the Constitution broader region since the study of pre-twentieth- of 1876 that required counties to provide century public assistance was a study of local manual labor poorhouses and farms, and she history, most poor relief programs being locally discussed the impact of the Congressional acts administered. She described poor relief as it of 1972 that resulted in a welfare system that was practiced in Philadelphia and then drew was fully federalized. Finally, Debbie Cottrell’s broad conclusions about the practice of welfare review of the county poor farm system in Texas in America during the nineteenth century. She (1989:169–190) examined three county poor described the motivations of both those who farms in depth and provided a historical context sought assistance and those who provided it, for the system in and in the identifying factors that have guided the cre- 1869 and 1876 state constitutions. She empha- ation and administration of welfare programs. sized that poorhouses and poor farms were A similar study by Robert Cray, Jr. (1988), attractive to public officials who believed them focused on paupers and poor relief in New York to be more cost-effective than outdoor relief, City and the surrounding area from 1700 to and she maintained that the typical “frontier 1930. He concluded that “civil officials had to Texan” considered relief to be a responsibility of balance a sense of compassion with a sense relatives, but not the government, which used of economy” (Cray 1988:4). In the eighteenth poorhouses as “dumping grounds for society’s century, it was not necessary to build and outcasts.” support poorhouses in rural areas and small A regional view was provided by Elna villages because there were so few poor, and Green (1999), who edited 11 articles about they were readily accommodated by local offi- social welfare practices in the South from 1830 cials, family, and church-based charity. With to 1930. Green pointed to the English anteced- time, however, transportation linked cities ents to southern colonial social welfare policy, to rural areas, which made them vulnerable and noted the ways in which southern policies to transients and new ideas about economic differed from those practiced in the North, at development. Increasingly, rural areas and least until the twentieth century, when pro- villages came to favor poorhouses and pauper gressive southerners looked northward for auctions, and they also came to view poor reform models. Outdoor relief prevailed until people as costly burdens rather than as objects the nineteenth century, when poorhouses of charity (Cray 1988:50–53, 84). By the early became common. However, as specialized state nineteenth century, both urban and rural popu- institutions for special dependent classes pro- lations favored the use of almshouses because liferated, almshouses were increasingly used they believed that they could be used to reduce to house the elderly (Green 1999:vii–xviii). expenditures on poor relief, and because poor An article in Green’s volume by James Tuten people were safer in an institution, where they (Green 1999:40–57) focused more narrowly on could be required to work (Cray 1988:50–53, the operations of one institution in Alabama, 84). the Jefferson County Poor Farm. Tuten char- A number of master’s theses and scholarly acterized the Jefferson County institution as articles written in the mid- to late twentieth one which never attained agricultural self-suf- century have summarized the history of pauper ficiency. He also tracked changes in the poor care in Texas. A thesis by Velma Lee Cathey farm population, concluding that only one- (1949) outlined the history of institutional care quarter of inmates were there because of their in Texas from the mid-nineteenth through the financial condition, the balance being orphans, mid-twentieth centuries. Cathey also identi- the sick, and the insane. Increasingly, however, fied three general phases of welfare legislation: as children were excluded and other options for

15 care became available, the mean age and death • Early nineteenth-century authors were rate of the population increased. He pointed interested in analyzing almshouse out inaccuracies in Evans’s highly critical 1926 populations in order to effect reform. publication and then noted the impact of the There was an early emphasis on Social Security Act of 1935, which he character- the supposed effects of alcohol and ized as constituting a return to outdoor relief. the potential threat of immigrants, Nonetheless, a few Alabama counties continued who were believed to represent a to operate poor farms until after World War II. disproportionately large percentage of Michael Katz’s social history of welfare the total pauper population in North (1986) purported to treat care in the United America. States, but actually focused on large, urban • Early nineteenth-century authors were poorhouses in the East Coast region with a concerned for the effects of almshouses strong emphasis on New York. He organized on children, who might become more his study chronologically, identifying an era inclined to crime because of their when poorhouses were the preferred response exposure to undesirable elements of to poverty, but outdoor relief persisted. He also society in institutions. asserted that poorhouse culture fostered the • By the mid-nineteenth century, there development of specialized institutions. He was some recognition of the complexity discussed the era from the 1890s through the of the causes of poverty and a continuing 1930s, when a reform movement focused on emphasis on intemperance as a leading children, when individuals who were specially cause. trained (social workers and public welfare offi- • In 1880, the United States government cials) became involved in reform, and when began to study pauper populations the New Deal completed the emergence of the in detail, creating special censuses. welfare state. He then traced the relation of Conclusions drawn by government social welfare to the post–World War II experi- studies about causes of pauperism ence, which resulted in federal programs such (want of other home, old age, infirmity, as the War on Poverty and Great Society (Katz disease, etc.) increasingly differed 1986:xii–xv). from those of social scientists who Finally, David Wagner’s study of American emphasized the genetic causes and poorhouses provided a national historic advocated eugenic solutions. context, discussing European antecedents and • Beginning in the 1880s, discussions the various philosophies of care for the poor about the causes of pauperism became in colonial and nineteenth-century America. more nuanced and statistics for larger He described the intense opposition to outdoor populations more readily available. The relief by social reformers and its reappearance impact of change from a predominantly late in the nineteenth century when special agrarian society to one in which industry classes began to receive pensions. Like Katz, played a role was examined, and some Wagner concluded that poorhouses and pauper scholars concluded that an industrial care were characterized by institutional com- revolution had left numerous members plexity and served a variety of purposes and of the agricultural class involuntarily roles that were as widely varying as social unemployed. Disability continued to be control and altruism (Wagner 2005:4–9, 20). He a strong prognosticator of poverty. also remarked on the persistence of the poor- • The genetic roots of pauperism house, an institution that found a role in both remained a dominant theory between pre-industrial and industrial societies (Wagner ca. 1900 and 1930. The theory was used 2005:45–46) and existed as late as the 1960s, as a primary attack on poorhouses and largely because significant numbers of individ- poor farms, which were considered uals were not covered by Social Security until to be breeding grounds of inferior 1956 and later (Wagner 2005:132–133). human stock due to inbreeding, lack A sampling of literature about pauper care of external controls, and mixing of in Europe and the Americas highlights trends sexes and different types of indigent in the history of theory about indigent care: populations.

16 • State and federal agencies during the Latin America and Mexico. Scholars first quarter of the twentieth century also emphasized the development of emphasized the responsibility of the public policy on the state and local community to provide relief and began levels. to change the language traditionally used to describe certain classes of Pauper Care in Europe indigents as well as the names of and the Americas public institutions. • Both federal- and state-level agencies The poor have been a part of the human issued studies of poor relief programs landscape for millennia. The Greeks referred and attempted to define different to the pauper class as one comprised of indi- classes of indigents. viduals who were not so much indigent as inef- • During the first quarter of the ficient, and they suggested that the condition twentieth century, some reformers of poverty was that of making little as opposed discussed physical changes to pauper to needing much. The associated Latin word facilities, such as poorhouses and “pauper” meant “simply poor, without means of poor farms, that might effect positive support” (Devine 1916:3–4). changes in care. Medieval European ideas about the • Increasingly, the role of professionals in pauper class recognized what were identi- the care of defectives and dependents fied as the “impotent poor” as a distinct class was emphasized. Such professionals (Brown 1928:3–4). While assistance was avail- considered abolition of poverty and able in the forms of alms and almshouses, pauperism to be dependent on the which were made available to both poor people work of professional sanitarians in and wanderers (Wagner 2005:4), English law the public health service and of social in the late 1300s provided that beggars who workers. were impotent to work should continue to live • In 1900–1930, descriptions of the in the cities and towns where they were then degraded state of poorhouse and poor situated or withdraw to the towns where they farm inhabitants and the anonymity of were born. This “law of legal settlement” was pauper burial emphasized the horrors intended to restrict the movement of beggars of pauperism. and to fix in law the residence of laborers • State-sponsored studies of the 1920s (Brown 1928:2–4). were uniformly critical of the quality The law of legal settlement was accompa- of care provided to mentally impaired nied by attempts to identify beggars by includ- paupers when administered outside of ing them in a census and licensing those poor specialized state institutions. people who local officials decided should be • State-level studies of systems and allowed to beg. Implicit in these early actions institutions used to deliver relief were certain principles: 1) the community continued after 1930 but were was obligated to relieve the suffering of the considerably less critical of poorhouses poor; 2) the impotent poor would be provided and poor farms than in the past. The for through voluntary alms collected by the concept of eugenics as a mechanism church; 3) no one should be compelled to beg, for the control and eradication of and no one should beg openly; 4) poor who defectives became less prevalent, returned to their place of settlement should and the associated language all but be received charitably; and 5) individuals disappeared. identified as “sturdy vagabond[s] and valiant • With the disappearance of county beggars” should have to work for a living homes and farms in the 1960s, scholars (Brown 1928:4). began to study the history of poor care According to Borah (1966:45–46, 48), many in specific cities, states, and regions European countries began to organize systems of the United States. There was of social welfare during the fifteenth century; increasing interest in the indigent care Spain, on the other hand, continued to practice systems of other countries, including relief based on a Middle Ages social structure

17 that emphasized “the obligations and rights the sick; the aged, infirm, and needy; and even of the various classes.…” As long as the lower travelers. The general order for the Indies pro- classes “kept to their place,” they were to be mulgated in 1541 by Charles V required all given access to aid and justice by nobles, the towns of Spanish and Indians to have hospitals, wealthy, and the monarch. Widows, orphans, of which he was the patron. In the sixteenth, and other needy classes, such as the sick, aged, seventeenth, and eighteen centuries, care for and hungry, were provided assistance through the ill, insane, and aged was provided by hos- the community, the church, and endowed chari- pital orders, and those workers were assisted ties, many of which were under church control. by cofradias. Church and civil authorities also Guilds, cofradias (associations of pious people), carried on a wide range of welfare activities. and entities such as hospitals (institutions In the case of the church, those activities were that cared for the sick and insane) joined with supported by revenues that were distributed extended families to create an effective network to the poor and used for good works at the of aid in fifteenth-century Spain. discretion of the clergy. Convents served as Until the Reformation, the church was places where the needy were fed, clothed, and largely responsible for poor relief in England, sometimes lodged; in some cases foundlings as well, and monasteries became centers for and orphans were taken in and reared. Civil maintaining the idle poor (Brown 1928:4–5). officials in Mexico City created an institution The Reformation passed Spain by, so the in the late 1500s that guaranteed a supply of Catholic Church retained its endowments and basic grains to the poor at the lowest possible with them an intact system for providing aid price. In other cases, towns made special provi- (Borah 1966:45). The suppression of monaster- sions for legal assistance to the poor, including ies in England during the reign of Henry VIII, those in jail, and to widows and minors (Borah however, resulted in an increase in the number 1966:46–51). of vagabonds and wandering beggars, and the Absent the traditional role of the Catholic government subsequently both suppressed Church in caring for the poor, England contin- begging and idleness through laws and pro- ued to develop a substitute system during the vided for the establishment of almshouses. reigns of Henry VIII (1509–1547), Edward VI According to Brown (1928:45), local authori- (1547–1553), and Elizabeth I (1558–1603). An ties were authorized to provide “tenantries, overriding and increasingly important prin- cottages, and other convenient housing for the ciple was that the poor should be supported by lodging of the impotent.” Wagner interpreted taxation. Initially, a person appointed by town the post-1500 English revolution in poor care officials and the church asked townspeople to as being more punitive, blaming make donations for the support of the poor. for the “harsher treatment of the poor and Failure of this approach inevitably led to the those who were deemed unproductive (‘indo- recognition, in 1572, of the principle that the lent’ or ‘vicious’).” He identified what he called poor would have to be supported through a a “new concensus [sic],” and where Brown saw tax levy imposed by justices of the peace. The almshouses, Wagner identified workhouses, money collected then would be administered correctional institutions meant to impose dis- by overseers of the poor, who were appointed cipline on the unworthy poor, those “men of by the justices and kept a register (Brown working age, who were vagrants, beggars, ‘indo- 1928:5–6). lent,’ petty criminals, or intemperate” (Wagner Development of civil structures during 2005:4–5). the reign of Elizabeth I was followed by the The conquest of New Spain brought with act of “43 Elizabeth” in 1604 that left the main it pre-Reformation, church-based institutions administrative power with annually appointed typified by organized aid for the needy- pro parochial authorities. The act required chil- vided by endowments and supplemented by dren whose parents could not work and other ecclesiastical and civil funds. The overarching married or unmarried persons who did not have institution was the hospital or hospice, which an occupation to work. It provided relief to the included groups of volunteer workers and lame, impotent, and blind and those unable to other supporters. As they had done in Spain, work, defined as the impotent poor. As the foun- such hospitals and hospices cared for lepers; dation of English poor law until the nineteenth

18 century, 43 Elizabeth also defined three classes paupers. It was supplemented, in limited form, of poor—the impotent poor, dependent children, by state support in public institutions for some and the able-bodied, the last of whom worked special classes of dependents, such as orphans. in houses of correction. Two to four selected State laws regarding the treatment and householders served with church wardens in regulation of paupers were not always readily every parish as overseers of the poor, and they passed: in North Carolina in 1749, the first bill also raised relief funds by taxation. The jus- introduced in the legislature that was designed tices of the peace were authorized to commit to provide relief to the poor and prevent idle- poor people who refused to work to houses of ness failed. Subsequent bills passed in 1755 and correction or jails (Brown 1928:7). 1759, on the other hand, outlined treatment of Between ca. 1600 and the 1790s, England poor people and vagabonds, addressed issues saw the development of a “network of law and concerning work, and discussed permanent set- practice which…had become entwined in the tlement (Brown 1928:18–19). These, with laws fabric of society and the economic system” passed in the colonies and using English poor (Poynter 1969:xi). It was a network or system law as a model, became the legal structure that whose salient features made local govern- was incorporated in the laws of the Northwest ments (parishes) responsible for the sick, poor, Territory in 1787, an area that embraced the aged, and afflicted; placed the justices of the Midwestern portion of the country (McClure peace and overseers of the poor in charge; and 1968:ix). There, as elsewhere in the eastern endowed the overseer with specific powers and half of the continental United States, most care duties, including the duty to make the able- was provided in one or more of four ways on a bodied work, the duty to provide relief to those local level: 1) outdoor relief (giving assistance who could not work, and the power to levy and to the poor in their own homes), 2) farming collect taxes (McClure 1968:2). This system, paupers out to families, sometimes by auction, together with the 1662 Act of Settlement, 3) contracting with one resident to care for which permitted authorities to move nonresi- all the town’s paupers, or 4) providing a town dent paupers to the parishes of their last legal almshouse (McClure 1968:6–7). settlement, “embodied the principles of local After the American Revolution, the admin- responsibility, family responsibility, and legal istration of relief remained local but appears to settlement which were the basis for the poor have become more structured or bureaucratic. relief systems of [North America]” (McClure In North Carolina, for example the freemen 1968:2). in a county elected seven other freeholders to Poor laws were passed in American colo- serve as overseers of the poor for three-year nies such as Virginia and South Carolina by terms. The seven freeholders elected three of 1642, and the role of the church remained rela- their members to serve as wardens. The seven tively strong until the American Revolution. freeholders, or overseers, could levy taxes for According to Green (1999:vii–xviii), some com- the care of the poor, who could be removed to munities on the Atlantic seaboard began to build the place of their legal settlement. However, workhouses or almshouses by the eighteenth the system was less than successful because century, but southern and northern colonies few citizens could be persuaded to serve (Brown differed in their residency requirements: New 1928:26–27). Subsequently, in the 1780s, the England required a more lengthy residency by legislature empowered wardens in seven North individuals before they were eligible to receive Carolina counties to buy land and build alms- public support, while the southern colonies houses where the poor and insane were housed. were more lenient. In general, there were few An increasing number of counties established almshouses or other institutions to house the such institutions between 1793 and 1830, and poor, the elderly, or dependent children. Rather, they served both a poorhouse and a workhouse outdoor relief in their own homes, or those of function (Brown 1928:28–29, 32). At the same others, was the prevalent form of support for time, a concept developed that farming opera-  McClure’s actual wording stated that the tions in connection with almshouses would English system was the basis for the poor relief systems create a system where the poor might be able to of the “New World.” In fact, the Spanish system found support themselves by their own labor or with in Latin America, Mexico, and, eventually, the American Southwest, differed from the English system. the help of labor provided by “certain classes of

19 misdemeanants” (Brown 1928:33). pentry, shoemaking, smithing, tailoring, and Such a system—one in which paupers of gardening (Philadelphia Board of Guardians various classes were housed in almshouses 1827:8–10, 12). that had agricultural land attached where In Providence, Rhode Island, the alms- the able-bodied labored, sometimes with the house was not associated with a farm. Rather, assistance of petty criminals—was common paupers worked at picking oakum (a fibrous throughout the eastern United States by the material used for caulking ships). Children were 1820s. Outdoor relief was discouraged, but its bound out at the age of seven, and paupers were persistence and the varieties of local mores sent home according to the law of settlement. meant that almshouses varied considerably As a smaller facility, the Providence almshouse from one another. Typical institutions included was overseen by one appointed person; a paid one in Baltimore where the almshouse was keeper boarded the inmates and received an located on a 300-acre farm within 2.5 miles of allowance for them. Outdoor relief in the forms the city. Inmates were classified and included of wood for household use and money also were the aged and infirm, lame, maimed, and those provided. Merchants who introduced foreign- otherwise incapable of labor; children; the sick; ers had to pay a bond so that the state did not and vagrants and others capable of contribut- become liable if the immigrant became a pauper ing to their own support. Within the institution (Philadelphia Board of Guardians 1827:13). there was an infirmary, a lying-in hospital, a In Newport, the almshouse was located on an workhouse, an asylum, a school, a lunatic hos- island where there was no outdoor relief, and pital, and a medical and surgical school so that the paupers worked (Philadelphia Board of doctors could study the inmates. Employees Guardians 1827:13). included a master or steward, a matron, a phy- The Boston, Massachusetts, almshouse sician and residents, and a farm superinten- was located on a ca. 60-acre farm about 2 miles dent. Other duties were carried out by paupers. from town. Resistance to replacing outdoor Insane persons could be separated from the relief meant that there were two parallel general population and sent to another hospital. systems and two boards of oversight. Paupers The almshouse was capable of accommodating at the almshouse/farm were grossly separated, 800–900 paupers, but the average number was with blacks and those with the worst cases of about 400 (Philadelphia Board of Guardians insanity being housed in separate buildings. 1827:4–5). This phenomenon of large capacity Children were housed with adults, a practice and relatively small resident population was not widely encouraged. The paupers worked at a pattern that the federal government identi- manual jobs, including farming, and employees fied in the first decade of the twentieth century, included a superintendent, assistant superin- when Harris (1915:9) noted that almshouse tendent, physician, chaplain/teacher, a clerk, paupers tended to move in and out of alms- and others. As in Providence, merchants had houses rapidly. to give bonds when introducing foreigners; and The New York City almshouse was on as in New York, pregnant women were dis- 26 acres, also about 2.5 miles from the city, charged with their children after confinement, and had an associated 100-acre farm. As in when they were expected to seek support from Baltimore, there was an attempt to classify the fathers (Philadelphia Board of Guardians and separate the inmates—men from women 1827:14–16). and then by nationality and race. The sick and The Salem, Massachusetts, almshouse was insane were housed in a separate building, and on a farm about 1 mile from town. As in Boston, the insane were further separated from one outdoor relief was available, although only to another based on their conditions. Children families or aged and respectable individuals. were housed in detached buildings and Paupers worked at light industrial and some bound out for work when it was appropriate. agricultural tasks. Employees included the Strangers without settlement were sent away, superintendent and his wife, and a clerk, physi- and husbands who deserted their families were cian, chaplain, and druggist. About 25 percent expected to support them. Those paupers who of the inmates were foreign. Regulations about were able worked at various tasks, including bastardy were similar to those in the Boston spinning, weaving, carding, wool-picking, car- and New York institutions. As a result, there

20 were only two to three paupers in the cat- (Poynter 1969:xxiii, xxiv). Others believed that egory of pregnant women without support at it was at the root of undesirable practices such the Salem almshouse (Philadelphia Board of as improvident marriage, excessive breeding, Guardians 1827:17–18). and unfettered growth of population. Perhaps The Hartford, Connecticut, almshouse because of the increasing number of paupers, or and associated farm were located 1 mile out at least the perception that their numbers were of the city and were combined with a house growing at a more rapid rate than that of the of correction. As in the other states and cities, non-indigent population, there was a “genuine costs associated with pauper care had less- revulsion against pauperism as a way of life… ened since the opening of the almshouse, and especially after 1815” (Poynter 1969:xvii–xviii). in Hartford outdoor relief had been reduced to This revulsion combined with an assumption wood and some medicine. The inmates worked that self-help could improve the lives of labor- at farming and light industrial tasks, and only ers, and Parliament created the Poor Law those paupers having legal settlement received Amendment Act of 1834, which expressed spe- aid. Employees consisted of a steward and his cific dogmas about relief and challenged the old wife and a physician, who also was available to order as too permissive. Ultimately, the new assist outdoor paupers (Philadelphia Board of law created a centralized professional admin- Guardians 1827:19–20). istrative structure and a theoretical basis, Early studies in the United States—which the goal of which was to make pauperism less included an 1834 report on poorhouses, jails, and desirable than independent labor as a way of other institutions in New York, Massachusetts, life. The instrument of enforcement in England Connecticut, and Vermont—not only invento- was the Union Workhouse (Poynter 1969:xvii– ried physical facilities and public policies, they xviii, xxii–xxv). According to Poynter (1969: also attempted to classify paupers and criminals xxv), the same institution that seemed harsh and to analyze possible links among intemper- and oppressive to the lower classes appeared in ance, poverty, and criminality (Chipman 1834). a different light to the upper classes and phil- Similar studies were undertaken in England, anthropic individuals, who saw the workhouse where extensive literature was published as a bulwark to protect society from the star- about poverty, pauperism, and relief between vation and insurrection of the poor on the one the 1790s and the 1830s. The same period saw hand, and the “moral depravity and economic a revolution and counterrevolution in attitudes ruin of progressively increasing pauperism on towards poor relief. Nearly 250 years after its the other.” passage, the 1601 Act for the Relief of the Poor The alarm about an increasing pauper pop- had resulted in a “system” that was intensely ulation in Europe, which New York Secretary local and thus heterogeneous. As Poynter of State John Yates had estimated in the mid- described it, poor relief consisted of “a multitude 1820s as representing 10 percent of the total of practices within (and sometimes without) the population, was cause for concern in the United framework of a complicated aggregation of law.” States as well. The permanent pauper popula- This aggregation tended over time to become tion on the East Coast of the United States was increasingly permissive, “increasing the range but a fraction of Europe’s (.5 percent in New of action which local officials might take within York, 1.5 percent in Massachusetts, .6 percent the law” because there were no national poli- in Connecticut, 1 percent in New Hampshire, cies. The resulting flexibility was efficient in .4 percent in Delaware and Pennsylvania, and serving local needs, but the growing numbers none reported in Illinois) (Yates 1971:939–943), of paupers alarmed many critics, who believed but reformers such as Yates believed that the Poor Law to be “an important element in outdoor relief encouraged “the sturdy beggar that economic and social system in which dis- and profligate vagrant to become pension- tress so obviously occurred” (Poynter 1969:ix, ers upon the public funds” (Wagner 2005:9). xx, xxiii, xxv, 1). In addition, immigrants, many of them from According to some critics, the English Poor Europe, made up a disproportionate percent- Law was responsible for the development of age of the New York state pauper population “a legal establishment for the relief of poverty (27 percent in about 1824) (Yates 1971:942). [that] created the paupers it set out to relieve” After a study of the poor in New York and other

21 states and of poor laws in most of the states of occupants had received little public assistance the union, Yates concluded that the poor con- before entering the poorhouse, the fact that sisted of two classes—the permanent poor, who the men tended to be unskilled laborers and typically included idiots, lunatics, the blind, women either had no occupation or had been extremely aged and infirm individuals, the domestic servants meant that they occupied lame, and children; and the occasional or tem- “the most vulnerable sectors of the working porary poor. There were slightly more females class.” More women than men were dependent, than males. Most paupers were found in large and they tended to stay dependent longer. On cities and towns (Yates 1971:939–943). Yates the other hand, more elderly men than women remarked on the varieties of laws concerning were inmates because children were more likely settlement, and he urged the establishment to be willing to care for their mothers than for of poorhouses, remarking that in every state their fathers (Katz 1986:90–91). where that system prevailed, the evils of and Typically, poorhouse inmates had no chil- expenses associated with pauperism had less- dren, a characteristic that set them apart from ened (Yates 1971:1111). most nineteenth- to early twentieth-century Yates’s study resulted in the establish- families. Many had never married, and about ment in New York of county “houses of employ- 75 percent of the widows had no living chil- ment” that became the county almshouse dren or only one. Thus, paupers tended to enter system common in the Midwest and elsewhere poor homes and poor farms not because they (McClure 1968:4). In addition, Dorothea Dix’s were “particularly debauched, idle, or thrift- campaign in the 1830s to remove the mentally less. Rather, they were so poor that when the ill from almshouses began to bear fruit by the death of a spouse or sickness pushed them over 1850s, when a number of states funded and the ‘verge of pauperism,’ they were unlucky constructed asylums (Wagner 2005:10), thereby enough to lack grown children to whom they assisting in the segregation of one type of could turn for help.” In sum, Hoyt found nine- dependent class that everyone seemed to agree teenth-century poorhouse inmates to be liter- would benefit from professional treatment in ate, having attended school; from working-class a specialized public institution. Nonetheless, families, many of whom had engaged in agri- the pauper population and its care remained a culture; not so likely to earn livings through complex problem. Thomas Hazard’s 1851 report agricultural pursuits and thus possibly “caught on care of the poor and insane in Rhode Island in transition from agriculture to industry”; not revealed a layered and even chaotic system from pauper backgrounds; and generally tem- that probably was more or less typical of that perate, from families that were temperate as in many other states. The population itself was well. As Katz summarized the pattern, many heterogeneous, being comprised of the infirm, dependent individuals suffered from conditions blind, intemperate, imbecilic, insane, aged, and that accompanied working-class life, includ- ill, and of individuals abandoned by potential ing “[s]easonal work, fluctuating demands for caregivers, such as family members. Programs labor, and periodic [economic] depressions…” in towns attempting to bring order to the situ- (Katz 1986:91–92). ation typically placed paupers and the insane The numbers of individuals seeking aid in who had no home in a town asylum, adminis- almshouses and benevolent institutions, who tering outdoor relief to those who had a home received outdoor aid, or who were housed in or friends who would take them in, parceling hospitals and asylums declined by about half paupers out to the lowest bidder for whom they between 1850 and 1890. Furthermore, the would work, and contracting for their main- population never amounted to more than an tenance through the agency of a committee extremely small fraction of the general popu- (Hazard 1851:10–11, 15, 32, 85). lation even at its apex in 1850, when it com- A similar study by Dr. Charles S. Hoyt in prised 2,171 individuals out of a million, or ca. New York in 1874–1875 found that many of the two-tenths of one percent (U.S. Department characteristics described in Hazard persisted of the Interior, Census Office 1896:1,267). 25 years later. Hoyt found that, while most Nonetheless, as a class, paupers maintained a high profile and remained at the center of  Dix was an American social reformer who worked on behalf of the mentally ill. competing ideas about indigent care as well

22 as of concern from the public, local and state believed that defectives of various classes governments, and reformers. In states such “clog[ged] the wheels” of industry, and that as Minnesota and Kansas, for example, the mental defectives, like the insane, should be county-run poorhouses and poor farms were segregated in institutions where their repro- thoroughly entrenched, and they remained so duction could be controlled. They were, after even in states that supported state-run insti- all, people “whose minds cannot be cured but tutions for the care of special classes such who can transmit their defect, with its train of as the insane, blind, and deaf, and children pauperism, prostitution, criminality, and other (McClure 1968:20, 36–38; Kansas Emergency grievous consequences” (Devine 1916:10–12). Relief Committee 1935:1). In many regions of Devine linked the condition of being men- the country, states created state-level boards tally defective to the condition of poverty and that assumed expanded roles in overseeing the pauperism (Devine 1916:9), despite earlier care of paupers and other needy classes, even studies to the contrary (Hoyt summarized in in institutions having no state-level affilia- Katz 1986:91–92). It was predictable, then, that tions. Eventually, the American Social Science the poorhouse and poor farm, as two of the insti- Association founded a Conference of Boards tutions having concentrations of both paupers of Public Charities that promoted collection and those suffering from a variety of mental of uniform statistics by state boards (McClure and physical conditions, should be targeted 1968:73–75). by reformers of the early twentieth century. According to Wagner (2005:154), the Alexander Johnson, for example, who was appearance of social welfare specialists in the General Secretary of the National Conference late nineteenth century and their work to collect of Charities and Correction, thought that poor- data about paupers resulted in renewed attacks houses, if not redesigned, had the potential on the poorhouse system. Probably bolstered to “encourage and foster degeneracy” in cases by work of the English where it did nothing more for “degenerate of 1905–1909, which recommended a “clean human beings but to keep them alive and allow sweep” of English Poor Law and criticized them to increase and multiply…” (Johnson the existing structure for the care of paupers, 1911:5–6). American social workers became increasingly A favorite secondary theme of the reform- critical of poorhouses, insisting that depen- ers was that a significant proportion, perhaps dent care could be better offered in “specialized even a majority, of those receiving care in institutions and by social work professionals” poorhouses were related to one another. The (Wagner 2005:154; Webb and Webb 1909:ix, statistical study by the U.S. Department of the xiv). Interior, Census Office (1896:361) and the late The tenor of the debate over and criticism nineteenth-century work by Hoyt had found of pauper care in both Europe and the United that there were insufficient data to draw firm States during the first third of the twenti- conclusions about the occurrence of pauperism eth century was heavily colored by the new within families and over multiple generations. science of eugenics, which asserted that certain Yet reformers such as George Warfield wrote classes of individuals should not be allowed in 1915 that a large number of those receiving to reproduce. In England in 1908, the English relief were related by blood or marriage. “So Royal Commission on the Care and Control of striking was this fact that it raises a question the Feebleminded concluded that reproduc- whether the dependent element of the popula- tion of that class should be controlled, while tion, and, from many indications, the defective Dr. Martin W. Barr of Pennsylvania wrote in and criminal elements also, do not belong to 1912 that “the modern institutional care of the a comparatively small number of families in feeble-minded [was] the utilization of a waste which degeneracy is marked” (Warfield 1915: product…” (Devine 1916:10). Edward Devine, v). with Margaret Sanger and many other social The criticism of poor farms and poorhouses reformers, believed that the mentally defec- persisted and grew among many reformers tive were unfit for parenthood because of their after World War I, one of the most outspoken biologic character and their inability to give critics being Harry C. Evans. Inspired by criti- children moral or economic training. Devine cal remarks by the Secretary of Labor in 1924

23 and using data collected by the Department of noted that in the United States at large there Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics and several had been a “marked decline” in the number of fraternal organizations, Evans published a almshouse paupers between 1880 and 1925, study that purported to be an accurate rep- although some selected regions had experi- resentation of conditions on American poor enced an increase. Finally, Stewart’s statistics, farms. As a number of subsequent studies like those published in the U.S. Department pointed out, Evans’s work was flawed because of the Interior study of 1896 that enumerated his approach to the data was clearly driven a broader population of needy individuals, by certain foregone conclusions: the poor farm revealed that the percentages of almshouse system degraded the human condition, poor paupers per 100,000 United States population farms were a waste of taxpayers’ money, and were always minuscule, being .0013 in 1880, their inhabitants lived in wretched conditions. .0012 in 1890, .001 in 1904, .0009 in 1910, and Above all, Evans asserted, the poor farm was .0007 in 1923 (U.S. Department of Commerce, a breeding ground for generations of mental Bureau of the Census 1925:6–7, 9). defectives and feebleminded individuals, many The same year the Department of Commerce of whom were foreign-born. He believed that study was published, Estelle Stewart’s study of actions should be taken, among them steriliza- the American almshouse was published as a tion, to refine and maintain the purity of the bulletin of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. “superior human stock” that had been polluted Like Evans, Stewart referenced statistics gath- by foreign-born and their feeble-minded chil- ered by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and dren (Evans 1926:1, 3, 6–20, 93–99). fraternal organizations. Unlike Evans, whose The reform agenda that was driven, in findings appear to have been driven by a par- part, by the eugenics and nativistic movements ticular point of view then prevalent among the of the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen- more extreme social reformers, Stewart used turies, was balanced by government studies, the data to discuss topics such as administra- two of which were published in 1925. The first, tive control, the character of inmates, and the which examined pauper censuses taken in practical operation of facilities. She opened her 1850, 1860, 1870, 1880, 1890, 1904, 1910, and study with a number of observations concern- 1923, started with a definition of an almshouse ing the roots of the American almshouse in as “an institution supported or controlled by English poor law. She noted that England had town, municipal, county, or State authorities passed from an era characterized by “promis- and used for the shelter of persons who are cuous, unsupervised” indigent support, when without means of self-support and who have paupers were maintained by private and public no relatives able and willing or legally bound charity and lived as they pleased, to a new era to aid them.” The study also noted that alms- of maintaining paupers in public institutions. house pauperism was not a complete measure Americans noted the changes in England and of poverty, because recipients of outdoor relief adopted the institutional format “in their own and pauper inmates of other institutions experiment in nation building.” By the 1920s, were not always included in enumerations. pauper institutions were being supplanted by The author, W. M. Stewart, was able to make the older system of outdoor relief, in which certain conclusions based on statistics col- indigents were granted enough aid in the forms lected in 1922–1923: paupers in almshouses of money, food, and fuel to enable them to live were a “rapidly shifting group,” many members at home (Stewart 1925:iii). of which were not paupers at all because they According to Stewart, there were alms- were not permanently indigent; and there were houses in every state in the early to mid-1920s, marked differences in the degree of perma- and in 40 of 47 states they were run by coun- nency of poorhouse populations within different parts of the country. Stewart’s study revealed  McClure’s study of Minnesota poor farms and that the West-South Central region (Arkansas, homes for the aged (1968:90–91) suggested that some of the decrease in the almshouse population may have Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas) had, by far, occurred because, as states built institutions for certain the least number of paupers in almshouses special classes of needy citizens, some almshouse per 100,000 population (U.S. Department of residents were “siphoned off to the new facilities.”  Stewart’s term “almshouse” was meant to include Commerce, Bureau of the Census 1925:2). He the poor farm model (Stewart 1925:1).

24 ties. Indiana had a state law that mandated tively small amount of money per inmate for an almshouse in every county, and only New board. The county or town provided clothing, Mexico had no almshouses. In a few states, bedding, fuel, medical necessities, and tobacco. there were both county and city almshouses. The lessee paid a minimal rent for the farm, In counties where there were no almshouses, furnished his own implements, and was entitled paupers were provided outdoor relief, were to all produce. The contract model was common placed with private individuals under contract, to counties in Alabama, Arkansas, Kansas, furnished clothing and medical care, or placed Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, in an almshouse in a neighboring county, which South Dakota, Tennessee, and Texas (Stewart then was reimbursed for associated expenses 1925:5–7). (Stewart 1925:1, 3). Stewart was particularly critical of small In 40 of 47 states, administrative control almshouses, which she characterized as often was on a county level, with commissioners, being dilapidated, inadequate, and even trustees, or supervisors being responsible for indecent. With the North Carolina Board of related activities. Only Michigan had a state- Charities, she concluded that the county home level department with the power to administer was a failure and possessed certain draw- state laws and enforce recommendations. In backs: such homes provided care for paupers 13 states, agents of state boards made yearly “against tremendous odds,” an inordinate inspections. The general pattern, however, amount of money was required annually to meant that state authorities and the general maintain them, thousands of acres of land on public knew little, if anything, about alms- associated farms were idle, efforts put into houses or poor farms (Stewart 1925:1, 3). care were duplicated, and much employment In 1922, there were 78,090 almshouse res- was unproductive. She agreed with a number idents in the entire country. Of those, Stewart of state boards that consolidation of local classified 20 percent as crippled, 16 percent as almshouses and poor farms and the establish- feebleminded, 4 percent as blind, 3 percent as ment of district facilities would be the most insane, .1 percent as epileptic, and .07 percent efficient and economical approach. Certain as deaf-mute. Presumably, the balance of states were working towards such a model, but 43,805, or 56 percent, were indigent aged, chil- other states faced fierce opposition from local dren, or some other category of dependent, but superintendents and county officials, for whom Stewart did not enumerate their condition(s). the local institutions had become integral ele- Almost all states had laws that allowed them ments in the counties’ economic and political to remove the mentally ill from almshouses, systems, even when the number of inmates but only New York and states in New England had dwindled to almost nothing. Stewart con- made an effort to segregate this class. Stewart cluded by urging that the care of the “indigent believed that New England almshouses, which old,” who comprised the greatest part of the mostly provided refuge, care, and some comfort county home and poor farm population by the to the old and infirm, most nearly fulfilled the 1920s, be given the same “thought and consid- institution’s “real purpose” (Stewart 1925:4–5). eration” that the care of other specific classes According to Stewart, 88 percent of the (blind, feebleminded, epileptic, and children) institutions were directly managed by a county had received (Stewart 1925:41, 47, 50, 52). official or by a hired superintendent or keeper The three comprehensive national studies who answered to poor officials. The remain- conducted in the early to mid-1920s concluded ing 12 percent were run through a contract that: 1) the poorhouse population appeared to system in which the farm and almshouse were have peaked in numbers; 2) some poorhouses leased to an operator, who cared for the poor. were becoming primarily homes for the aged, Any produce raised on the farm belonged to the but the populations still were heterogeneous institution, and what was not consumed was and included the ill, feebleminded, insane, sold and the proceeds deposited in the local deaf, blind, able-bodied and mentally capable, treasury or made available to the almshouse and children; 3) there had been little change superintendent. The contract system that was in methods of institutional management, typical of the remaining 12 percent of institu- 88 percent of the institutions being managed tions consisted of the lessee being paid a rela- by a salaried superintendent who reported to

25 county officials; 4) poorhouse care was very tion during the 1930s, when a national depres- expensive, and the operating cost per inmate sion increased the number of poor. As a result was directly inverse to the size of the poorhouse; of the economic crisis, poorhouses continued to 5) poorhouse facilities varied greatly in size, have an important place in the welfare system construction, and state of repair; and 6) there during the 1930s (Kansas Emergency Relief were many cases of neglect and mistreatment. Committee 1935:v), and a proportional increase Recommendations stemming from the studies in the number of those who were both poor and included closing local poorhouses, creating aged assured the persistent use of county homes larger, nonlocal institutions, and urging states as facilities for the aged. The county home and to take over direct care of the aged just as they farm retained that function, even after passage had done with other categories of indigents of the Social Security Act, which disallowed (McClure 1968:129–134). payment of old age benefits to inmates of public The government-sponsored studies and institutions (McClure 1968:162–165), primar- Evans’s widely read, if not always accurate, ily because a relatively large segment of the study, proved to be influential ones that spurred population was not covered by the Act. Indeed, states to perform their own investigations after entire occupations such as public employees, 1925. Arthur James, for example, studied the and agricultural and domestic workers (those Virginia system and concurred with Evans most likely to be paupers in the nineteenth that many county poorhouses were institutions century) were excluded, as well as anyone who “symbolic of the uttermost despair of mankind, had not made at least 10 years of contributory a word to connote poverty, neglect, disease, filth, payments (Wagner 2005:132–133). loneliness and death itself. It has continued as According to McClure, the poorhouse con- a perfect testimonial of man’s inhumanity to tinued to serve the needs, albeit on a lesser man, as well as a conspicuous example of ineffi- scale, of the homeless whose population tended cient and reactionary government.” Countering to grow during the twentieth century because Evans’s findings, however, James criticized of a lengthening life span, a shift from rural the earlier work for only “pointing out a few to urban living that occurred after World of the worst institutions” and not recognizing War II, the emergence of a youth-centered Virginia’s successes as it gradually changed its society with little disposition to take on care of system (James 1926:5). The state legislature in elderly parents, and the development of a new 1918, for example, had taken steps to consoli- philosophy in the mid-twentieth century that date county and city almshouses into district demanded a secure old age (McClure 1968:231). homes, an approach that James applauded for Additionally, Social Security coverage of the its economic benefits and appropriate response disabled, who had always comprised one of to a dwindling aged population who might then the largest components of the poorhouse/poor receive outdoor relief or be boarded privately farm population, was not allowed until 1956, (James 1926:21). He concluded that the issue and then only with certain requirements. In of care in almshouses was a complicated one fact, a great number of the typical pauper class because the institution was “part of the whole were not eligible for many federal government problem of poverty and poor relief in the locali- relief programs (Wagner 2005:133), and so the ties, which involves the entire social life of the poorhouse and farm remained a much-needed people, and cannot be separated from the local- safety net in many parts of the country until ities as a case of smallpox or insanity. Family the 1970s. life, employment, community organization, While some scholars focused on the narrow community institutions, local government, and and broad patterns of pauper care during its many other things, play a part in almshouse centuries of history in the Americas, Michael affairs, and the community that is not working Katz provided a summary of trends in the on all these is not really making any headway heyday of pauper homes and poor farms (ca. on the almshouse problem” (James 1926:22). 1870s–1940s) and characterized the institu- The institution that was widely held by tions’ inhabitants. In general, Katz concluded reformers and social scientists to be a persistent that during the nineteenth and early twentieth and problematic element in the landscape of centuries, the poorhouse was not a monolithic indigent care received something of a rejuvena- institution because it sheltered so many differ-

26 ent kinds of people who sought both short-term believed that the role of the church and long-term relief. Inmates were a heteroge- was to collect voluntary alms. neous group, their heterogeneity “mirror[ing] • In England, the system increasingly the complex causes of destitution.…” As such, became focused on local political the poorhouse was a “structural artifact of structures to raise taxes and provide working-class life.” Evans’s conclusions aside, oversight of tax collection, distribution, most inmates did not come from “a degraded use, and record keeping. culture of poverty marked by illiteracy and • By the seventeenth century, there intemperance.” Nor were they “apathetic, were attempts to classify the poor, the unwilling to work, and permanently pauper- broadest categories being dependent ized.” Rather, they were more often families in children, the impotent poor (the lame, crises created by temporary unemployment, blind, and those unable to work), harsh weather, illness, or old age (Katz 1986:92– and the able-bodied poor who either 94). The poorhouse and poor farm provided a worked or were committed to houses of structure of relief that, if not ideal, persisted correction or jails. well into the mid-twentieth century because it • Increasingly, English laws concerning met specific social needs. the poor became entwined in the A review of the history of indigent care country’s economic and social systems. in Europe and the Americas suggests the With a lack of standardized national following: structure provided by Parliament, the laws tended to be varied and • Europe had two different traditions of permissive, reflecting local conditions care after the Reformation: and values. Certain benefits accrued o The first, whose nucleus was in to local structures, businesses, and Spain, spread to Latin America, politicians, who provided services to Mexico, and Texas. Because the and oversight of the poor. Catholic Church retained its • The English principles of local properties, the church continued to responsibility, family responsibility, and play a leading role in indigent care legal settlement became the basis for and worked in association with North American poor relief systems. the royalty, influential individuals, • As in England, American colonial guilds, cofradias, and local poor relief policy was local, and political structures. The system there were differences between was relatively well-organized and southern and northern colonies in its depended heavily on hospitals, or administration. hospices, that cared for the sick, • Through the eighteenth century, infirm, and aged; orphans; and outdoor relief was the prevalent form other needy classes. of support. o The second, whose nucleus was • A few public institutions existed for in England and western Europe, specific classes of dependents, such as spread to the non-Spanish North orphans. American colonies. Of necessity, • By the 1820s, a common pattern in the after churches were largely United States was to house different stripped of their properties in the classes of paupers in single almshouses Reformation, care was provided that had agricultural land attached. within a secular system that The able-bodied worked, sometimes assumed that the community was with the help of petty criminals. obligated to relieve the suffering of Typically, almshouses and poor farms the poor, relied on the law of legal were located in proximity to urban settlement to restrict the movement centers, often 1–3 miles distant. of beggars and laborers, asserted • A revulsion in England against that those needy who were able to pauperism resulted in a major overhaul work were obligated to do so, and of the relief system and creation of a

27 centralized professional administration in the late nineteenth century and whose purpose was to make relief less mounted a full-scale attack on the desirable than labor. This revulsion poorhouse and poor farm system. was mirrored in the United States, • The social philosophy of eugenics where public officials undertook heavily colored debate about indigent studies of poorhouse populations. A care in the United States and Europe. contemporaneous reform movement Social scientists promoted the in the United States identified outdoor separation of sexes as well as other relief as the culprit in the system categories of indigents, and they and encouraged the establishment of advocated the sterilization of those poorhouses because they were believed believed to be unfit to reproduce, citing to be more economical to operate. the social and economic costs to the • During the first half of the nineteenth public of unregulated intercourse. They century in the United States, there linked poverty and pauperism, and by was a perception among reformers that extension the poorhouse and poor farm the pauper class was increasing at a system, with the condition of being rate disproportionate to the general mentally defective. Criticism reached population. Laws pertaining to relief an apex in the mid-1920s, when social were criticized for contributing to the scientists asserted that the poorhouse perpetuation and growth of the pauper population was comprised largely of population. individuals related by blood. • By the mid-nineteenth century, • Studies by government agencies that reformers increasingly worked to were based on census records, on the identify different classes of dependents, other hand, asserted that almshouse encourage their segregation from paupers represented a rapidly shifting one another, and provide for the group, that not all were permanently care of specific classes in state-run indigent, and that the decrease in institutions. numbers from 1850 to 1890 had • Increasingly in the second third of continued to the mid-1920s. the nineteenth century, reformers • The depression of the 1930s rejuvenated attempted to classify poorhouse the poorhouse and poor farm systems occupants and analyze the root causes because of an increase in the numbers of pauperism. of indigents. • Paupers enumerated in federal • The Social Security Act of 1935 and censuses beginning in 1850 represented subsequent legislation provided some a minute percentage of the total United relief but did not cover the majority States population (two-tenths of of the residents of poor farms and one percent in 1850), and their numbers poorhouses until the 1960s. steadily declined to 1890. Typically, the men were unskilled laborers and Pauper Care in Texas the women were domestic servants. Agricultural workers were heavily Pauper care in Texas has a history that represented. Most institutionalized spanned almost 150 years. Rooted in Spanish paupers did not have families (children traditions that expected the church, civil or spouses) to provide for their care. authorities, and families to care for the needy, • During the second half of the nineteenth pauper care rapidly became embraced within century, the number of state-level the laws of the Republic of Texas. By the Civil oversight boards steadily increased, War, practices of care in Texas closely paral- and by the end of the century there leled those of other states: the greatest number was a national Conference of Boards of indigents, who were a heterogeneous popu- of Public Charities that promoted lation, received care locally within a system collection of uniform statistics. that was overseen by county officials; the • Social welfare specialists appeared remainder—those whose condition had been

28 attributed to insanity, or were deaf, dumb, or and the church. Municipal ordinances stated blind—were segregated and accommodated to that the city had a responsibility to assist the extent possible in state institutions. orphans, widows, the aged and infirm, and the As in other states, the pauper population in poor, a reiteration of Spain’s pre-Reformation Texas was heterogeneous and their care lacked belief system concerning the obligation of the a systematic approach. Rather, laws govern- community to provide relief to those less for- ing care were permissive: few state laws were tunate (Borah 1966). But unlike Spain, Latin passed, and so local mores prevailed concern- America, and Mexico in the early nineteenth ing the amount of support offered, segregation century, no formal apparatus existed to deliver of classes of indigents, requirements for settle- relief in Bexar. ment, responsibilities of family members, and With revolution and formation of a Republic other pertinent issues. Texas also was one of in 1835–1836, care for those in need changed numerous states in which state-level oversight to a system rooted in English poor law. An act by a professional board was delayed until the approved on December 20, 1836, organized jus- 1920s, and then occurred only incompletely. As tices’ courts and defined their powers and juris- a result, while there were some reformers and diction, and it created and defined the office and health care specialists who published studies powers of commissioners of roads and revenue. that pointed out the shortcomings of the state’s Section 29 specified that it was the “duty of approach to indigent care, focusing particu- said board of commissioners to provide at the larly on the insane, there was little legislation expense of the county, for the support of indi- passed that was based on those studies. gent, lame, and blind persons, who are unable To a great extent, the history of pauper to support themselves” (Gammel 1898a:1201– care in Texas paralleled that of other states: 1206). This act was modified in 1846 by a law social scientists of the early twentieth century passed by the First Legislature of the State of decried the poor farm because they believed it Texas that organized county courts and gave was destructive to the very populations it sought them not only the previously vested powers to serve and contributory to the persistence “to provide for the support of indigent persons of pauperism. Renewed concern for indigent resident in their county, who cannot support populations prior to the 1930s and increases themselves,” but also to provide for “the burial in their numbers during the Great Depression of paupers” (Gammel 1898b:1639–1642). resulted in the creation of state programs and References in state law suggest that a bureaucracies designed to provide relief to pauper population existed in the Republic and needy citizens, including those traditionally young state, and reports from Houston describ- served by poor farms and homes. However, the ing local conditions reveal that the numbers employment and other qualifications embed- were sufficiently large in that urban area ded within programs such as Social Security to require the creation of a charity hospital left traditional residents of poor farms unable shortly after Houston was incorporated. Those to qualify for assistance and assured the sur- numbers apparently increased after the capital vival of county-based programs for another 30 was moved from Houston to Austin and local years. municipal revenue fell. The capacity of the city The earliest records concerning care of hospital became overwhelmed by the numbers indigents and other needy individuals in Texas of sick poor, and the city council was forced to provide only scant information about the size sign a resolution in 1839 limiting patients to of the population prior to 1850s and the system those who were applying to be resident citizens used to deliver care. De la Teja and Wheat (1985) recorded needs for charity in the urban  The resolution probably was a reflection both of the numbers of European immigrants entering center of Bexar in the 1810s through the 1830s the Republic through its ports and the numbers of that resulted from poverty rooted in political individuals and families immigrating from the United struggles, economic disarray, natural disasters, States. Houston in the 1830s and 1840s was a hotbed of speculation in land certificates and attracted numerous and disease. The three vehicles available for buyers and sellers of land scrip. Once they had sold their the delivery of care, specifically in the forms of scrip, veterans and those who had received certificates food and shelter, were a citizens’ board that col- by virtue of their immigration status often had little in the way of money or other items of value with which to lected and distributed supplies, private charity, support themselves.

29 and who lived within the corporate limits of the steps the state took to provide for the care Harris County. The local newspaper urged citi- of certain classes of paupers. In 1855, Sam zens to aid the poor, and the council increased Houston was moved to address the issue of the the residency requirement to six months. But impact of paupers on Texas twice: a letter from the numbers of indigents apparently increased, Independence on July 24 expressed his oppo- together with the cost of their care (Writers’ sition to “the policy of European potentates Program 1942:325). and statesmen, to throw upon our shores their The presence of foreign immigrants among refuse population of convicts and paupers, to the pauper population in the 1840s raised pervert our ballot boxes, and populate our poor concerns among nativists who also expressed houses…” (Jones 1859:607), while his December prejudice against Hispanic people. William speech in Nacogdoches stated his opposition Kennedy, for example, compared the slave to a bill before Congress that would allow for- labor that made it possible to create wealth eigners to vote after a six-months’ residence in in Texas with what he called the “motley the United States. He noted that even felons pauper population” that fulfilled the same role and former residents of European poorhouses to the “great landed proprietors of Central “with the mark of the fetters or the parish garb Mexico, the monopolists of the soil” (Kennedy upon their limbs” would be able to vote (Thrall 1841:369). There was suspicion of European 1879:561). immigrants, as well, who resident Texans Concern with the foreign indigent appears assumed comprised the majority of paupers to have been segregated during the 1850s from and might league themselves against “true a genuine desire to aid resident citizens who Americans.” Frederick Law Olmsted character- were in need due to conditions beyond their ized the efforts of the German royalty that cul- control. In 1853, for example, Guy Morrison minated in the formation of the Adelsverein as Bryan, nephew of Stephen F. Austin, intro- being directed at “the diminution of pauperism duced a bill to the state legislature for the erec- [in Germany] by the organized assistance and tion of a lunatic hospital; and two years later, protection of emigrants” (Olmsted 1857:173). E. M. Pease drew the attention of the Little wonder, then, that “American” citizens of legislature to the need for state institutions San Antonio, which had a large population of that would care for the insane, deaf, dumb, and both Hispanics and Germans, were alarmed by blind. The efforts of Bryan and Pease came to the results of an election in the 1850s in which fruition in 1856, when a bill to fund a state those two groups voted against the “American asylum was passed. Speaking in support of the candidates.” The Germans were classified as bill, Guy Bryan described the current state of “European paupers,” while the Mexicans were care for the insane and reiterated the respon- characterized as “ignorant, vicious, besotted sibility of the government. He remarked that greasers” and “peons” who took their direction every citizen should be interested in the erec- from priests (Olmsted 1857:499). tion of an asylum that would be staffed, as the The federal census of 1850 enumerated governor had imagined, with professionals only 9 native and 1 foreign pauper in Texas out who were skilled in the causes and treatment of a total population of 212,592. These 10 indi- of insanity because insanity was “the heritage viduals were located in Anderson, Cherokee, of all classes.” At any time, any Texan might Cass, DeWitt, Fayette, Liberty, Matagorda, and become a “raving maniac.” The lot of such a Tyler Counties (Figure 1). Of the eight counties person would be the same as that of felons: represented, only five offered monetary support “chains and a cell in the county jail.” Bryan to paupers (Figure 2) despite laws passed by the then described the system as it existed in the legislature. Of these, Anderson had spent $14 mid-nineteenth century: “Jails are often made per month, Cherokee had spent $120, Fayette asylums for the poor, and the raving maniac.” had spent $40, and Cass and Liberty had spent He reminded his fellow legislators that “[t]he $75, all for unspecified amounts of time. government is responsible to the people for It can be safely assumed that the numbers its omissions, as well as for its commissions, of indigents were underreported in the federal and must take care of its citizens” (Nelson census, given the amount of public concern 1926:1–3). about their numbers during the 1850s and Passage of a bill to construct state insti-

30 Dallam Sherman Hansford Ochiltree Lipscomb 1850 Hartley Moore Hutchinson Roberts Hemphill

Oldham Potter Carson Gray Wheeler

Deaf Smith Randall Armstrong Donley Collingsworth

Parmer Castro Swisher Briscoe Hall Childress

Hardeman

Bailey Lamb Hale Floyd Motley Cottle Wilbarger Foard Wichita Clay Montague Lamar Red Cooke Grayson Fannin Cochran Hockley Lubbock Crosby Dickens King Knox Baylor Archer River Bowie Delta Morris Titus Jack Wise Denton Collin Franklin 1/0 Yoakum Terry Lynn Garza Kent Stonewall Haskell Throckmorton Young Hunt Hopkins Camp Cass Rockwall Rains Marion Wood Palo Parker Tarrant Dallas Upshur Gaines Dawson Borden Scurry Fisher Jones Shackelford Stephens Pinto Kaufman Van Harrison Zandt Gregg Hood Smith Johnson Ellis Andrews Martin Howard Mitchell Nolan Taylor Callahan Eastland Erath Somervell Henderson Rusk Panola Navarro Cherokee Hill Anderson El Paso Bosque Shelby Loving Winkler Ector Midland Glasscock Coke Comanche 1/0 Sterling Runnels 1/0 Nacogdoches Coleman Brown Hamilton Freestone Limestone Hudspeth McLennan San Culberson Ward Crane Tom Mills Houston Augustine Upton Reagan Green Coryell Leon Angelina Sabine Reeves Irion Concho Falls McCulloch Lampasas San Saba Trinity Newton Robertson Jasper Bell Madison Schleicher Menard Polk Jeff Pecos Burnet Milam Walker 2/0 Davis Crockett Mason Llano Brazos San Tyler Williamson Jacinto Sutton Burleson Grimes Kimble Liberty Hardin Montgomery Gillespie Blanco Travis Lee Terrell Washington 1/0 Orange Bastrop Presidio Kerr Waller Jefferson Edwards Hays 1/0 Austin Brewster Val Kendall Harris Verde Real Comal Caldwell Chambers Bandera Fayette Colorado Fort Guadalupe Bend Gonzales Galveston Bexar Lavaca Kinney Uvalde Medina Wharton Brazoria Wilson 1/1 Dewitt Jackson Victoria Maverick Zavala Frio Atascosa Karnes 1/0 Goliad Matagorda Calhoun Bee Refugio Dimmit LaSalle McMullen Live Oak

San Patricio Aransas Jim Webb Wells Nueces Duval

Kleberg

Brooks # Native-Born/# Foreign-Born Paupers Zapata Kenedy

Starr Willacy Hidalgo

Cameron PAI/08/slh

Figure 1. Numbers of native- and foreign-born paupers supported by counties, 1850. Data source is U.S. Total Texas population 212,592. Federal Census, 1850. tutions for the care of certain classes of needy, that the county judge be notified of the -pres many of whom were the responsibility of county ence of a person identified as being an idiot or government, resulted in the erection and insane. The judge ordered the person brought opening of the Texas Institute for the Deaf and and tried before a jury of 12 men. If the jury Dumb and Institution for the Education of the found the individual to be insane, he was either Blind in 1857, and the State Lunatic Asylum sent to the asylum or handed over to a friend in 1860–1861 (Nelson 1926:7–8, 21, 33–36). who had to post bond assuring his safekeeping. Nonetheless, the majority of individuals clas- Idiots who could be kept safely in the county sified as defectives remained the responsibility and persons who were infected with contagious of county-level government. In part, this was diseases had to be kept in the county. Preference due to the limited space available in the state for admission to the asylum was given to indi- institutions. gents and patients who had been ill less than The legal method of commitment required one year. Where indigents were concerned, the

31 Dallam Sherman Hansford Ochiltree Lipscomb 1850 Hartley Moore Hutchinson Roberts Hemphill

Oldham Potter Carson Gray Wheeler

Deaf Smith Randall Armstrong Donley Collingsworth

Parmer Castro Swisher Briscoe Hall Childress

Hardeman

Bailey Lamb Hale Floyd Motley Cottle Wilbarger Foard Wichita Clay Montague Lamar Red Cooke Grayson Fannin Cochran Hockley Lubbock Crosby Dickens King Knox Baylor Archer River Bowie Delta Morris Titus Jack Wise Denton Collin Franklin Cass Yoakum Terry Lynn Garza Kent Stonewall Haskell Throckmorton Young Hunt Hopkins Camp Rockwall Rains Marion Wood Palo Parker Tarrant Dallas Upshur Gaines Dawson Borden Scurry Fisher Jones Shackelford Stephens Pinto Kaufman Van Harrison Zandt Gregg Hood Smith Johnson Ellis Andrews Martin Howard Mitchell Nolan Taylor Callahan Eastland Erath Somervell Henderson Rusk Panola Hill Navarro Cherokee El Paso Bosque Loving Coke Comanche Shelby Winkler Ector Midland Glasscock Anderson Sterling Runnels Nacogdoches Coleman Brown Hamilton Freestone Limestone Hudspeth McLennan San Culberson Ward Crane Tom Mills Houston Augustine Upton Reagan Green Coryell Leon Angelina Sabine Reeves Irion Concho Falls McCulloch Lampasas San Saba Trinity Newton Robertson Jasper Bell Madison Schleicher Menard Polk Tyler Jeff Pecos Burnet Milam Walker Davis Crockett Mason Llano Brazos San Williamson Jacinto Sutton Burleson Grimes Kimble Hardin Montgomery Gillespie Blanco Travis Lee Terrell Washington Liberty Orange Bastrop Presidio Kerr Waller Jefferson Edwards Hays Fayette Austin Brewster Val Kendall Harris Verde Real Comal Caldwell Chambers Bandera Colorado Fort Guadalupe Bend Gonzales Galveston Bexar Lavaca Kinney Uvalde Medina Wharton Brazoria Wilson Dewitt Jackson Victoria Matagorda Maverick Zavala Frio Atascosa Karnes Goliad Calhoun Bee Refugio Dimmit LaSalle McMullen Live Oak

San Patricio Aransas Jim Webb Wells Nueces Duval

Kleberg County Offering Monetary Support for Paupers Brooks Jim Hogg Zapata Kenedy

Starr Willacy Hidalgo

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Figure 2. Counties offering monetary support for paupers, 1850. Total Texas population 212,592. Data source is U.S. Federal Census, 1850. county of origin was required to pay $2.00 per . . the support of paupers and sick persons…” week per indigent patient to the state (Nelson (Gammel 1898c:1212, 1215). Indigent care also 1926:36–37). was described as a local concern in cities such as The county-level character of indigent Houston, where the cost of care had increased care was reiterated in state legislation that to such an extent by 1858 that the local news- incorporated cities and spelled out their paper suggested establishing an almshouse in responsibilities to paupers. The 1858 Act to connection with the city hospital. Such action incorporate Indianola, for example, allowed would reduce the pauper accounts by $1,500 the city board to provide “for the support of per year (Writers’ Program 1942:325), a sum paupers and others while in the hospital, and that suggested a considerable number of for their burial in death…,” and it specified paupers under the care of the city. A typical that the hospital fund was “declared sacred for. county might have been Collin, where records

32 Dallam Sherman Hansford Ochiltree Lipscomb 1860 Hartley Moore Hutchinson Roberts Hemphill

Oldham Potter Carson Gray Wheeler

Deaf Smith Randall Armstrong Donley Collingsworth

Parmer Castro Swisher Briscoe Hall Childress

Hardeman

Bailey Lamb Hale Floyd Motley Cottle Wilbarger Foard Wichita Clay Red River Montague Grayson Lamar Cochran Hockley Lubbock Crosby Dickens King Knox Baylor Archer Cooke Fannin 1/0 Bowie Delta Titus Cass Jack Wise Denton Collin Hopkins Franklin Morris Yoakum Terry Lynn Garza Kent Stonewall Haskell Throckmorton Young Hunt Camp 5/0 Rains Rockwall Marion Wood Upshur Parker Tarrant Dallas Kaufman Gaines Dawson Borden Scurry Fisher Jones Shackelford Stephens Palo Pinto Harrison 6/0 Van Zandt Johnson Gregg 6/0 Hood Ellis Smith Henderson Rusk Panola Andrews Martin Howard Mitchell Nolan Taylor Callahan Eastland 1/0 1/0 Erath 2/0 3/1 Somervell Navarro Cherokee 15/0 Hill Shelby El Paso Bosque Loving Winkler Ector Midland Coke Comanche Anderson Glasscock Sterling Runnels Freestone 7/0 Nacogdoches 1/0 Brown Coleman Hamilton 1/0 11/0 San Hudspeth Culberson McLennan Ward Tom Green Mills Limestone Houston Augustine Crane Reagan Coryell Sabine Reeves Upton Leon Angelina Irion Concho Falls 11/0 McCulloch Lampasas Bell Trinity Newton San Saba Robertson Jasper 1/0 Madison Polk Tyler Schleicher Menard 3/0 Walker Pecos Burnet Milam 1/0 Jeff Davis Crockett Grimes 2/0 Mason Llano Williamson Brazos 1/0 San 2/0 2/1 Jacinto Sutton Kimble Burleson Gillespie Travis Liberty Hardin Blanco Lee Montgomery Terrell 0/1 1/0 12/2 2/0 Orange Hays Bastrop Washington Presidio Kerr Edwards 1/1 Fayette Kendall 1/0 Austin Jefferson Brewster Val Verde Waller Harris Real Comal 0/1 3/0 Chambers Bandera Caldwell Colorado Bexar Guadalupe Lavaca Fort Bend Gonzales Galveston Kinney Uvalde Medina 12/3 2/0 Wharton Dewitt Brazoria Wilson Jackson Atascosa 3/1 Matagorda Maverick Zavala Frio Karnes Victoria 1/0 2/0 3/1 Goliad Calhoun Dimmit LaSalle Bee Refugio McMullen Live Oak

San Patricio Aransas Jim Wells Webb Nueces Duval

Kleberg

Brooks # Native-Born/# Foreign-Born Paupers Zapata Jim Hogg Kenedy

Starr Willacy Hidalgo

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Figure 3. Numbers of native- and foreign-born paupers supported by counties, 1860. Total Texas population 604,215. Data source is U.S. Federal Census, 1860. in 1858–1859 listed four cases of support: in total population of 604,215. These individuals two cases, county residents were given $10 and were located in 35 counties, with the great- $45 for the support of a pauper; in the other est number being located in Rusk (15), Bexar two cases, the county paid two individuals $12 (15), Washington (14), Houston (11), and and $12.50 to make coffins for indigents. That Nacogdoches Counties (11) (Figure 3). In 10 pattern repeated in 1860, when the commis- years, the number of counties offering mon- sioners’ court provided funds for three addi- etary support to paupers had increased as well tional coffins, and money was provided for the from those listed in 1850, and included a total care of an indigent child and one adult, both in of 30 (Figure 4). In counties that made provi- private homes (Bland 1994:78). sions for paupers, the amounts of money pro- By 1860, the number of Texas paupers vided for support varied widely from a low of enumerated in the federal census had increased $72 in Tyler County to a high of $2,000 in Bexar to 138 (126 natives and 12 foreigners) out of a County. But because the census was not specific

33 Dallam Sherman Hansford Ochiltree Lipscomb 1860 Hartley Moore Hutchinson Roberts Hemphill

Oldham Potter Carson Gray Wheeler

Deaf Smith Randall Armstrong Donley Collingsworth

Parmer Castro Swisher Briscoe Hall Childress

Hardeman

Bailey Lamb Hale Floyd Motley Cottle Wilbarger Foard Wichita Clay Montague Lamar Red Cooke Grayson Fannin Cochran Hockley Lubbock Crosby Dickens King Knox Baylor Archer River Bowie Delta Titus Jack Wise Denton Collin Franklin Morris Yoakum Terry Lynn Garza Kent Stonewall Haskell Throckmorton Young Hunt Hopkins Cass Camp Parker Rockwall Rains Marion Wood Palo Tarrant Dallas Upshur Gaines Dawson Borden Scurry Fisher Jones Shackelford Stephens Pinto Kaufman Van Harrison Zandt Gregg Smith Hood Johnson Ellis Andrews Eastland Martin Howard Mitchell Nolan Taylor Callahan Henderson Panola Erath Somervell Rusk Hill Navarro Cherokee El Paso Bosque Shelby Loving Winkler Ector Midland Coke Comanche Glasscock Sterling Runnels Anderson Coleman Brown Freestone Hamilton Nacogdoches Limestone Hudspeth Ward McLennan Culberson Crane Tom Mills San Sabine Houston Upton Reagan Green Coryell Leon Angelina Augustine Reeves Irion Concho Falls McCulloch Lampasas San Saba Trinity Jasper Newton Robertson Madison Bell Schleicher Tyler Jeff Menard Polk Pecos Burnet Milam Walker Davis Crockett Mason Llano Brazos San Williamson Jacinto Sutton Grimes Kimble Burleson Hardin Montgomery Gillespie Blanco Lee Terrell Travis Washington Liberty Orange Bastrop Presidio Kerr Hays Waller Jefferson Edwards Fayette Austin Brewster Val Kendall Harris Verde Real Comal Caldwell Chambers Bandera Colorado Fort Guadalupe Bend Gonzales Galveston Bexar Lavaca Kinney Uvalde Medina Wharton Brazoria Wilson Dewitt Jackson Victoria Matagorda Maverick Zavala Frio Atascosa Karnes Goliad Calhoun Bee Refugio Dimmit LaSalle McMullen Live Oak

San Patricio Aransas Jim Webb Wells Nueces Duval

Kleberg

Brooks Jim Hogg County Offering Monetary Support for Paupers Zapata Kenedy

Starr Willacy Hidalgo

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Figure 4. Counties offering monetary support for paupers, 1860. Texas population 604,215. Data source is U.S. Federal Census, 1860. about the meaning of the dollar amounts, it is cials undertook: according to Hunt (2008), the not possible to compare costs from county to commissioners’ court allocated money, staples, county. Only Houston County offered any speci- and cotton cards to needy families. Records ficity, listing the numbers of paupers supported between 1862 and 1865 included two refer- in each beat and the corresponding amount of ences about aid to groups of citizens as opposed money spent per beat. to specific individuals. In 1862 and 1863 there The Civil War brought with it dislocation were two references to money distributed to and, presumably, a burden on counties that destitute wives of war veterans and raw cotton were expected to support widows, orphans, distributed to soldiers’ wives. Between 1862 and families whose husbands and fathers were and 1864, the commissioners made repeated absent. Records from Collin County are partic- efforts to identify families in need of support, ularly informative about relief efforts that offi- to distribute money for the support of soldiers,

34 and to purchase and distribute cotton cards. By Three laws passed by the legislature between 1864, the county availed itself of funds made 1866 and 1869, however, suggested that law- available in Austin for the establishment of an makers feared that the new immigrants, rather indigent fund, and it appropriated $5,000 in than being a blessing, would become a burden county funds to be used for indigent families to towns, cities, and counties. An act concern- (Bland 1994:78–80). ing alien passengers approved in October 1866 On the other hand, paupers supported allowed the Commissioner of Immigration or individually did not increase disproportion- any mayor to examine ships’ passengers and to ately in Collin County during the Civil War, deny any of them to land who were found to be and a comparison of statistics for the period a “lunatic, idiot, maimed, aged or infirm…[or] before with the years during the war suggests incompetent.…” Other classes who could be little change in the actual number of charges turned away included individuals who had on the court. Commissioners’ court minutes been paupers or criminals in any other state or record that between 1858 and 1860, 6 individu- country (Gammel 1898d:948). als received support, a number that increased The next month, the legislature passed an to 7 individuals between 1861 and 1865. In act to incorporate the Western Texas Colonial most cases, the money was distributed by the Land Immigration Company. In the act, the court to citizens who became responsible for legislature specified that the company would the care of a pauper. Between 1858 and 1865, forfeit all “franchises, privileges and benefits” the indigent included 6 males and 5 females; conferred by the act if it introduced to Texas 1 of the females was a child. During the same “any pauper, convict or criminal…” (Gammel period, the commissioners provided funding 1898d:1459–1463). In 1869, the Liverpool and for the burials of approximately 11 paupers. Texas Steamship Company, Limited, one of Interestingly, only 1 of the 11 received funds whose purposes was to introduce immigrants from the county before her death; the remain- to Texas, was warned that it would be fined ing 10 were classified as paupers at the time between $1,000 and $5,000 for each individual of their deaths but received no public funds pauper or convict it introduced to the state prior to that time (Bland 1994:78–80), suggest- (Gammel 1898e:126–129). ing that relatives or friends may have provided Belief that the pauper population might unreimbursed support until the time of death. increase significantly as a result of unregulated The need for care evident during the immigration was accompanied by measures to Civil War continued unabated during the late deal with the resident indigent population as 1860s: Collin County Commissioners’ Court well as with petty criminals. In 1868–1869, minutes recorded 29 entries between 1866 and the Constitutional Convention gathered but 1869 for a variety of types of care. For the first disbanded without completing a constitutional time, county support was sought for a Negro, document. The work was then collected, pub- presumably a freedwoman. Caretakers sought lished as a constitution, and approved by the money from the commissioners, and county electorate (McKay 1996:2:289). Among its funds were spent for food, beef, and medical provisions was the first reference to county treatment (Bland 1994:80–81). poorhouses: On a state level, conflicting needs resulted in the implementation of conflicting policies, Each county in the State shall provide, particularly as they pertained to immigrant in such manner as may be prescribed labor. Loss of slave labor after the Civil War by law, a Manual Labor Poor House, left many agriculturists without a source of for taking care of, managing, workers, and the Texas Bureau of Immigration employing and supplying the wants began to promote Texas to prospective set- of its indigent and poor inhabitants; tlers, many of them from Europe. A number of and under such regulations as the large-scale landowners participated in the pro- legislature may direct, all persons grams, hoping that immigrants from France, committing petty offences in the Ireland, Sweden, and other countries would county may be committed to such replace the freed slave community, who could Manual Poor House, for correction no longer be counted on as a source of labor. and employment (Cottrell 1989:70).

35 While the 1869 constitution provided for power of city councils to levy poll taxes that the establishment of county manual labor poor- excluded “paupers and persons of unsound houses, no evidence was found that any county mind” from the tax (Gammel 1898f:832). The actually established such an institution. Rather, Constitutional Convention of 1875, however, the pattern of providing outdoor relief appears adopted a document that included a number to have persisted as the primary, if not sole, of provisions that affected special classes of method of indigent support for almost a decade. citizens. Article VI, for example, stated that A compelling reason for the absence of county idiots, lunatics, “[a]ll paupers supported by poorhouses and farms in Texas may have been any county,” felons, and servicemen were not the small number of paupers who received allowed to vote (Gammel 1898g:808). Article county support relative to the total population: XI of the adopted Constitution of 1876 man- while census statistics for 1870 are anything dated that “construction of county poorhouses but complete, given that many paupers were and farms, along with jails, courthouses and cared for by family members who did not seek bridges, should be provided for in the general reimbursement from the county, only 219 out law.” Article XVI mandated that “[e]ach county of a total population of 818,579 were listed as must provide in such manner as may be pre- receiving support during 1870. Of those, the scribed by law, a manual labor poorhouse and majority of native-born paupers were black (107) farm, for taking care of, managing, employing and the minority were white (74). Also enumer- and supplying the wants of its indigent and ated were at least 25 foreign-born10 (Figure 5), poor inhabitants” (Whiteside 1973:9). a number that suggests either that fears about The constitutional requirements enumer- the threat of foreign-born beggars was exagger- ated in 1876, and the mandate that poorhouses, ated, or that the laws passed between 1866 and poor farms, and other public institutions “should 1869 had been effective. Forty-four counties be provided for in the general law” resulted were listed in the pauper count, while 45 coun- almost immediately in the passage of an act to ties provided support to and/or levied a special organize commissioners’ courts and define their tax for the support of lunatics and paupers jurisdiction and duties. Specifically, the legisla- (Figure 6). As in 1850 and 1860, the amount ture empowered the courts to “provide for the of money expended for support varied widely, support of paupers, and such idiots and lunatics pointing to the intensely local character of indi- as cannot be admitted into the Lunatic Asylum, gent care. A total of 9 counties recorded that [and] residents of their county, who are unable they had levied a special tax for the support or to support themselves[;] [and to] provide for maintenance of lunatics (otherwise known as a the burial of paupers.” Another act pertained “lunatic tax”) and paupers and indigents.11 to convicted persons and specified that convicts There appears to have been little legisla- committed to jail, who were unable to discharge tion concerning indigent care in Texas during their fines, could do so by working manually in the early 1870s, with the exception of a reit- any workhouse or associated farm, or on any eration of the county courts’ duty to provide bridge or public road. The county commission- for the care of indigents and burial of paupers ers were directed to build work houses and (Gammel 1898e:108), and a provision in the acquire work farms necessary to use the labor  The incomplete character of the statistics of county convicts and to manage and control provided in census returns prior to 1880 is reflected in a those institutions (Gammel 1898g:887–890, comparison of the 1870 return for Collin County, which 1064–1066). listed no paupers supported within the year and no money expended for their care, with records of the Collin County While the general laws passed in 1876 were Commissioners’ Court, which enumerated payments in not specific about a requirement for a county to 1870 of $169.57 to paupers, indigent families, or those erect a manual labor poorhouse and farm for its responsible for their care (Bland 1994:81). 10 The number of foreign-born paupers may indigent and poor inhabitants but rather speci- actually have been 34. The 1870 Walker County census fied erection of a workhouse and farm for county listed 9 foreign-born but failed to list any paupers in that convicts, the mandate of the 1876 Constitution category present on June 1. Rather, 9 blacks were listed on that date. soon resulted in the acquisition of poor farms 11 Interestingly, in four of the nine cases, the special that may or may not have been occupied and tax levied for the support of lunatics and/or paupers was used by convicts but most certainly were pri- paired with a tax to be used for the construction of public buildings. marily for the benefit of paupers. According

36 Dallam Sherman Hansford Ochiltree Lipscomb 1870 Hartley Moore Hutchinson Roberts Hemphill

Oldham Potter Carson Gray Wheeler

Deaf Smith Randall Armstrong Donley Collingsworth

Parmer Castro Swisher Briscoe Hall Childress

Hardeman

Bailey Lamb Hale Floyd Motley Cottle Wilbarger Foard Wichita Clay 7/0 Red Cooke Grayson Fannin Lamar Cochran Hockley Lubbock Crosby Dickens King Knox Baylor Archer River Montague Bowie 2/0 1/0 Delta Morris Titus Cass Garza Jack Wise 5/0 Collin Franklin Yoakum Terry Lynn Kent Stonewall Haskell Throckmorton Young Denton Hunt Hopkins Camp 5/0 Parker Rockwall Rains Wood Upshur 6/0Marion Palo Dallas Gaines Dawson Borden Scurry Fisher Jones Tarrant Harrison Shackelford Stephens Pinto 1/0 Kaufman Van 2/0 6/0 1/0 Zandt Gregg 13/0 Hood Smith Johnson Ellis Panola Andrews Martin Howard Mitchell Nolan Taylor Callahan Eastland Erath Somervell Henderson Rusk 2/0 Navarro Hill Cherokee El Paso Bosque 8/0 Shelby Loving Winkler Ector Midland Glasscock Coke Comanche Anderson Sterling Runnels Limestone 3/0 Nacogdoches 3/0 Coleman Brown Hamilton Freestone San Augustine Hudspeth Ward McLennan 3/0 Culberson Crane Tom Mills Angelina Sabine Reagan Green Coryell Houston Reeves Upton Irion Concho Leon McCulloch Lampasas 1/0 2/0 2/0 San Saba Falls Trinity Newton Robertson Jasper Bell Madison Schleicher Menard Walker Tyler Jeff Brazos 3/0 Pecos Burnet Williamson Milam Polk Davis Crockett Mason Llano 6/0 3/9? San Burleson Grimes Jacinto Sutton 1/1 Kimble Hardin Gillespie Travis 1/0 2/0 Blanco Lee Montgomery Terrell Bastrop 2/2 Liberty Orange Kerr 0/2 9/0 Washington Presidio Hays Jefferson Edwards 2/0 3/1 Fayette Austin Waller Harris Brewster Val Kendall Caldwell Verde Real 5/5 8/0 30/11 Chambers Bandera Comal 6/1 Fort Bend Guadalupe Colorado 1/0 4/0 Bexar 6/0 Gonzales Galveston Kinney Uvalde Medina Lavaca Wharton Wilson 3/0 1/1 Dewitt Brazoria 2/0 Jackson Victoria Matagorda Maverick Zavala Frio Atascosa Karnes Goliad 8/0 Calhoun Bee Refugio Dimmit LaSalle McMullen 1/0 1/0 Live Oak

San Patricio Aransas Jim Webb Wells Duval 2/1 Nueces

Kleberg

Brooks Jim Hogg # Native-Born/# Foreign-Born Paupers Zapata Kenedy

Starr Willacy Hidalgo

Cameron PAI/08/slh

Figure 5. Numbers of native- and foreign-born paupers supported by counties, 1870. Total Texas population 818,579. Data source is U.S. Federal Census, 1870. to Cottrell (1989:174–175), the first poor farm character of the poorhouse inmates who lived was acquired by a county in 1876. Three years in institutions as well as those who received later, Kaufman County commissioners began outdoor relief. Finally, it provided information to scout for land that the county could use as a about the individuals and families who were poor farm (Hunt 2008). By 1880, approximately the keepers of the poorhouses and poor farms. 24 counties had poorhouses or poor farms (U.S. According to the special census sched- Bureau of the Census 1880). ule of 1880 entitled “Paupers and Indigents The federal census of 1880 was important in Institutions, Poor Houses, Asylums; or in to a history of pauper care in Texas not only Private Homes,” 85 counties delivered support because it identified the counties that were to 558 individuals within a total population the locations of physical institutions, but also of 1,591,749. Of those 85 counties, 25 had because it included a special census that enu- poorhouses or poor farms (Figure 7) whose merated and described, for the first time, the residents numbered from a low of 1 in Upshur

37 Dallam Sherman Hansford Ochiltree Lipscomb 1870 Hartley Moore Hutchinson Roberts Hemphill

Oldham Potter Carson Gray Wheeler

Deaf Smith Randall Armstrong Donley Collingsworth

Parmer Castro Swisher Briscoe Hall Childress

Hardeman

Bailey Lamb Hale Floyd Motley Cottle Wilbarger Foard Wichita Clay Red Cooke Grayson Fannin Lamar Cochran Hockley Lubbock Crosby Dickens King Knox Baylor Archer River Montague Bowie Delta Morris Titus Garza Jack Wise Collin Franklin Yoakum Terry Lynn Kent Stonewall Haskell Throckmorton Young Denton Hunt Hopkins Cass Camp Parker Rockwall Rains Wood Marion Palo Dallas Upshur Gaines Dawson Borden Scurry Fisher Jones Tarrant Shackelford Stephens Pinto Kaufman Van Harrison Zandt Gregg Hood Smith Johnson Ellis Panola Andrews Martin Howard Mitchell Nolan Taylor Callahan Eastland Erath Somervell Henderson Rusk Hill Navarro El Paso Bosque Shelby Loving Winkler Ector Midland Glasscock Coke Comanche Sterling Runnels Limestone Anderson Cherokee Coleman Brown Hamilton Freestone Nacogdoches Hudspeth McLennan San Culberson Ward Crane Tom Mills Sabine Reagan Green Coryell Houston Augustine Reeves Upton Irion Concho Leon Angelina McCulloch Lampasas San Saba Falls Trinity Newton Robertson Jasper Bell Madison Schleicher Jeff Menard Polk Tyler Pecos Burnet Milam Walker Davis Crockett Mason Llano Brazos San Williamson Jacinto Sutton Grimes Kimble Burleson Hardin Montgomery Gillespie Blanco Lee Terrell Travis Washington Liberty Orange Bastrop Presidio Kerr Hays Jefferson Edwards Fayette Austin Waller Brewster Val Kendall Harris Verde Real Comal Caldwell Chambers Bandera Colorado Fort Guadalupe Bend Gonzales Galveston Kinney Uvalde Medina Bexar Lavaca Wharton Brazoria Dewitt Wilson Jackson Victoria Matagorda Maverick Zavala Frio Atascosa Karnes Goliad Calhoun Bee Refugio Dimmit LaSalle McMullen Live Oak

San Patricio Aransas Jim Webb Wells Duval Nueces County Offering Monetary Support or Kleberg Brooks Levying a Special Tax for Lunatics and Paupers Jim Hogg Zapata Kenedy

Starr Willacy Hidalgo

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Figure 6. Counties offering monetary support for paupers or levying a special tax for lunatics and paupers, 1870. Total Texas population 818,579. Data source is U.S. Federal Census, 1870. and Hays Counties to a high of 52 in Bexar disabled, they did not always supply complete County, and whose total was 223 or 39 percent information. What is apparent from the infor- of the total enumerated pauper population. mation that appeared in the special census, Noninstitutional care included care provided however, is that more than twice as many by parents, relatives, friends with homes, or paupers were not able-bodied (267) as were the charity of individuals, and that provided (123), most were temperate (295) and very by some combination of county, city, town, or few intemperate (22), most were not criminal citizens. (272) versus those who were (3), and parents The statistics that described individual (10) with children (29) represented a relatively paupers were incomplete. That is, when pro- small number of the total. The greatest number viders were given the opportunity to describe of paupers suffered physical disabilities or dis- whether or not a pauper was able-bodied, tem- eases such as paralysis, blindness, rheumatism, perate, criminal, aged, or mentally or physically dropsy, palsy, scrofula, or pregnancy; a number

38 Dallam Sherman Hansford Ochiltree Lipscomb 1880 Hartley Moore Hutchinson Roberts Hemphill

Oldham Potter Carson Gray Wheeler

Deaf Smith Randall Armstrong Donley Collingsworth

Parmer Castro Swisher Briscoe Hall Childress

Hardeman

Bailey Lamb Hale Floyd Motley Cottle Wilbarger Foard Wichita Clay 9x Red Cooke Grayson Fannin Lamar Cochran Hockley Lubbock Crosby Dickens King Knox Baylor Archer 5 River Montague 1 Bowie 11x 11x Delta 3 Wise Denton Collin 1 Titus Throckmorton Young Hunt Hopkins Morris Yoakum Terry Lynn Garza Jack Franklin 2 Kent Stonewall Haskell 2 4 3x 6x 2x 3 Cass 8 Ca1mp 1 Parker Tarrant Dallas Rockwall Rains Wood Upshur Marion Palo Van 3 Gaines Dawson Borden Scurry Fisher Jones 1x Harrison Shackelford Stephens Pinto 5 11x 12x Kaufman Zandt 8x Gregg Johnson 5 4 Hood 5 Smith 7 Erath Ellis Rusk Panola Andrews Martin Howard Mitchell Nolan Taylor Callahan Eastland Somervell 5x Henderson 2 8x 1 4 4 Cherokee 10x Hill El Paso 4 Bosque Navarro Shelby Loving Winkler Ector Midland Coke 3 Nacogdoches Glasscock Sterling Runnels Comanche Anderson 6 Coleman Brown 3 15 Hamilton McLennan Freestone 3 Hudspeth Ward Limestone Houston 7 Culberson Crane Tom Mills 14x Sabine Green Coryell San Reeves Upton Reagan 2 Angelina Irion Concho 3 5x 4 1 Augustine McCulloch Lampasas 11x Leon San Saba Falls Trinity Jasper Newton 15x Robertson Madison Bell Tyler Schleicher Menard Burnet 1 7 Polk 2 Jeff Pecos 7 Crockett Walker 7 2 Davis Mason Llano 3 2 Milam 7x Grimes San Williamson Brazos Jacinto Sutton Burleson Kimble 7x 2 Hardin Gillespie Blanco 30x Lee Montgomery Travis Orange Terrell 2 Was3hin3gtxon Liberty Hays Bastrop Presidio Kerr 2x Jefferson Edwards Kendall 1x Fayette Austin Brewster Val Comal 3 Waller 8 Harris Chambers Verde Real 6 Bandera 6 Caldwell 16 Colorado Fort 2 Guadalupe Lavaca Bend 52x Gonzales 13 8 Galveston Kinney Uvalde Medina Bexar 3 Wilson 7 Wharton 6 Brazoria 12x 3 Dewitt 3 Jackson 9 Victoria Matagorda Maverick Zavala Frio Atascosa Karnes Goliad 1 3 Calhoun Bee Refugio Dimmit LaSalle McMullen 3 Live Oak

San Patricio Aransas Jim Webb Wells 6 Duval Nueces

Kleberg

Zapata Brooks Jim Hogg # Paupers in Institutions 9 Kenedy

x County with Poorhouse Starr Willacy Hidalgo

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Figure 7. Counties with poorhouses and numbers of paupers and indigents in institutions, poorhouses, and asylums or in private homes, 1880. Total Texas population 1,591,749. Data source is U.S. Federal Census, 1880. were crippled. Almost an equal number were A review of the statistics for those counties paupers because they were elderly (118), and that had institutional care revealed that there of those, many had physical and mental dis- were five for which additional information about abilities that contributed to their condition of the pauper population was provided—Dallas, impoverishment. Many (110) were mentally Denton, Fannin, Grimes, and Hays. In all five disabled from conditions such as epilepsy, counties, the superintendent listed the total idiocy, insanity, and dementia.12 number of paupers who had received care during the year 1879–1880, as well as the number 12 Contrary to the growing perception that many, or even most, institutionalized paupers were related enumerator said of one pauper that his epilepsy and and suffered from mental disabilities, the 1880 census insanity appeared to have been precipitated by a fall, but identified 63 individuals who said they had other family he had learned from a neighbor that the pauper’s mother present who were being cared for. Of those, 7 suffered had two idiotic daughters whom she would not report. from insanity and idiocy. Still, the suspicion existed He concluded that the condition of all three children was that heredity played a large role. The Caldwell County due to heredity.

39 under his care at the time of the 1880 census poor farms seriously. Facilities about which enumeration. In four of the five cases, the total there is information during the 1880s included number cared for during the entire 12 months the Kaufman County Poor Farm, which was compared to the resident population at the time located ca. 1.25 miles from the courthouse the census was taken was larger by a significant square on 408 1/3 acres and replaced care factor (Dallas, 52 versus 10; Fannin, 19 versus 9; that had housed paupers in local hotels and Grimes, 12 versus 7; and Hays, 2 versus 1), sug- boardinghouses. Buildings to house residents, gesting a nineteenth-century corollary to the guards, and farm animals had been erected pattern noted in the early 1920s that paupers in by November 1883 (Hunt 2008). According to almshouses were a “rapidly shifting group” that the Kaufman County Historical Commission included many individuals who were not perma- (2007), the improvements eventually included a nently indigent (U.S. Department of Commerce, superintendent’s residence, dining hall, dormi- Bureau of the Census 1925:2). tory, silo, water well and well house, blacksmith The facilities where paupers were housed shop, barns, chapel, jailhouse (for inhabitants included 15 that were designated as poor who had been incarcerated for minor offences), farms or that were called poorhouses but were and other outbuildings. The site also included run by superintendents who farmed. Another a paupers’ cemetery. According to the Texas 5 were designated poorhouses or city poor- Historical Commission (Historical Markers: houses. Coryell, Dallas, and Grayson Counties Kaufman County Poor Farm), the program at included jail or prison functions. The Coryell the Kaufman County Poor Farm required all County facility was called the Coryell County able-bodied persons to work, and the resident Poorhouse and Convict Farm, although there pauper population was supplemented by county was nothing elsewhere in the schedules to inmates brought daily from the county jail to indicate that prisoners or criminals were part the farm, where they were housed beginning of the population. In Dallas County, the keeper in 1893. Presumably, they replaced the outside of the poor farm was the jailer as well, and a vendors who had been paid by the county to aid guard was part of the poor farm population. the poor farm residents (Hunt 2008), who were None of the inhabitants of the poor farm was not always strong or healthy enough to provide a criminal, but the enumeration for the Dallas for themselves. County prison schedule listed 14 individuals In 1883, Parker County established a poor whose location was the Poor House Prison. farm on 320 acres as a replacement for outdoor In Grayson County, the poor farm population relief in the belief that the county expenses included 1 white and 3 black convicts, and a associated with pauper care would decrease if white guard. the paupers worked for their keep on the farm The 1880 census provided statistics for (Bruce 2007). Buildings included a superin- 19 poorhouse/poor farm keepers, one of whom tendent’s house, paupers’ barracks, and out- was African-American (Waller County). They buildings, as well as a cemetery. The farm was ranged in age from 33 to 60 years old, and the located about 3 miles south of Weatherford. average age was 44 years old. All the keepers As in Kaufman County, convict labor supple- were married, and 14 of the households mented the labor of paupers, but there was included children. One household had no chil- no jail on-site (Cottrell 1989:185–186; Texas dren but did have grandchildren; another had Historical Commission Historical Markers: no children but had 5 servants. Presumably, Parker County Poor Farm). a keeper would have been assisted with the Sometime between 1883 and 1885, Navarro household duties by his wife and with farm County established a poor farm about a mile chores by his children if they were old enough. from Corsicana (Texas Historical Commission They were responsible for a population that Historical Markers: Smith-McCrery Home), was disproportionately African-American: out and Anderson County commissioners pur- of 16 poorhouses or poor farms where the races chased poor farm property in 1884 (Texas of the paupers were provided, 57 percent were Historical Commission Historical Markers: white and 43 percent were black. Anderson County Poor Farm). Eventually, the By 1880, county commissioners in Texas Anderson County property included housing for appear to have taken the charge to establish the residents and superintendent, barns, wells,

40 a cotton gin, and a cannery. A jail building was The more than threefold increase in used for the convict laborers who assisted the numbers of paupers in seven years is notewor- paupers with labor and worked on county roads. thy, particularly given that the entire popula- A cemetery was located on the edge of the prop- tion of the state grew 40 percent between 1880 erty (Texas Historical Commission Historical and 1890. Reasons for the apparent increase Markers: Anderson County Poor Farm). In probably are attributable to one or more vari- Wise County, a poor farm began operation in ables: the data collected in 1880 and 1887–1888 1885 on 320 acres, which encompassed a cem- were obtained by two different agencies that etery (Texas Historical Commission Historical may have employed more or less thorough pro- Markers: Wise County Poor Farm). The follow- cedures, or, the growth in numbers of paupers ing year, the Collin County poor farm began was real but probably not representative of a operation on 336 acres southwest of McKinney, sustained trend. Texas in 1887–1888 was in the and Galveston County Commissioners began throes of a dramatic economic downturn whose planning for a poor farm. In 1887, Galveston roots were embedded in a series of catastrophic County purchased 213 acres on Clear Creek. weather events. The resulting decline and, in Remarkably, the first building at the farm, , collapse of certain agricultural which contained a dining hall, was designed markets would have had its largest impacts on by Galveston architect Nicholas J. Clayton. marginal communities.14 The facility housed indigents who were poor, Whether because of economic stresses or mentally ill, and elderly. Those who were able from other factors, the number of poorhouses assisted with farming chores, probably assisted and poor farms continued to grow, and by 1890, by residents who had been convicted of crimes13 the U.S. census enumerated 56 Texas counties (Texas Historical Commission Historical with almshouses serving 464 paupers (Figure 9). Markers: Galveston County Poor Farm; The Information from commissioners’ court minutes Dallas Morning News, April 14, 1998). in Bowie and Cass Counties in northeast Texas The number of counties in Texas provid- documents what probably were typical opera- ing poor farms or other institutional assistance tions at a poor farm in the 1890s. The Bowie had increased in numbers from 25 in 1880 to 36 County facility was located 1.5 miles from the in 1887–1888, with the greatest increase occur- county seat of Boston on 70 acres purchased ring in the west-central part of the state. The by the county in 1891. Buildings were erected population of paupers in institutions or private immediately, and two men and two women homes had increased at a much higher rate: 223 were admitted. A superintendent was paid $25 in 1880 versus 857 in 1887–1888. According to a month, and a county commissioner bought statistics provided by Foster (2001), the total necessities for the paupers. County paupers population of paupers had increased dramati- who requested outdoor support were told that cally as well, from 578 in 1880 to 1,822 in 1887– assistance by the county was contingent on 1888 (Figure 8). Of the total, both inside and their moving to the county farm. Typical resi- outside institutions, 51 percent of the pauper dents included a family that “had been living population was noncolored native, 32 percent near [a] water tank, in destitute circumstances was colored, and 16 percent was foreign-born. and being cared for by their neighbors.” Others Approximately 47 percent of paupers lived on were blind, old and feeble, and widowed (Brett poor farms, a statistic that shows that outdoor n.d.). relief still was widely practiced, despite the Merchandise necessary for the poor farm perception that poor farms were a more eco- occupants was purchased at local New Boston nomical way to supply relief. 14 Local concerns about the social displacement 13 The close relationship between convicts and that accompanied the agricultural crisis of the late poor farms, whose primary purpose was the care of 1880s may have contributed to laws passed about the paupers, was expressed in various state laws, including same time. The so-called paupers oaths were addressed an act approved in March 1889. The intent of the law by the state legislature in 1887, and in 1889 an act to was to credit county convicts at the rate of 50 cents per incorporate the City of Dallas suggested that paupers day if they performed manual labor “on public streets or had become troublesome in that community. The act roads, or on county poor farms” (Gammel 1898h:1042). empowered the city to “license, tax, regulate, or prevent or Sometimes these county poor farms were for the care of suppress paupers, peddlers, pawnbrokers, and keepers of paupers; in other cases, they were county-level prison theatrical or other exhibitions, shows, and amusements” farms. (Gammel 1898h:15, 900).

41 Dallam Sherman Hansford Ochiltree Lipscomb

Hemphill 1887-1888 Hartley Moore Hutchinson Roberts 1

Oldham Potter Carson Gray Wheeler

Donley Deaf Collingsworth Smith Randall Armstrong 2

Parmer Castro Swisher Briscoe Hall Childress

Hardeman

Bailey Lamb Hale Floyd Motley Cottle Wilbarger Wichita Foard 4 4 Clay 68x 11x 1 Cooke Grayson Fannin Lamar Red Cochran Hockley Lubbock Crosby Dickens King Knox Baylor Archer 16 Bowie Montague River 10 123x 24x Delta 1 Titus 12 Throckmorton Hunt 9 Jack Franklin Morris Garza 3 Wise 4x 7 11 23 Yoakum Terry Lynn Kent Stonewall Haskell Young 3 Denton 19x 12x Hopkins 8x Collin 4 Cass Rockwall Rains 8Camp Parker Tarrant Upshur Marion Shackelford 4 8 Wood 3 Gaines Stephens Palo Dallas Harrison Dawson Borden Scurry Fisher Jones 2 2 Pinto 24x 20 Kaufman Van 4 Gregg 3 5 Zandt Hood 20x 23 Johnson Ellis Smith 14 Eastland 12 Henderson Panola Andrews Martin Howard Nolan Taylor Callahan 15x Somervell5x 10x 5 5 Erath 10x Rusk Mitchell 4 6 4 2 10x Cherokee Hill Navarro El Paso Coleman 13 Bosque 23 4x Shelby Loving Winkler Ector Midland Glasscock Coke Runnels Comanche Anderson 16 Sterling 3 Nacogdoches 5 3x 19x 10 15 San 2 2 McLennan Freestone 14 Tom Hamilton 5 Augustine Hudspeth Brown Limestone Houston Culberson Ward Crane Green Mills 25x Sabine Coryell Angelina 6 Reeves Upton Reagan 9 25 Irion 3 Concho 4 12x 27 5 6 1 Lampasas Falls Leon Trinity Newton 1 McCulloch 25 17 14x Jasper Robertson Ma8disxon San Saba Burnet Bell Tyler 2 Schleicher Menard Walker 7 Jeff Pecos 1 25x Brazos San Polk 8 Davis Crockett 1 Llano 11 20x Milam 35x 13 11 Jacinto Williamson Burleson Grimes Sutton Mason 7 15 Kimble Lee Montgomery Hardin Blanco Travis 19x Gillespie Orange Terrell 7 Bastrop 3 8x 20 Liberty Edwards 28 Hays 50 Washington 1 Presidio 3 Kerr Kendall 15x 36x Austin 14x 12 Jefferson Val 1 Comal Caldwell Fayette 24 Waller Harris 1 Verde Real 2 Chambers 5 7Bandera 10 3x 11 12 Guadalupe Colorado 8 Fort 2 Lavaca Bend Galveston Brewster Kinney Uvalde Medina 167x 31 Gonzales Bexar 22x 21 20x 4 10 10 Wharton 30 6 7x Brazoria Wilson Dewitt 17 6 Maverick Frio 9 7 Jackson Matagorda Zavala Atascosa Karnes Goliad Victoria 2 1 15 18x Calhoun 1 Dimmit LaSalle McMullen 7 Bee 1 3 Live Oak Refugio San Patricio 3 1 Aransas Jim Webb Wells Duval 15 Nueces

Kleberg

Brooks Jim Hogg # Paupers Zapata Kenedy

x County with Poor Farm Starr Willacy Hidalgo

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Figure 8. Counties with poor farms and numbers of paupers, 1887–1888. Data source is Foster (2001). stores, and extraneous services such as sewing, and his family and the inmates; seed, feed, washing, and other work were hired out to and labor associated with washing; and sewing local residents. The superintendent hired in for inmates unable to perform those tasks for 1892 was paid $20 per month, and his respon- themselves (Brett n.d.). sibilities included planting and cultivating 5 The Cass County Poor Farm was located acres at the farm in profitable crops. He also about 2.5 miles from the county seat, Linden, and was responsible for furnishing milch cows and was authorized in 1895 when county commis- a workhorse. Subsequent contracts with super- sioners decided that it would be less expensive intendents required them to perform repairs, to operate a poor farm than to provide outdoor care for the inmates, haul supplies, cultivate relief of $3 to $8 per month per pauper. Anyone and raise garden truck, and have cooking done who owned a maximum of $10 in worldly goods for the paupers. The county was responsible for was eligible for residence, and the commission- furnishing provisions to the superintendent ers set a specific date after which outdoor relief

42 Dallam Sherman Hansford Ochiltree Lipscomb 1890 Hartley Moore Hutchinson Roberts Hemphill

Oldham Potter Carson Gray Wheeler

Deaf Smith Randall Armstrong Donley Collingsworth

Parmer Castro Swisher Briscoe Hall Childress

Hardeman

Bailey Lamb Hale Floyd Motley Cottle Wilbarger Foard Wichita Red Clay 10x River Cooke Grayson Fannin Lamar Cochran Hockley Lubbock Crosby Dickens King Knox Baylor Archer 9x Montague 6x Bowie 5x 23x 20x Delta Hunt Franklin Jack Hopkins Titus Garza Wise 1x Yoakum Terry Lynn Kent Stonewall Haskell Throckmorton Young 2x Denton 3x Morris Cass 6x Collin 9x 6x Camp Parker Tarrant Rockwall Rains Wood Marion Palo Dallas Kaufman Upshur Gaines Dawson Borden Scurry Fisher Jones Shackelford Stephens Pinto 9x 4x 9x 30x Van Zandt Harrison Smith Gregg Hood Johnson 7x 6x 5x Ellis Andrews Martin Howard Mitchell Nolan Taylor Callahan Eastland 12x 4x 14x Erath 10x Henderson 5x Panola Somervell 2x Rusk Hill Shelby El Paso Bosque 5x Navarro 4x Loving Winkler Ector Midland Coke Glasscock Sterling Runnels Comanche Anderson Cherokee 14x 6x Coleman Brown 5x Hamilton McLennan 3x Freestone Nacogdoches San Hudspeth Culberson Ward Tom Limestone Crane Mills 14x Augustine Reagan Green Coryell Houston Angelina Sabine Reeves Upton Irion Concho Leon McCulloch Lampasas 4x 6x San Saba Falls Trinity Newton Robertson Jasper 8x Madison Bell Schleicher Menard Burnet 3x Polk Tyler Jeff Pecos 7x 10x Grimes Walker Davis Crockett Mason Llano 2x 7x Milam Brazos San Williamson Jacinto Sutton 10x 7x Kimble Burleson Hardin Montgomery Gillespie Blanco 19x Lee Washington Terrell Travis Waller Liberty Orange Hays Bastrop 10x Presidio Kerr Harris Jefferson Edwards Fayette Austin Brewster Val Kendall 2x Caldwell 3x Verde Real Comal 10x Chambers Bandera 3x 14x 5x Colorado Fort Guadalupe 3x Bend 39x Gonzales Galveston Bexar Lavaca Kinney Uvalde Medina Wharton 13x Wilson Brazoria 6x Dewitt Victoria Jackson Matagorda Maverick Zavala Frio Atascosa Karnes Goliad 3x

2x Calhoun Bee Refugio Dimmit LaSalle McMullen Live Oak

San Patricio Aransas Jim Webb Wells Nueces Duval

Kleberg

Brooks Jim Hogg # Paupers in Almshouses Zapata Kenedy

x County with Pauper Facility Starr Willacy Hidalgo

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Figure 9. Counties having a county poorhouse, city poorhouse, almshouse, or poor farm, and numbers of paupers in almshouses, 1890. Total Texas population 2,235,527. Data source is United States Department of the Interior, Census Office (1895). ended. Residents at the farm included paupers the livestock, tools, and other necessities his and short-term prisoners, most of whom had family required. In turn, he had to live on and committed minor offenses. The prisoners typi- improve the farm, give his whole time to its cally worked out their fines through labor on operation, and care for the livestock and crops. the farm or on public roads, and paupers who He also had to take charge of the convicts and were able were required to work as well (Stow paupers and make sure that they worked as the 1974:22–23). law required and, if they were paupers, as they Rules applied to the superintendents at were able to. The superintendent was expected the Cass County Poor Farm as well as to the to treat the paupers and convicts in a humane paupers and prisoners. The first superinten- fashion, and they, in turn, could not swear or dent hired, who also acted as foreman of the use vulgar or obscene language. They could not county farm, was paid $25 a month and given leave the farm without the superintendent’s

43 permission, a rule that reflected the commis- missive. At the time of the study, the general sioners’ concern with paupers who might come provisions of the law were encompassed in just and go as they pleased. According to Stow, most four sentences, surpassed in brevity only by of the poor farm paupers were elderly people those of Louisiana. As with the great major- who had no income and no family who would ity of the states, Texas law in 1904 assigned or could care for them. During the 1890s, there to county commissioners the management of were some mothers and dependent children, almshouses. It also assigned them the duties but by 1900, state laws were more restrictive, to provide for paupers who were actual resi- and few children were kept at the Cass County dents of the counties and unable to care for facility after the turn of the last century (Stow themselves, to send the indigent sick to county 1974:22–23). hospitals where they existed, and to bury dead No source exists for the 1900 census that paupers. Commissioners were empowered enumerated paupers on a state-by-state basis to encumber a county for sums necessary to in a special schedule. However, the Department support paupers and to employ doctors for their of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of the Census, care (U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, issued a report four years later that signaled Bureau of the Census 1906:48). Left unad- a return to the level of interest in the condi- dressed in the Texas law were issues such as tion of pauperism that had been reflected in responsibility of relatives to care for the poor, the studies springing from the 1890 census. management of poorhouses, state supervision The special report was limited to paupers in of charitable institutions, and other topics. almshouses, which made it of limited useful- Indeed, 36 other states required residency or ness in enumerating and analyzing the pauper the ownership of property before applying population in general, since it excluded the for aid, support by relatives if any were able, large numbers of paupers on outdoor relief. or work. Texas required none of those. Only 6 Furthermore, as the report pointed out, the states, other than Texas, were silent on issues reasons for the relative numbers of institution- of legal settlement, responsibility of relatives, alized paupers from county to county and state responsibility of paupers to work, and record- to state were various and not readily quantifi- keeping requirements (U.S. Department of able. However, as the report’s authors pointed Commerce and Labor, Bureau of the Census out, “In general, the number of paupers in a 1906:41–49). state who are supported in almshouses bears As the 1904 report pointed out, permis- close relation to the laws governing the indoor siveness in state law often resulted in an care of the poor as well as to the manner of extraordinarily fluctuating pauper population their administration.” In addition, the methods in almshouses. Statistics for Texas in the same of almshouse administration had an impact on report (U.S. Department of Commerce and the numbers of paupers in almshouses, and the Labor, Bureau of the Census 1906:88) reflected authors asserted that strict rules about admis- such movements: there were 913 paupers in sion and discharge usually resulted in a more- Texas almshouses on December 31, 1903 (706 stable population throughout the year, whereas white and 221 colored). A total of 901 paupers “lax and inviting” rules usually resulted in a was admitted to almshouses during 1904 (785 population that grew quickly and “fluctuate[d] white and 116 colored), and 851 were dis- violently from season to season.” Another factor charged, died, or transferred during the year was the character of outdoor relief which, if (749 white and 102 colored). The statistics, then, plentiful and permanent, made care in the show an approximately 90 percent turnover in almshouse less appealing (U.S., Department the population during the sampling period. of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of the Census The number of Texas counties having 1906). almshouses continued to grow, reaching 62 by A review of the chief points in the numer- the time of the 1903–1904 study (Figure 10). At ous special provisions within laws throughout least one county, Bowie, took note of the federal the United States as presented in the govern- study and included a copy of it in the minutes ment study of paupers in almshouses revealed of the commissioners’ court. Soon thereafter, that, when compared to those of other states, the commissioners issued rules and regula- the laws of Texas were brief, general, and per- tions governing the poor farm, but none of the

44 Dallam Sherman Hansford Ochiltree Lipscomb 1903-1904 Hartley Moore Hutchinson Roberts Hemphill

Oldham Potter Carson Gray Wheeler

Deaf Smith Randall Armstrong Donley Collingsworth

Parmer Castro Swisher Briscoe Hall Childress

Hardeman

Bailey Lamb Hale Floyd Motley Cottle Wilbarger Foard Wichita Clay Red Cooke Grayson Fannin Lamar Cochran Hockley Lubbock Crosby Dickens King Knox Baylor Archer River Montague Bowie Delta Hunt Franklin Hopkins Titus Garza Jack Wise Yoakum Terry Lynn Kent Stonewall Haskell Throckmorton Young Denton Morris Cass Collin Camp Parker Tarrant Rockwall Rains Wood Marion Palo Upshur Gaines Dawson Borden Scurry Fisher Dallas Jones Shackelford Stephens Pinto Kaufman Van Harrison Zandt Smith Gregg Hood Johnson Ellis Andrews Martin Howard Mitchell Nolan Taylor Callahan Eastland Erath Henderson Rusk Panola Somervell Hill Navarro El Paso Bosque Shelby Loving Winkler Ector Midland Coke Glasscock Sterling Runnels Comanche Anderson Cherokee Coleman Freestone Hamilton McLennan Nacogdoches Brown San Hudspeth Culberson Ward Tom Limestone Crane Mills Augustine Reagan Green Coryell Houston Angelina Sabine Reeves Upton Irion Concho Leon McCulloch Lampasas San Saba Falls Trinity Newton Robertson Jasper Madison Bell Schleicher Menard Polk Tyler Jeff Pecos Burnet Grimes Walker Davis Crockett Mason Llano Milam Brazos San Williamson Jacinto Sutton Kimble Burleson Hardin Montgomery Gillespie Blanco Lee Terrell Travis Washington Liberty Orange Bastrop Presidio Kerr Hays Jefferson Edwards Fayette Austin Brewster Val Kendall Harris Verde Real Comal Caldwell Chambers Bandera Waller Colorado Fort Guadalupe Lavaca Bend Gonzales Galveston Bexar Kinney Uvalde Medina Wharton Brazoria Wilson Dewitt Jackson Matagorda Maverick Zavala Frio Atascosa Karnes Goliad Victoria Calhoun Bee Refugio Dimmit LaSalle McMullen Live Oak

San Patricio Aransas Jim Webb Wells Nueces Duval

Kleberg

Brooks Jim Hogg County with Pauper Facility Zapata Kenedy

Starr Willacy Hidalgo

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Figure 10. Counties having a county poorhouse, city poorhouse, almshouse, or pauper farm, 1903–1904. Data source is U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor (1906).

rules reflected the less-permissive regulations kitchen, and an adjoining storeroom. Pauper then current in other states. Rather, they reit- inmates had a washroom, dining room, and a erated the superintendent’s obligations to care dozen two-room cottages. A large barn was on for the paupers in a humane fashion and to site, and a separate guarded house held prison- report expenses associated with the poor farm ers. Typical paupers were elderly, blind, or epi- to the county commissioners (Brett n.d.). Such leptic; those who could kept their own rooms care also was reflected in the actions of the clean and assisted with chores. The pauper Travis County Poor Farm superintendent, who population included a former lawyer and a labored in 1903–1904 to improve conditions surgeon who had lost his savings in an unsuc- at the institution by replacing unusable items cessful business venture. The prisoners, who and hiring a Negro cook to prepare three meals included a Swiss doctor who was a drug addict, a day. The superintendent lived in a one-story, a gambler, and “six small colored boys who five-room building with two large porches, a had been fined for stealing chickens,” helped

45 Dallam Sherman Hansford Ochiltree Lipscomb 1910 Hartley Moore Hutchinson Roberts Hemphill

Oldham Potter Carson Gray Wheeler

Deaf Smith Randall Armstrong Donley Collingsworth

Parmer Castro Swisher Briscoe Hall Childress

Hardeman

Bailey Lamb Hale Floyd Motley Cottle Wilbarger Foard Wichita

Clay Red Cooke Grayson Fannin Lamar Cochran Hockley Lubbock Crosby Dickens King Knox Baylor Archer River Montague Bowie Delta Throckmorton Hunt FranklinMorris Jack Hopkins Titus Garza Wise Yoakum Terry Lynn Kent Stonewall Haskell Young Denton Cass Collin Camp Parker Tarrant Rockwall Rains Wood Marion Palo Upshur Gaines Dawson Borden Scurry Fisher Dallas Jones Shackelford Stephens Pinto Kaufman Van Harrison Zandt Smith Gregg Hood Johnson Ellis Andrews Martin Howard Mitchell Nolan Taylor Callahan Eastland Erath Henderson Rusk Panola Somervell Hill Navarro El Paso Bosque Shelby Loving Winkler Ector Midland Coke Glasscock Sterling Runnels Comanche Anderson Cherokee Coleman Hamilton Freestone Nacogdoches Brown McLennan Limestone San Hudspeth Culberson Ward Tom Crane Mills Augustine Reagan Green Coryell Houston Angelina Sabine Reeves Upton Irion Concho Leon McCulloch Lampasas San Saba Falls Trinity Jasper Newton Robertson Madison Bell Schleicher Menard Polk Tyler Jeff Pecos Burnet Walker Davis Crockett Mason Llano Milam Brazos San Williamson Jacinto Sutton Grimes Kimble Burleson Hardin Montgomery Gillespie Blanco Lee Terrell Travis Washington Liberty Orange Bastrop Presidio Kerr Hays Jefferson Edwards Fayette Austin Waller Brewster Val Kendall Harris Verde Real Comal Caldwell Chambers Bandera Colorado Fort Guadalupe Lavaca Bend Gonzales Galveston Bexar Kinney Uvalde Medina Wharton Brazoria Wilson Dewitt Jackson Matagorda Maverick Zavala Frio Atascosa Karnes Goliad Victoria Calhoun Bee Refugio Dimmit LaSalle McMullen Live Oak

San Patricio Aransas Jim Webb Wells Nueces Duval

Kleberg

Brooks Jim Hogg County with Pauper Facility Zapata Kenedy

Starr Willacy Hidalgo

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Figure 11. Counties having poor farms or other institutions for housing paupers, 1910. Total Texas population 3,896,542. Data source is U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census (1915). support the poor farm by raising vegetables the United States. This trend was reflected in and crops such as wheat, oats, corn, and cotton the statistics for Texas that not only showed (Carpenter 1960:119–125, 131). a decrease in the ratio, but a decrease in the The number of Texas counties having total number of paupers. National trends also almshouses and poor farms increased again saw a percentage decrease in the numbers of from 62 in 1903–1905 to 69 in 1910 (Figure 11) paupers in almshouses who were less than 50 The population of inmates became increasingly years old, a statistic that pointed to a poor- white (75 percent of the poorhouse population house population that was increasingly elderly. in 1903 versus 77 percent in 1910), although In addition, the almshouse population was the percentage admitted remained relatively becoming increasingly male, and immigrant constant. Trends noted by the Department of paupers continued to represent a significantly Commerce, which provided the statistics, reit- large part of the population, although not the erated the decline in the ratio of paupers in overwhelmingly large numbers that some

46 had feared. In Texas, this foreign-born popu- sick paupers to a hospital (U.S. Department of lation predominated in counties with large Commerce, Bureau of the Census 1914:271– urban populations (Bexar and Harris) and 272, 312–346). counties with large immigrant populations Nor was Texas in the mainstream of a (Bexar, Brazos, Comal, Guadalupe, Harris, and national trend identified in the federal report Lavaca). Single people were disproportionately to centralize care under state as opposed represented as were the illiterate, unskilled to local authorities. In one other particular, laborers, those who were not able-bodied, and however, a new group of social reformers in those who were physically or mentally defec- Texas shared important ideas then current tive. In keeping with the general character elsewhere in the United States. As early as of almshouse paupers as being “an unstable, 1905, Dr. M. L. Graves, Superintendent of the rapidly shifting, group,” Texas paupers appear Southwestern Insane Asylum at San Antonio, to have been similarly mobile: with a total pop- made a plea for the more humane treatment of ulation enumerated as 861 on January 1, 1910, insane individuals who were “confined in jails, and 1,046 admitted in 1910, 700 were trans- poorhouses and private homes of Texas,” for ferred and discharged; 313 died during the the improvement of the state’s hospitals for the year (U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau insane, for changes in the lunacy laws, and for of the Census 1915:9–12, 76–77). recognition of the role heredity played in insan- Texas was different from many other ity, criminality, and moral perversion. Finally, states in the degree to which its laws were per- Graves pointed to the burden that the insane missive, and that generally lenient approach imposed on taxpayers (Graves 1905). persisted despite the passage of laws by the Graves’ work was followed a decade later state legislature prior to World War I. In 1911, by C. S. Yoakum’s study of the care received by for example, the legislature had passed an act the feebleminded and insane in Texas, which authorizing county commissioners to raise drew new attention to this particular popula- money for the “establishment of county poor tion of paupers and introduced mainstream houses and farms” so that they could provide reform ideas about eugenics, the classifica- “proper facilities for caring for their poor…” tion of “undesirable citizens,” their cost to the (Gammel 1911:204), and another law provided public, and the lack of control the state then for “the support of paupers and such idiots exerted over the population (Yoakum 1914:11– and lunatics as cannot be admitted into the 12).15 Unable to find the county-level statistics lunatic asylum, residents of their county, who he needed in the federal census, Yoakum sent are unable to support themselves” (Gammel a questionnaire to county judges in Texas to 1911:236–237). However, according to a study which all but four counties responded (Figure published by the U.S. Department of Commerce 12). Of the total, Yoakum provided some degree that summarized state laws relating to depen- of detail about six county facilities (Bell, Bexar, dent classes, Texas in 1913 still had no general Collin, Dallas, Grayson, and Hill). At the Bell state supervision of charities, no requirement County farm, Yoakum found 3 “distinctly insane for legal settlement before receiving assis- persons,” an old woman who “made life a burden tance, and no requirement that relatives be for all the others by her desire to steal every- responsible for dependent family members. thing she could find and hid it in her trunk,” an Indeed, Texas, 7 other states, and the District epileptic, and a man who had recently “failed in of Columbia were the only entities that did not an apparent attempt at suicide by cutting his have a residency requirement and 1 of 13 states in which relatives were not liable for the costs 15 In 1916, the care of the insane by counties drew of a family member’s care. Instead, the stat- the attention of Dr. Thomas W. Salmon, who described conditions in a wealthy, but otherwise unidentified, utes supported the historic legal structure in Texas county. He noted that the paralytics, epileptics, which commissioners’ courts were responsible and elderly housed at the poor farm had humble but for providing support for residents of the coun- comfortable accommodations. The insane, who were housed in a separate brick building, however, were cared ties and for idiots and lunatics who could not for in such a way that they were degraded. The attendant be admitted to the state asylum, for providing was well-intended, but untrained, and the facilities and pauper burials, and for providing and main- lack of care testified to what Salmon referred to as “ignorant conception of the nature of mental disease. . .” taining necessary public buildings and sending (Gilbertson 1917:266–271).

47 wrist with a razor.” He found the “cottages” at cages’” (Yoakum 1914:114, 119, 122). the “poor house” to be “woefully overcrowded” Yoakum’s focus was on the insane and (Yoakum 1914:110). The Bexar County poor feebleminded population in public institu- farm was under the charge of “one untrained tions, including poor farms (Figure 12), and woman” who was solely responsible for 22 so his comments reflected a bias about the insane, senile, or idiotic women. The popula- quality of care available and the institu- tion also included 2 idiotic children and 2 “dope tions in which it occurred. In counterpoint to fiends.” There was a total of 120 at the poorhouse Yoakum’s descriptions of degraded conditions, under the care of 1 superintendent. Yoakum a photograph of the Cass County farm in 1914 found the wards “floored with rough boards, (Stow 1974:22–23) depicted an apparently showing broken places and impossible of sani- well-maintained complex. The superinten- tary cleansing.” He commented, however, that dent’s house and paupers’ dining room was the county had plans to build “a modern build- a turn-of-the-century, one-story frame, gable- ing on a large farm south of town, where the roofed structure with a full front porch and inmates will be given greater freedom and be stone chimney on a gable end. Close by was put to work as far as they are able” (Yoakum the paupers’ house, a one-story frame, gable- 1914:112–113). According to The San Antonio roofed structure with a full front porch and Light (July 27, 1913), the commissioners’ court two chimney flues. Each room in the building had already bought 100 acres for the farm, had an entrance to the porch. A county com- and they planned to raise money for “an insti- missioners’ report found the rooms “neat as a tution for the poor that will not be surpassed pin.” During a typical day, and if the weather anywhere in the South” by selling the old poor was cold, the superintendent built a fire in farm on Jones Avenue in the city. An essential each of the rooms and fixed breakfast for the first step in the sale of the old farm was the inmates with the help of his family members. removal of the associated “unsightly burial In hot weather, his concern for the convicts, ground,” an action that would make the prop- who worked on the farm raising crops, led him erty more desirable to potential buyers. Plans to leave the jail doors open so they wouldn’t included reinterment of identified pauper suffocate. He solved the potential problem of burials in City Cemetery No. 7, reinterment of flight risk by gathering the convicts’ clothes the unknown in a common grave at the new and taking them with him (Stow 1974:22–23, poor farm, and leveling of all evidence of the 63–64). old burial ground after removal of the bodies. Like many of his contemporaries, Yoakum In Collin County, Yoakum found 4 insane advocated the removal of certain classes of at the county farm, where appropriate treat- defectives and dependents to specialized state ment and expert care were not available, but institutions, where they could receive care and in Dallas County, he found a poor farm that their behavior could be controlled for the benefit “was kept clean and wholesome,” despite its of general society. He advocated the establish- “antiquated buildings.” Here, he found “the ment of permanent state agencies to study and first hospital building on a poor farm.” It was solve “these intricate social problems,” and he “well equipped for its simple purposes” and warned that, if Texas did not take its responsi- had five beds. About 10 insane and 12 idiotic bilities to the “weaker classes” (in this study, the individuals were at the Grayson County farm, feebleminded and insane, some of whom were where conditions were “very bad.” Some indi- paupers), the future burden on society would be viduals were kept in unclean and untidy cells, as great as it was in the eastern United States. and Yoakum noted that a number of the poor Because he believed heredity to be the prime farms had “miniature jails.” On the other factor in a variety of neuroses that led inevi- hand, he found the rooms in the main building tably to insanity, idiocy, crime, and, eventually, for the paupers and imbeciles at the Grayson pauperism, Yoakum reiterated his generation’s County facility to be “clean and pleasant.” commitment to eugenics as a solution to the Finally, he found 6 feebleminded individuals defectives in society. He strongly recommended at the Hill County farm where the buildings the development of farm colonies for the seg- had “long since outlived their usefulness,” regation, management, and care of those ele- and 1 employee had referred to them as “‘bat ments of society unable to care for themselves,

48 Dallam Sherman Hansford 1/ Lipscomb Ochiltree 1911-1912 Hartley Moore Hutchinson Roberts Hemphill

Oldham 1/ Carson Gray 2?/ Potter Wheeler Deaf 1/ Smith Randall Armstrong Donley Collingsworth

Parmer Castro Swisher Briscoe Hall Childress

Hardeman

Bailey Lamb Hale Floyd Motley Cottle Wilbarger Foard 11/ Wichita Clay /4 Red 1/1 3?/6x Lamar River Cochran Hockley Lubbock Crosby Dickens King Knox Baylor Archer /1 1?/2 6/ Montague Cooke Grayson Fannin Delta Morris Bowie Hunt 4/ Franklin Jack Titus Yoakum Terry Lynn Garza Kent Stonewall Haskell Throckmorton Young 7/ 2/ /1x /3 8/2 4/3 Wise Denton Collin Camp Cass Hopkins Dallas Rockwall Rains Marion Palo Kaufman Wood Gaines Dawson Borden Scurry Fisher Jones Shackelford Stephens Pinto 4/ 1/4x 47/x Upshur Harrison Parker Tarrant 1/2 3/ 2/6 Hood Johnson Van Zandt 1/ Gregg Erath 2/ 4/x 4?/2x Henderson Andrews Martin 2/ Mitchell Nolan Taylor Callahan Eastland Smith Panola 3/ 1/ Ellis Rusk Howard Somervell Hill Navarro 10/1 El Paso Comanche Bosque 6/x 2/ Anderson 4/4 Loving Winkler Ector Midland Glasscock Coke 1/ Sterling Runnels 1/ Hamilton /2 Cherokee Shelby Coleman Brown Freestone 2/ McLennan Nacogdoches Hudspeth Limestone San Culberson Ward Crane Tom Mills Coryell 2/x Houston Augustine Upton Reagan Green 2/ Falls Angelina Sabine Reeves Irion Concho 3/2 Leon McCulloch Lampasas Bell Trinity Newton San Saba Robertson Jasper 6/4x 2/2 Madison 1?/ Menard Polk Tyler 2/ Jeff Pecos Burnet 2/ Brazos Grimes Walker Crockett Schleicher Williamson Davis Mason Llano Milam 1/1 San Jacinto Sutton /1 3/3 Kimble Burleson Hardin Travis Montgomery Gillespie Blanco Lee /5 Terrell 2/ Washington Liberty Orange Bastrop Presidio Kerr Hays Harris Jefferson Edwards Austin Waller Brewster Val Kendall 15/1 \5 2/ Verde Real Comal Caldwell 4/7 Chambers Bandera Fayette Colorado Fort Bend Guadalupe Bexar Lavaca Gonzales 1/ Galveston Kinney Uvalde Medina 8/2x /1/ Wharton 2/ Wilson Dewitt Brazoria 4/ 1/ Jackson Victoria Matagorda Maverick Zavala Frio Atascosa Karnes Goliad Calhoun 1/ Refugio Dimmit LaSalle McMullen Live Oak Bee

San Patricio Aransas Jim Webb Wells Nueces Duval

Kleberg

Brooks Jim Hogg # Insane/# Feebleminded in Poor Farms or in Jail Zapata Kenedy

x Example of County with Poor Farm or Poorhouse Starr Willacy Hidalgo

Cameron PAI/08/slh

Figure 12. Counties having poor farms or poorhouses, numbers of insane on poor farms, and numbers of feebleminded in jail and on poor farms, 1911–1912. Data source is Yoakum 1914. and he believed that their line of descent and humanity.” But two relatively acceptable should be terminated (Yoakum 1914:12, 17, 24, solutions were sterilization and segregation, 66, 74–77). and Texas legislators were sufficiently alarmed In 1911, the American Breeders’ by the information that social scientists and Association’s eugenics section had unani- others provided them to submit three bills at a mously adopted a resolution that authorized session about the time Yoakum was completing the association chair to appoint a committee. his work (Yoakum 1914:82, 82n). One of these, The purpose of the committee was “to study and introduced in the senate in 1913, authorized report on the best practical means for cutting sterilization of some criminals, of lunatics and off the defective germ-plasm in the American epileptics, and of people being hereditary carri- population.” Yoakum pointed out that solutions ers of congenital diseases of mind and body who such as euthanasia and natural selection were either were confined to eleemosynary or penal “repugnant to present-day ideals of religion institutions or might be. The bill was reported

49 out favorably but failed (Nelson 1926:124). inmate), 1 housed 51–100 inmates (14 inmates In the meantime, there remained almost 500 per employee and supported at a cost of $124.99 insane individuals in Texas county jails or poor per inmate), and 3 housed 101–200 inmates farms (Yoakum 1914:108). (7.88 inmates per employee and supported at Available literature does not indicate a cost of $271.39 per inmate). There were no that there was an administrative response to larger institutions in Texas. Interestingly, 6 of Yoakum’s study. Indeed, the legislative record the state’s poor farms comprised of 607 acres appears to have been silent until the early had no inmates at all (Stewart 1925:17–20, 1920s, when Governor Pat Neff, who was some- 26). thing of a crusader and moralist with inter- In summarizing state laws pertaining ests in education, prisons, public health, law to poorhouses and poor farms, Stewart found enforcement, and taxation (Turner 1996:4:970), that Texas was 1 of 28 states (out of 48 states delivered a speech in 1923 that criticized what and the District of Columbia) where control of he called the “dead weights” (the crippled, per- almshouses was vested in a board of county manently sick, women, dissipated and indolent commissioners (Stewart 1925:53–54). This individuals, and drug addicts in institutions), total number probably reflected the early whom he characterized as consumers rather results of a national shift from local to state than producers. While his critical comments control that had begun occurring in the late targeted inmates in the Texas prison system, nineteenth century and eventually became who he believed should be put to work (Neff a dominant pattern throughout the United 1923:44), his characterizations echoed earlier States. Reflecting a change from the pre–World ones made about residents of poor farms. War I pattern, Texas required legal residence Neff’s comments appeared about the to receive assistance, although exceptions still same time as the national study Paupers in could be made. Texas and 3 other states did Almshouses, 1923, which found an increase not enumerate who could be committed to an in the numbers of paupers between 1880 and almshouse; and with 28 other states, it did not 1923 in the West South Central region of the address in its laws the subject of contracting for country (U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau the care of the indigent. Texas, 35 other states, of the Census 1925). Within Texas, the pauper and the District of Columbia made provision population in almshouses had increased by “for the removal of mental defectives in alms- ca. 25 percent, but it seemed to have escaped houses to an asylum for defective persons,” but notice that the total number in 1923 was still it was 1 of 18 states that did not make relatives very small, 1,073 being enumerated in the “liable to the support of poor persons commit- special census. Furthermore, the number of ted to almshouses.” Texas and 11 other states paupers in almshouses per 100,000 popula- did not require paupers who were able to work tion had remained constant, while the total to be employed, and it was 1 of 30 states that number of paupers admitted to almshouses had not made provision for almshouse consoli- had decreased by 32 percent between 1910 and dation, an activity some states had undertaken 1923 (U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau because of a belief that consolidation resulted of the Census 1925:7–8). Estelle Stewart’s in financial savings. study, published the same year, examined sta- While some authors have assumed that tistics from institutions throughout the United Texas was intolerant and punitive in its posture States, including 54 in Texas that had 657 male towards paupers (Cottrell 1989:172; Crannell and 294 female occupants, and a total of 8,682 2003), the data in Stewart argue otherwise: associated acres. Of these, 4,645 acres were there was a generally tolerant and lenient atti- in cultivation. The majority (28) of the Texas tude about work, the financial liability of rela- poorhouses or poor farms housed 1–10 inmates tives, and residency. At the same time, the state (3.67 inmates per employee and supported at a recognized, even if it did not provide adequate cost of $464.67 per inmate per year), 14 housed local or state support for, one of the core values 11–25 inmates (10.68 inmates per employee of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century and supported at a cost of $332.36 per inmate), progressive social policy: that “mental defec- 2 housed 26–50 inmates (7.5 inmates per tives” were more appropriately cared for in employee and supported at a cost of $321.07 per asylums than in poorhouses and poor farms.

50 Stewart concluded that almshouses had none. Although the commission found that throughout the United States were charac- the great majority of inmates were what they terized by dilapidation, inadequacy, and even called mentally diseased or deteriorated, the “indecency,” and she asserted, quoting the North fact that 56 suffered from arteriosclerosis and Carolina State Board of Charities, that the another 24 of cardio-related diseases (Texas county home was “a failure” (Stewart 1925:41, Eleemosynary Commission 1925:31–33), sug- 49). Her conclusions were affirmed by the find- gests that advanced age may have been the ings of the Texas Eleemosynary Commission. most significant contributor to their mental Called together by Governor Neff in November condition. 1923, but provided with no funds by the legis- Projecting to the state as a whole, the com- lature, the commission raised money and hired mission estimated that 933 individuals were mental health experts to help them find “better housed on Texas’ poor farms where all classes and more economical methods of conducting of people were mixed together, just as they had the State’s eleemosynary institutions and, been since the nineteenth century. They con- especially…seeking out means of preventing in cluded that poor farms were performing “no future, as far as possible, dependency and delin- useful service whatever, unless it be considered quency.” The commission focused on the insane useful to temporarily hide from our sight the and feebleminded but, because a number of aged, the insane, the feeble-minded, the syphi- those classes were housed in poorhouses and at litic, and the tuberculous and mix them in one poor farms, the commission’s report described house with no proper care of either class, no general conditions at county poor farms and treatment likely to rehabilitate them, or even to almshouses. The experts studied a total of 148 ease their pains efficiently and protect society individuals at 11 poor farms and 1 “old-ladies’ from them.” The commission concluded with the home” and found 53.4 percent to be mentally statement: “Poorhouses are relics of medieval ill or deteriorated (insane), 22.3 percent men- ignorance and largely a waste of money. They tally defective (feebleminded), and 1.4 percent should be abolished and their inmates sent to each to be borderline mental defective or suf- institutions suited to their several needs” (Texas fering from gross personality defects (Texas Eleemosynary Commission 1925:8, 33–34). Eleemosynary Commission 1925:5, 19, 29–30). The attack on poorhouses and poor farms Of the facilities, the commission found in Texas and the nation continued during the that two counties had “well constructed build- mid-1920s in the form of Harry Evans’s study ings,” but in most counties, housing consisted that included 54 Texas poor farms. Evans briefly of “several small ‘pauper houses’ of frame,” described conditions at 14 poor farms and pro- each of which had two small rooms, each room vided specific, but only brief, information about being occupied by 1 or 2 people. Most of the 11 improvements at 11 of them. All of the 11 had poor farms had no dining room. The inmates outdoor privies, well water, and no sewerage. received food in the kitchen and consumed it Typically, men and women slept in adjoining in their rooms. Conditions were generally dirty, rooms. Collin County had three “old, one-story and clothing, bedding, and rooms were in need board buildings battened” with whitewashed of soap and water. Concerning inmate demog- rooms; a dining room; and a building with cells, raphy, the commissioners found 111 male an iron door, and iron grated windows. Palo inmates and 37 females. There were 121 whites, Pinto County had an “old shack of a building,” 27 Negroes, and no Mexicans. Children were while the Travis County facility looked like an found at 2 of the poor farms, and the greatest “old logging camp.” The Wilson County poor number of the residents (100) fell between the farm was comprised of “two old shacks” (Evans ages of 50 and 89. Single people (66 of 148) and 1926:79–80). widowed individuals (50) predominated. According to Nelson (1926), who reiter- A total of 85 of the inmates were suf- ated the findings of the Texas Eleemosynary ficiently educated to read and write, and 9 of Commission, the chief recommendations of them had some high school training or had been the commission were embodied in a bill and to college; however, 97 of them had not passed presented to the 39th Legislature in 1925. The beyond the third grade. A total of 19 had some main provisions pertained to terminology used level of skilled training; the remaining 129 to describe certain classes, division of the state

51 into hospital districts, changes to the commit- and poor farms in Texas. And, indeed, some ment law, establishment of two psychopathic poor farms were shut down, the one operated hospitals, and the requirement that persons by Bowie County being advertised for sale in judged insane could not be held for more than December 1941. Old age assistance entitled 30 days in any facility other than “an institu- the elderly to services that exceeded what poor tion for the treatment of the insane” (Nelson farms and poor homes had been able to provide. 1926:118–119). According to Cottrell (1989:182), the availabil- Presumably, enforcement of the last provi- ity of federal and state aid spelled an end to sion would have resulted in removal of persons these local institutions, and she attributes the diagnosed as insane from poorhouses and poor ownership of poor farm properties by counties farms. However, insufficient information is well after the 1930s to the length of time it took available to evaluate whether or not poorhouse for counties to complete sales of the property. and poor farm populations changed follow- A more likely explanation for the persis- ing the activities of the Texas Eleemosynary tence of these historic institutions is that pro- Commission. Some authors have remarked vided by Wagner (2005:132–133), who pointed on the growing tendency of the residents to be out that groups such as agricultural and characterized by their elderly status. A greater domestic workers and public employees were impact on the institutions probably occurred as not covered by the Social Security Act. Social a result of the depression of the 1930s, when Security pensions required 10 years of contrib- federal and state programs began to have utory payments, and so a very large number an effect on funding of relief and use of the of elderly were not eligible to receive Social poor farms themselves. The Kaufman County Security pensions. The disabled, who com- Poor Farm, for example, was used simultane- prised another large proportion of the indigent ously as a facility for paupers and in a Farm population, were not covered by Social Security Demonstration Program beginning in 1931. until 1956, and even then, they also had to Under that federal program, some of the farm have made 10 years of contributions. These and acreage was set aside and placed under the similar requirements of the law help to explain jurisdiction of the county agent (Hunt 2008). the persistence of poor homes and poor farms In November 1932, statewide relief began in Texas as late as the 1960s. with passage of the Federal Relief Emergency A review of the history of indigent care in law (Cottrell 1989:181), and constitutional Texas suggests the following: authority for a state welfare system was estab- lished in 1933 under Article III, Section 51a, • While some provisions for indigent entitled Assistance Grants and Medical Care care were provided in Spanish and for Needy Aged, Disabled and Blind Persons, Mexican law, the legal structure of that and Needy Children. The framers of the 1933 care became rooted in English poor law provisions established very specific eligibility following the Texas Revolution and requirements, as did the Social Security Act of passage of an act establishing what 1935, which forbade assistance to residents of became the county commission system. public institutions. This act was accompanied • After 1846, county courts were by the Texas Old Age Assistance Law of 1935, responsible for supporting indigents whose requirements essentially were the same and burying paupers. as those of the Social Security Act (Cottrell • Concerns about the number of 1989:182; Whiteside 1973:10). immigrant poor in Texas during the Theoretically, the federal and state laws mid-nineteenth century mirrored passed during the 1930s and the creation of those of the rest of the United States new state agencies such as the Child Welfare and persisted into the late nineteenth Division and Commission for the Blind in 1931, century. Unemployment Relief Commission in 1934, • Texas was among the first states to Old Age Assistance Commission in 1936, and establish, fund, and construct state State Board of Public Welfare (Department of institutions in the 1850s and 1860s for Public Welfare) in 1939 (Cathey 1949:110, 112) the care of special classes of individuals should have obviated the need for poor homes (insane, deaf, dumb, and blind) who

52 typically were cared for at home. • Between 1900 and 1930, Texas social However, space at those institutions reformers and legislators reflected was inadequate to relieve the burden national trends in the area of eugenics of care provided by families and, later, and the identification of poor farms local governments. as undesirable spawning places for • While it would be impossible to undesirables. reconstruct the number of paupers in • When compared to those of other Texas after 1850 without reviewing states, Texas laws regarding the care of all census records for every county, the indigents were permissive. As a result, small numbers recorded in the special pauper populations and the extent censuses of the late nineteenth century to which they received care in county suggest that the numbers of indigents institutions tended to fluctuate more relative to the total population were than in states with more restrictive very small. laws. • The 1876 Constitution provided for the • As elsewhere in the United States, the establishment of poorhouses and poor numbers and percentages of paupers in farms; the first poor farm was acquired Texas decreased in the early twentieth by a county the same year. century. Thereafter, the pauper • Prison labor became an essential part of population became increasingly elderly, the operation of poor farms by the late male, and single. nineteenth century. Misdemeanants • As elsewhere in the United States, typically assisted superintendents in state programs and bureaucracies the operation of the farms and raising designed to provide relief and care of crops to feed the paupers. for certain classes of needy citizens • Typically poor farms were located 1 increased dramatically during the to 3 miles from a major town, often 1930s. However, local solutions to care, the county seat, and the economic ties such as poor homes and poor farms, between farm and town were strong. persisted because a large percentage Improvements at the farm usually of indigent citizens failed to qualify for included a superintendent’s house, any other form of relief. pauper housing (often two-room frame cottages), a kitchen, barns, a shower Pauper Care in Bell County, or washroom, wells, and outhouses. Texas, 1850s–1969 A typical poor farm headquarters probably closely resembled that of a Pauper care in Bell County, Texas, may rural Texas farm. Cemeteries usually have begun as early as 1850, when the county were present. If inmate labor was used, was formed; official records document a continu- a jail might be present. ity of care from 1859 (CCM B:191)16 until 1969, • Poor home and poor farm populations when the Bell County Home closed and the last were racially mixed. A wide variety six inmates were moved to a Temple nursing of types of indigents usually were home (Gardner 1995). During the intervening present as well, and included elderly, 110 years, the county provided outdoor care for blind, insane, and idiotic individuals. the entire time, and indoor care for 90 of those Children were not represented in large years at four different locations. Between 1879 numbers. and 1969, indoor and outdoor relief occurred • The numbers of indigents probably simultaneously as county officials worked to increased in response to natural and develop a system that was humane, economi- economic disasters. The numbers of cally practical, and flexible. The larger world of poor farms increased between 1876 and 16 The designation “CCM” indicates county 1910, but at a steadily decreasing rate. commissioners’ minute books. All such references in this • The population served by outdoor relief chapter are to Bell County records, as are deed, death, may have exceeded that served by and probate records cited in the text. Note that “deed record” is abbreviated “DR” in the text for the sake of institutions at all times. brevity.

53 sociological and reform theory seems not have fied as a diseased person who was suffering, touched those responsible for the care of indi- and two years later, help was sought to keep a gents, except in occasional requirements to keep Mrs. Griffin and her two children from suffer- records. Rather, pauper care in Bell County ing (CCM C:58, 175–176). reflected other broad patterns: the majority of The next step involved the identification of individuals who needed care received a modest an individual who was willing to take respon- stipend from the county that allowed them to sibility for the pauper, receive money from the remain in their homes; a number who were county, and account for the funds. If the pauper in greater need, perhaps because of the seri- was ill, a medical doctor might be selected ousness of their afflictions, received a county (CCM C:44). Otherwise, the responsible party stipend that was administered by a third party, could be a member of the general community while others were placed at the county farm or or a relative: Benjamin Ellis was given money home; and the most serious cases were sent by for the costs involved with keeping his insane the county to one of several appropriate state daughter (CCM C:65), and T. K. Young kept institutions. To call pauper care in Bell County and supported “the old pauper woman of color” a “system” would be a misnomer. Rather, the (CCM C:176). A caretaker was not named for county’s practices, like those of the state as a the money appropriated for the support of an whole, appear to have been permissive. While old Negro woman who had been the slave of county commissioners attempted, from time Parson Crawford and now was a pauper (CCM to time, to exert some degree of oversight and C:175), but presumably, a third party would structure, they were generally lenient concern- have been identified to receive the $10 per ing issues such as family responsibility, length month that was appropriated for that use. of time indigents were allowed to be dependent According to one record, the recipient of the on the county, and legal settlement. funds was required to present his accounts, jus- Bell County records suggest that some tifying the expenses of care, to the court (CCM form of pauper care existed by the 1850s,17 and C:44). The tone of the court records, whether that care consisted exclusively of outdoor relief pertaining to monetary or personal responsi- until 1879. As early as November 1859, Bell bility, was not punitive but, rather, solicitous. County paid for the burial of a Mrs. Yarbrough The court understood that an impoverished at an undisclosed location (CCM B:191), and father who was trying to care for a large family after the Civil War, the county commissioners’ would need assistance for his lunatic daugh- minutes frequently listed sums paid and ser- ter in the forms of money and adult care. It vices rendered for a variety of forms of assis- used language that urged responsible parties tance. A typical arrangement involved several to “prevent suffering” and provide for the steps. First, the person needing assistance was paupers’ “support and comfort” (CCM C:31, 58, identified, either by themselves or by others 175–176). Furthermore, the stipends appear to who knew of their plight. Notes in the minutes have been generous, ranging from $10.00 per for October 1865 said that “old man” Wade month to $16 2/3 per month, and they could be Hampton was a pauper and “really needed used for medical attention, lodging, food, cloth- assistance from the county” (CCM C:28); in ing, coffins and graves, and transportation of another case, an impoverished father with a individuals to the Lunatic Asylum in Austin. large family had a pauper daughter who was a In 1868, court records suggest changes lunatic for whom he was unable to care (CCM in funding sources and an early attempt to C:31). In 1866, “freed boy Henry” was identi- bring some centralized organization to the disbursement of funds. Unlike other coun- 17 The author identified data in the county ties that imposed a tax for pauper care, Bell commissioners’ minutes by using the index to the minutes. However, it became apparent that the index County sold lots in the vicinity of Belton and was not complete, and certainly not exhaustive, stated that the money raised was to be used because a random review of pages not listed under the for that purpose (CCM C:183). Within months subjects “pauper” or “poor” in the indexes resulted in the identification of numerous records other than those of the sale, the court ordered the appoint- that were indexed. The absence of references to paupers ment of J. M. Kiser, who was directed “to take during the Civil War was particularly noteworthy, since charge of the indigents in Bell County and to most counties would have had requests from or on behalf of indigents during that time. make such arrangements for their Support

54 and Comfort as may be really necessary” (CCM 1880 indicated that the poor farm housed 10 C:194). This nascent structure appears to have pauper individuals (5 males, 5 females). Of the remained in place during July 1868, when the 10, 6 were adults and 4 were children. The 3 court directed an agent to furnish food (meal adult males included a single 44-year-old male and meat) to each pauper recognized by the who was maimed, crippled, or bedridden; a court and to draw reimbursement for the cost widowed 71-year-old male who was a carpen- of the items from the county fund (CCM C:200). ter; and a 76-year-old male who was a widowed However, less-directly regulated care activi- preacher. The adult females included a mother ties continued, as well. During 1868–1869 and and daughter (a 72-year-old widow and her 42- 1876–1879, individuals were paid for boarding, year-old single daughter) and a mother who feeding, clothing, and otherwise supporting had 4 children who were 5 years old or younger. paupers. In other cases, the paupers them- The special census made the same year enu- selves received the county funds, and by 1877, merated 2 paupers who were being supported there were 9 individuals (7 males, 2 females) by the county outside of the poor farm: one suf- who drew monthly appropriations that ranged fered from heart disease and the second, who from $6.00 to $12.00 from the county (CCM was classified as habitually intemperate, had E:178). By May 1878, that number had doubled cancer in his face. The 13 individuals at the poor to 18 (14 men, 4 women); in August 1878, there farm (most of them enumerated in the popula- were 15 (11 men, 4 women); in November 1878, tion schedule) included the Wheat family (5 there were 14 individuals (11 men, 4 women); in members), who suffered no disabilities. Other November 1878, there were 14 individuals (11 individuals suffered from old age or a combina- men, 3 women); and by May 1879, there were tion of old age, paralysis, and other ailments 10 individuals (CCM E:263, 272, 291, 342). (3); were crippled or crippled and epileptic (2); While the number of county-supported were paralyzed and idiotic from dropsy of the paupers was relatively few (ca. 13.2 average brain (1), or were paralyzed and epileptic (1). between 1877 and 1878) when compared to the The only able-bodied individual male had no county population (9,771 in 1870 and 20,517 disabilities. None were habitually intemperate, in 1880) (Connor and Odintz 1996:1:474), and none were criminal. the commissioners’ court made a decision to George Raney remained the poor farm purchase a poor farm tract approximately manager from 1879 to 1886, successfully re- 5.5 miles northwest of Belton from R. H. and bidding for the position each year. Typically, he Ella B. Turner. The purchase of the tract, which agreed to feed the paupers for $5.00 each per was unusually distant from the county seat,18 month. Sometimes he provided washing and was consummated on January 16, 1879 (DR mending services and supplied tobacco for an Y:236). Presumably, the county constructed additional sum per head; he also offered to go the appropriate improvements on the property, for a physician, haul wood, and help the sick and on September 1, 1879, Lucinda Shirley “in ordinary cases” for an additional $50.00 was sent to the poor farm (CCM E:360). There, per year. He promised to bury the dead on the she would have been greeted by the superin- poor farm and to furnish coffins at $10.00 each tendent, George W. Raney, a white, 40-year-old (CCM G:311). farmer whose household included a 35-year-old Despite the opening of the poor farm in wife, five children between the ages of 1 month 1879 and the improvements that were made to and 13 years, and a 46-year-old English helper, it, including construction of a cistern measur- who was a farmer (U.S. Bureau of the Census ing 10 by 16 feet (CCM E:398) and providing 1880). furniture (CCM F:322), outdoor care continued The Bell County population statistics for at a robust pace. Paupers supported outside of the farm included blind individuals (CCM 18 A sample of other farms, such as those in Cass, E:380; F:166, 322), lunatics (CCM E:398), idiots Bowie, Navarro, and Kaufman Counties, showed that (CCM F:322), crippled individuals (CCM F:161, county farms typically were no more than 1 to 2 miles distant from the county seat or some other population 312), and a number in “actual want” (CCM center. The benefits of proximity to urban centers were E:406). Pauper funds also were used to provide addressed by Alexander Johnson in 1911, when he medical care to the paupers. A contract with Dr. recommended placing poor farms in the country, but proximate to population centers. S. N. Nunn in 1884 called for Nunn to be paid

55 $250.00 per year. In return, he was to supply cants for the position, and they laid out the medical attention and all medicines and drugs rights and responsibilities of the superin- to the paupers on the poor farm, in the corpo- tendent. In November 1888, for example, the rate limits of Belton, or confined in the Bell county furnished J. Brister the 5-acre poor County jail (CCM F:287). The contract for 1886 farm with improvements, the use of two mules specified that the county physician also was and harness, and all farming implements on to examine applicants to the poor farm after hand: one cotton and corn planter combine, one the court decided that each was “a fit subject turning plow, one stock and two sweeps, three for admittance…so far as financial ability shovels, one mattock (an implement for digging and character is concerned,” and to ascertain and grubbing), two picks, and three hoes. He whether or not the applicant was able to “make also was granted the privilege of cutting and a livelihood” (CCM F:411). hauling wood he needed at the poor farm free In January 1886, Bell County agreed to sell of charge from a tract of land the county had the 125-acre poor farm on the Bowers Survey to purchased (CCM G:137).19 George Raney, the superintendent (CCM F:409; The county committed to pay Brister DR 50:442–443). The same month, the commis- $6.00 per head at the end of each month for sioners accepted the offer of E. Brunet to sell each pauper at the poorhouse. Brister agreed to the county 5.5 acres on the Leon River “near furnish the paupers with “good and sufficient the Bridge and known as the Ice house prop- food and to take care of, nurse and look after erty” for $950.00. The new poor farm site was the same, to the best of his skill and ability.” on the Connell Survey in northeast Belton, and The county was to give the paupers the clothing, the acreage was paid for out of funds received medicine, and medical attention they needed. from the sale of the first poor farm (CCM F: In case of death, the county would furnish 411, 412; DR 54:113). clothing and a coffin for the corpse, and Brister The county improved the new poor farm would dig the grave. Brister would receive his on the Leon River with a two-story home and payment at the end of each month after filing other buildings. Alterations and additions to the a “verified account” that showed “the number buildings occurred during the next decade and of paupers on hand, the date of the entering or included the addition of a gallery on one side of discharge of any pauper and the total amount the superintendent’s house and the boxing in due for the month just ended…” (CCM G:137). of another gallery (CCM G:365). The commis- The language of the agreement between sioners’ court also authorized the addition of a the county and the poor farm manager set the room to “the house on the poor farm” for two of terms for a relationship between manager and the female paupers (CCM G:432). In November paupers that was intended to be solicitous, and 1894, the commissioners decided to construct entries in the commissioners’ court minutes an entirely new house because the paupers suggest that Brister, in particular, fulfilled that were not properly accommodated, and the sexes expectation. In 1890, for example, he appar- and races were not separated. The new paupers ently had approached the commissioners’ court house would be two 14-foot-square rooms 10 about a lunatic and an epileptic who were being feet high, with a single roof. It would be “box kept in the county jail. The court gave Brister and stripped and ceiled overhead.” Each room permission to take the two men from the jail to would have a stove flue. The two rooms would the pauper farm and attempt to care for them be connected by a door and there would be two there (CCM G:217–224). In addition, the court outside doors and two windows to each room. was not without its own charitable behav- The foundation would be cedar blocks and the ior: in June 1892, the commissioners ordered cornice would be “plain box” (CCM H:154). the “graves at the poor farm fenced in and to As in the past, a series of superinten- included about one-fourth (1/4) of an acre of dents provided care to the paupers at the land” (CCM G:391). About five months later, Leon River location. These included J. Brister the county authorized the marking of graves at (1888–1890), J. W. Ogletree (1890–1893), D. B. Birchfield (1893–1896), and W. B. Coburn 19 In February 1887, the county acquired 18 acres (1896–?). Contracts were negotiated yearly of timber land out of the J. J. Simmons Survey from D. W. McGlassen for $150.00. Timber on the land was for the between the commissioner’s court and appli- use of the poor farm (CCM G:29–30).

56 the poor farm “with head boards & names of 8 females) (CCM G:362), and by February 1893, dead” (CCM G:419). the total had more than doubled to 42, again While the official county posture towards primarily male (CCM G:438, 452). The number paupers appears to have been solicitous, that remained relatively high in February 1894 of the community was not always. By 1887, (26 total; 13 males, 13 females) (CCM H:173, the concerns of Belton’s citizens focused on the 292). Paupers were predominantly white, and burial of pauper dead, and late in the year, some the next largest group was African-American; of them petitioned the court to purchase a piece on occasion, a Hispanic appeared on the rolls. of land other than the one-quarter acre that Typically, each pauper was provided $5.00 to would be used as a burying ground for paupers $10.00 per month in the form of warrants that (CCM G:77). A committee looked at a number of were given to third parties who were respon- sites, and on January 2, 1888, members recom- sible for the care of the pauper. Medical atten- mended acquisition of a 5-acre tract belonging tion for all paupers, whether in the Bell County to W. H. Edwards (CCM G:79). Soon after, the jail, at the county poor farm, or in the city of president of the Ladies South Belton Cemetery Belton was provided by a series of doctors, who Association, Mrs. Lydia Alexander, petitioned applied for the position just as the poor farm the court to deed the South Belton Cemetery superintendents did for theirs. to her and her successors and to pass an order Throughout the 1890s, the Bell County prohibiting the “further burying of paupers Commissioners Court wrestled with the ques- or negroes on said ground” (CCM G:93). This tion of whether indoor or outdoor relief was more petition revealed that some pauper burials economical. In February 1897, for example, the between 1886 and 1888 had been in the South court instructed each commissioner to person- Belton Cemetery as well as at the poor farm ally examine all paupers in their beats for the on the Leon River. The court signed a quit- purpose of reporting on their conditions and claim deed to Alexander and proceeded with their eligibility for designation as paupers so its plans to acquire the 5-acre pauper cemetery that the county could revise its pauper list, if site from Edwards. However, citizens living necessary. In November, the court ordered an near the Edwards tract objected, and the court individual placed at the poor farm for “safe gave them the option of purchasing the prop- keeping” and receipt of “proper care.” But the erty from the county (CCM G:93). It is unlikely order was changed shortly thereafter to one that any burials occurred on the Edwards providing for outdoor relief instead, because tract because of citizen objection and the short the commissioners believed that it would be amount of time during which the county owned more economical (CCM I:15, 77). the 5 acres. Finally, in early 1898, the county commis- In the meantime, the county continued to sioners met and reviewed the county’s situation practice a dual system of indoor and outdoor vis-à-vis its indigent population. The members relief. Even incomplete lists of those receiving stated on January 3 that for a number of years care by direct county grants or through third- there had been about 40 paupers who had party warrants suggest that the numbers iden- been drawing on the monetary resources of tified with outdoor relief probably surpassed the county to the extent of about $300.00 per those receiving institutional care at the farm: month (outdoor relief) and another number at in February 1887, the 13 paupers supported the county poor farm whose care was costing monthly by the county outside of the farm about $100.00 per month.20 They concluded included 9 whites and 4 blacks of whom 8 were that the county should buy a larger farm that men and 5 women. Of those who suffered disabil- would be self-supporting, thereby lessening the ities, 2 were idiots, 2 cripples, 2 blind, 1 infirm, fiscal burden on the county. The commission- and 5 aged (CCM G:33). In February 1888, ers, having looked at several farms, settled on the 16 paupers included 11 men and 5 women (CCM G:87), and in February 1890, there were 20 The commissioners’ statistic of approximately 40 paupers drawing outdoor relief in 1898 and an average 11 male and 10 female paupers (CCM G:226). from the population schedules for 1880 and 1900 of about A year later, the court enumerated 18 paupers 16 paupers at the poor farm at any given time shows the (11 males, 7 females) (CCM G:303). In February very small number of individuals who were indigent when compared to the total 1880 Bell County population 1892, the pauper list included 18 (10 males and of 20,517 and 1900 population of 45,535.

57 13 acres belonging to Miss J. Carothers and a ordered to the poor farm with their tools, tents, farm belonging to S. O. Wilson whose 200 acres and teams (CCM I:252, 357). There, Coburn were on the Leon River about 2 miles northeast took charge of them, presumably to provide of Belton. Wilson agreed to sell his property, necessary supplemental labor. They were a and a deal was struck on January 10, 1898. presence at the poor farm in both the 1900 Wilson’s parcel was composed of four separate and 1910 censuses (U.S. Bureau of the Census tracts and included land that would become 1900, 1910). In 1900, the county convict popu- the location of Bell County’s third poor farm lation (also identified as day laborers) at the and a new paupers’ cemetery at Pepper Creek farm totaled eight of whom seven were black (CCM I:99–100; DR 119:261–263). It lay east of and one white, seven male and one female. In the Gulf Colorado & Santa Fe Railroad right- 1910, there were six convicts and two convict of-way and north of the river, and it was tran- guards. Convicts included two blacks, two sected on the north end by Pepper Creek, which mulattos, and two whites; of these five were meandered through the property before empty- male and one female. Presumably, the convicts ing into the river. Access to the property was assisted the farm superintendent with farm deeded to the county by W. M. and Mattie A. duties, including work on a special project in Sherrod on March 21, 1898, when the Sherrods 1905, when the county commissioners’ court sold 1.3 acres out of their property in the Nancy ordered the superintendent to set aside 10 Chance League so that the county could build acres of the farm and follow the directions a road from the Belton and Temple Road to the and rules of the “Agriculture Department” in new poor farm (DR 120:412–413).21 a cotton-raising experiment. The department The Southwestern Telephone Company would furnish the seed free of cost and fertil- placed a line at the farm in early 1898 and, pre- izer at cost. The superintendent then was to sumably, the county moved ahead with build- fertilize 5 acres and leave the balance unfer- ing improvements there to house the paupers tilized, and use identical seed and cultivation and superintendent (CCM I:103). In March, the methods in each tract (CCM J:358). county noted a need to take out insurance, and Apparently in an effort to bring structure the commissioners asked an agent to prepare to the poor farm system, the county commis- policies that would cover $2,150.00 worth of sioners made an inventory of all Bell County investment (CCM I:130). Paupers at the old property at the poor farm and filed the record farm were ordered to the new, and the county with the county clerk (CCM J:348). They also clerk was ordered to cease payments to all required the superintendent to keep a set of individuals on the paupers’ roll in Bell County, books in which he recorded money received with one exception (CCM I:100). The hoped- from the sale of farm products, the convict for result was that cessation of payments for labor, sales of livestock, and all forms of income. outdoor relief would encourage all indigents in He was to record all expenses incurred in farm the county to move to the farm. maintenance, convict and pauper support, and The new poor farm was located on more all other expenses. The books would include lists than 200 acres of prime farmland (an amount of all paupers and convicts received, and dates that increased with the purchase of additional of reception and discharge (CCM J:347–348). acreage in October 1903), and so convict labor The resulting records for the operation of soon became an important component in its the Bell County Poor Farm on the Leon River are operation. By August 1899, the court had missing from county archives. Consequently, ordered the sheriff to take all male county con- for the 14 years during which the farm was victs who owed fines and costs to the county and located on the Leon River, only two federal deliver them to superintendent W. B. Coburn. censuses (1900 and 1910) provided profiles of The next year, the convict gang who had been the pauper population on the farm, and the working on the Belton Little River Road was 1900 census included incomplete information because portions of it were indecipherable. In 21 The road appears to have entered the property in the future vicinity of a pest house that was established in 1900, the farm included 23 paupers, of whom late 1900 in the north part of the farm near the railroad at least 13 were white, 14 female, and 13 either right-of-way. About the same time, a smallpox detention widowed or single. One mother was present camp was authorized at an unidentified location on the farm (CCM I:377, 378). with her two young daughters; in another case,

58 an adult mother and daughter were present. Commissioners concluded in November 1912 Otherwise, all inmates appear to have been that the facility, which was used as a deten- unrelated. The household of the superinten- tion farm for paupers and county convicts, was dent, William Coburn (40 years old), included not “anything like a paying proposition as a his wife (37 years old), 5 children ranging in farm.…” It was a burden on the county taxpay- age from 5 to 18, and Coburn’s mother, who was ers, and the county judge and commissioners 79. In 1910, the superintendent was William voted to sell it (CCM L:2). The property was J. Kennedy (50 years old), and his household offered for sale, and J. P. Hellums offered the included a wife (32 years old) and 5 children winning bid (CCM L:4). The county transferred ranging in age from 1 to 16. The 17 paupers the property to Hellums in a deed whose calls included 9 females and 8 males of whom only 1 excluded the 1-acre paupers’ cemetery north of was married. Nine paupers were widowed and Pepper Creek (DR 239:416–418). 7 single. There were 13 whites and 4 blacks, Sale of the poor farm in November 1912 was and 7 of the individuals were 60 years old or followed in December by the purchase of 5 acres older. across from the North Belton Cemetery where One purpose of the Leon River poor farm the county intended to build a superintendent’s had been to lessen the financial burden on home and three houses for the indigent popula- Bell County that was associated with a dual tion (CCM L:6). Eventually, this fourth county support system in which the cost of outdoor facility, called the County Home, had its own care was three times that of care at the poor paupers’ graveyard (Gardner 1995:9, 10), and farm.22 It was for that reason that the com- county paupers were regularly admitted to the missioners had stated in 1898 that allowances home, which provided care to indigents until paid to Bell County paupers would cease (CCM it closed in 1969. The practice of outdoor relief I:99–100). But it took only a few years for the continued as well, and county commissioners’ dual system to resume in the county. In early minutes record numerous examples of indi- 1905, receivers were appointed for each of viduals who received county funds, sometimes three sets of paupers, who were allowed $5.00 in the form of warrants amounting to $3.00 to per month support (CCM J:283). Thereafter, $10.00 per individual. This practice persisted the commissioners’ court minutes made fre- until at least the late 1960s. quent references to paupers on the pension In the meantime, the old paupers farm roll, on allowance from the county, or allowed that had been purchased by J. P. Hellums in groceries. In other cases, paupers received pay- November 1912 (CCM L:4) appears to have ments directly from the county. These activi- retained an agricultural function. The tract ties were supplemented by care provided to the was reduced in size in 1913 by the sale of 1 poor in Temple, where the King’s Daughters acre in the northwest corner of the property, and the Sisters of Divine Providence provided and then it was sold to Ida Allen in August medical and burial services to paupers (Benoit 1916 (DR 24:123; DR 276:72–73). Within two n.d.:1–3).23 months, Allen sold the property to F. L. Denison The pauper farm on the Leon River never (DR 282:197–198), who increased the size of the achieved the level of self sufficiency the county tract by purchasing land adjacent to it on the had hoped for, despite the purchase of addi- southwest corner (DR 294:142–143). tional property in 1903 (DR 150:191). As early Denison, who came from a prominent Bell as 1911, the commissioners discussed selling County family (his father was second district the farm (CCM K:373–374), and it was apparent attorney for the judicial district that embraced that they were not satisfied with arrangements Waco, and Denison helped his mother publish to care for Bell County’s indigent population. the Belton Reporter), conveyed the property to 22 The reasoning of the commissioners is not his wife, Callie, in July 1928 (DR 394:124–125). entirely clear. While the cost of outdoor care was three The next year, Callie sold the old poor farm times that of care on the farm, the number of paupers tract and the land that had been added to it to provided outdoor care at any time was proportionately greater, as well. H. R. Smith (DR 398:541–542). 23 In 1899, the Bell County Commissioners’ Court Smith, who was born in Williamson County began to provide $15.00 per month to King’s Daughters in 1885, was married to Minnie Pearl Ruble in Hospital in Temple for providing medical treatment to Bell County paupers (Benoit n.d.:3). 1906; the couple moved to Bell County in 1923

59 (The Belton Journal, March 22, 1945:10). They Minnie Pearl Smith had conveyed her probably moved to the poor farm tract shortly property to the Baptist Foundation of Texas in after they acquired it, and Smith became active 1959 with the understanding that she and her in local community affairs. He became presi- daughter had the right to occupy, use, manage, dent of the Belton Farmers Cooperative Gin control, and receive benefits from it during and Locker Association and served for five years their lifetimes (DR 801:437–439). With the as a member of the Farm Debt Adjustment deaths of Smith, and then Riley, the foundation Committee of Bell County’s Farm Security obtained complete control of the property, and Administration (The Belton Journal, March on September 6, 2005, it sold the 35.197 acres 22, 1945:3). According to a granddaughter, the that included some or all of the improvements Smiths also ran the Allis-Chalmers dealership constructed by the Smiths and some remnants in downtown Belton (Worley 2008). of the Bell County poor farm to Terrell and A descendant and other relatives believe Geraldine Timmermann (DR 5826:126). that the Smiths constructed a one-and-one- half-story or two-story “colonial style” home Conclusions on the property, as well as two barns, a garage and workshop, a secondary garage, stone water The history of public policy surround- tank and attached laundry room and garage, ing and scholarly interest in poor care in the sheep shed, storm cellar, and numerous other United States has focused on topics such as the site improvements, including a cattle weigher roots and causes of pauperism, the character and cattle chutes. Site features that may have of poorhouse and poor farm populations, demo- been present before 1929 included two one-story graphic trends, and the long-term ill effects of frame houses, numerous small buildings that pauperism on the poor themselves and on the housed farm workers when the Smiths owned larger society. While government-sponsored the property, and what descendants identified demographic studies have not always sup- as a jail associated with the county convicts ported their conclusions, scholars and reform- who worked on the pauper farm (Miller 2008; ers after the mid-nineteenth century asserted Ruble 2008; Worley 2008). that pauperism tended to be family-based In 1940, the Smiths designated two tracts and self-perpetuating, that specific classes of in the Chance Survey as their homestead. The indigents should not be allowed to propagate, first was 160½ acres that lay along the Leon that children were particularly susceptible to River and were adjacent to the historic poor the effects of pauperism, that alcohol played a farm tract on the west; the second was 39.5 role in indigence, that immigrants represented acres in the northwest portion of the farm adja- a disproportionate part of the pauper popula- cent to the railroad right-of-way that included tion, that poorhouses and poor farms exacer- their home and the associated improvements bated the worst effects of poverty, and that the (DR 484:242–243). intervention of social scientists was necessary H. R. Smith died in Temple on March 18, to break cycles of dependency. Government- 1945, and the poor farm and nearby proper- sponsored studies often found little empirical ties went to his widow (Probate File 4002). evidence of multigenerational pauperism and Their daughter, Elaine Smith Riley, and Riley’s suggested instead that pauper populations, husband moved to the farm to help with its man- particularly in poorhouses and poor farms, were agement, and the family continued to live on very fluid, moving in and out of those institu- the property in the Smith home until it burned tions with frequency. The evidence also pointed in December 1952. They then built another to the decreasing numbers of paupers in insti- home adjacent to the original house site using tutions and the tendency for the institutional materials from the McCloskey Hospital in population to become increasingly weighted Temple in about 1954 (Worley 2008). In 1985, toward the elderly. Reformers and government Riley became Smith’s guardian. Smith died on entities, alike, agreed that certain classes of December 4, 1988, and her home on the Chance poor—those suffering from mental illness or Survey burned the next year (Probate Docket mental deficiencies—were best off when segre- No. 14,300; Temple Daily Telegram, December gated in their own state-run special-care insti- 6, 1988:6–B). tutions. In general, North American pauper

60 care was locally based for most of its history, those who received outdoor care, those housed and so funding was local as well. Families were at poor farms, and convicts. considered to be the primary caregivers, and A study of pauper care in Bell County laws concerning legal settlement and family reflects and reinforces the broader patterns of responsibility were strong in most states. care in North America and Texas. County-level Pauper care and the institutions designed outdoor care was part of the fabric of indigent to facilitate that care in Texas followed broad care in Bell County from its earliest days, and trends and patterns that were typical of the institutional care in the form of poor farms rest of the United States: local government was began shortly after passage of the 1876 state given responsibility by the state for funding constitution that mandated the creation of indigent care, which was administered by a county-level institutions. As in other counties, commissioners’ court. Both indoor and outdoor policy about care in Bell County appears to care were funded in Texas, so not every county have been permissive, so that all races and age was the location of a pauper institution such groups were accommodated; indoor and outdoor as a poorhouse or poor farm. Beginning in the care coexisted; public and private postures early twentieth century, reformers appeared towards paupers, particularly those suffering who stressed the evils of poor farms and the from disease or mental deficiencies, were solici- importance of segregating classes of paupers tous; and local officials seemed little influenced so that individuals who suffered debilitating by then-current reform theories about separa- mental conditions could be housed in one of the tion of classes of paupers, eugenics, and the state-run facilities. However, local institutions innate evils reformers believed to be associated tended to be long-lived, perhaps due in part to with poor farms and poor homes. Segregation their acceptance within the local community, of indigents who suffered debilitating mental the lack of alternatives for care, and the fact conditions was rare in the nineteenth and early that federal programs failed to provide aid to a twentieth centuries, perhaps because there significant proportion of an increasingly elderly was insufficient space in state-run institutions population until the second half of the twentieth to accommodate them. century. In general, Texas pauper care appears A study of Bell County pauper care also to have been permissive, and local government reveals a number of interesting facts that may exercised considerable latitude in making deci- have a bearing on studies of other county-level sions about how best to care for county indi- indigent care facilities in Texas. First, while gent populations. As a result, structure of care scholars generally discuss single institutions tended to change frequently as county officials within a county, implying that the county poor responded to both an obligation to treat paupers farm occupied a single location, the Bell County in a humane fashion and a requirement to be example reveals that county commissioners responsible stewards of public funds. were not averse to moving those institutions Specific information about the architec- when practical considerations warranted it. As ture of a large sample of Texas poor farms is a result, Bell County was the location of no fewer not available because so few survive. Most than four county homes or poor farms between were located in close proximity to county seats 1879 and 1969. Each of those institutions was or large urban centers, and almost all were the location of significant improvements that associated with farms. Poor farm architecture were associated with the history of pauper uniformly included a superintendent’s house care in the county. Second, only a percentage that was sufficiently large to accommodate a of the indigent population of Bell County was family, cottages (usually frame) for inmates, accommodated in county institutions. Indeed, support features such as wells and outhouses, the system of outdoor relief that existed from outbuildings normally associated with agri- the 1850s to the 1960s was, if anything, more cultural activities, and a structure to accom- vigorous and better-funded than that associ- modate county convicts who became part of ated with indoor, or institutional, relief. As a the poor farm workforce around the turn of result, any study purporting to inventory and the last century. Cemeteries were located at analyze the extent and character of a county’s all poor farms and would have been used for pauper population cannot do so on the basis the interment of any county indigent, including of federal population schedules and poor farm

61 or poorhouse records alone. To do so would project, the author and principal investigator be to exclude the largest part of the indigent obtained permission to visit the property from population. Finally, for all the attention paid the current landowners, Terrell and Geraldine to indigent populations, their size relative to Timmermann, and the leasee, Burt Cummings. the general population was extraordinarily They visited the site to examine the historic small. Concerns about the effects of paupers resources on two occasions. The first visit was on the genetics and economics of the larger, in August 2007 with Mr. Cummings, and the non-indigent population appear to have been second visit was in January 2008 with Carl unfounded through the mid-twentieth century, and Joy Riley Worley. The onsite interviews and their numbers did not warrant the expres- (Cummings 2007; Worley 2008) were informa- sions of alarm within the ranks of professional tive and provided important information relat- reformers that eventually dominated discus- ing to the history of the property and individual sions about poor farms between 1900 and 1930. buildings and features on it. Notably, H. R. and The insufficiency of the arguments, together Minnie Pearl Smith purchased and moved to with the persistent need and local commitment the property in the late 1920s, and Mrs. Worley, to assist the indigent, may have been overrid- their granddaughter, was a young girl there in ing factors in the persistence of what reform- the late 1940s. While Mr. Cummings’ knowledge ers considered to be an archaic mechanism for of the historic resources was primarily second delivering care. hand (i.e., stories he had heard from many dif- Poor care in Texas actually touched very ferent sources), Mrs. Worley had more intimate few lives relative to the general population knowledge of the resources from having grown between the 1820s and 1960s. However, the up on the property. She remembered many sec- institutions associated with the delivery of ondhand stories about the older resources that that care on a county level remain landmarks were on the property when she was a little girl within a larger cultural landscape. Their rela- or that existed when her grandparents acquired tive rarity as property types and lack of archi- the land. She also provided many firsthand val documentation lend additional significance recollections about buildings and features that to the few remnants that still exist and to the were built by her family or modified while they records of their operation that survive. owned the property. During the site visits, a detailed inven- Preliminary inventory and tory was made of all buildings and features assessment of the within the main farm-ranch complex west of 1898–1912 Bell county the highway that were either visible or were poor farm pointed out by Mrs. Worley. Digital photographs also were taken to document each building and The Bell County Pauper Cemetery on feature within this portion of the property. Pepper Creek, documented as archeological Each resource was assigned a unique number site 41BL1201, is but one component of the and plotted on large-scale prints of modern 1898–1912 Bell County Poor Farm. Located aerial photographs. UTM coordinates also were immediately east of IH 35, the cemetery was at obtained for each resource using a handheld, the far northern end of the old poor farm prop- recreation-grade GPS unit. These locations erty and became isolated from the rest of the were then plotted on the aerial photographs poor farm when IH 35 was constructed (Figure to create a detailed map of historic resources 13). During the previous phases of investiga- (Figure 14), with the locations being accurate tion that focused on the cemetery (see Table within about 5 m. Observations and historical 1), it became apparent that a cluster of build- notes were tabulated to create an inventory of ings and features west of Interstate Highway the historic resources (Table 2) keyed to the 35, and about 1,500 ft west-southwest of location map. the cemetery, was on the poor farm property. The inventory includes two kinds of his- Subsequent inquiries revealed that some of toric resources: (1) resources that have physical the structures at this location might have evidence remaining (i.e., standing structures been associated with the poor farm. Following and features, as well as rubble and artifact con- up on this information as part of the current centrations where structures or features once

62 Poor Farm Cemetery

Complex of Historic Buildings and Features

0 250 500 1,000

Feet

Figure 13. Modern aerial photograph showing Interstate Highway 35, the Bell County Pauper Cemetery on Pepper Creek, and the complex of historic buildings and features on the 1898–1912 Bell County Poor Farm property. Base image August 8, 2004, aerial photograph from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Agricultural Imagery Program, Aerial Photography Field Office, Salt Lake City, Utah (available from the Texas Natural Resources Information System online at http://www.tnris. state.tx.us). existed), and (2) resource locations that were good condition and do not appear to have been remembered by informants but have little or seriously modified. Besides these structures, at no physical evidence remaining. It includes 24 least 10 other buildings, features, or locations existing historic resources as well as 8 possible are identified as being of unknown age or pos- resource locations. Of the existing resources, sibly being associated with the poor farm (see only 3 were definitely associated with the Table 2). 1898–1912 poor farm. Structure No. 1 is a Presenting a complete and well-supported wood frame building that was a Bell County evaluation of the resources, relative to National jail used to house inmates sent to work on the Register eligibility criteria, is beyond the scope poor farm. Structures 6 and 11 are wood frame of this study. However, three facts are notable houses that may have been used as housing for and indicate that the 1898–1912 Bell County indigent people being cared for by the county Poor Farm may well be eligible for listing on or perhaps by the poor farm superintendents the National Register of Historic Places. First, and their families. While all three of these the historic contextual framework presented in structures were certainly used for other pur- this report reveals that poor farms played an poses after 1912, the buildings are in relatively important role in the history of indigent care

63 in Texas. Second, poor farms that have original features, and (3) archeological investigations of standing structures, features, and associated selected locations and suspected resource areas. cemeteries are very rare in Texas. And third, the The goals of this additional work would be: Bell County property appears to contain some relatively intact components associated with • to more fully document the history of the turn-of-the-century poor farm and there- the poor farm fore is an good example of this property type. • to provide a better inventory and In conclusion, the historic resources on the Bell assessment of the existing resources on County Poor Farm property warrant additional the poor farm property (broadening the consideration if there will be any impacts to the survey to include the entire poor farm location associated with the proposed improve- property) ments to the Interstate Highway 35 corridor. • to investigate and identify the If the property will be impacted, it is recom- suspected resource areas on the poor mended that the following tasks are appropri- farm property ate and warranted: (1) additional archival and • to identify and evaluate all resources oral history research focused in particular on that were associated with (built or used the improvements made at the poor farm in by) the Bell County Poor Farm from the 1898–1912 period, (2) more thorough onsite 1898 to 1912. investigations of existing historic buildings and

64 14

16

7 11 12

20 22 15 13

B 8 2 23 E 4 G D 5 9 24 3 1 21 19 C 17 18 A 10

F 6

H

0 25 50 100 LEGEND meters 1 Existing Historic Resource 0 100 200 400 A Suspected Historic Resource Location feet

PAI/08/SLH

Figure 14. Map of historic resources located on the 1898–1912 Bell County Poor Farm property west of Interstate Highway 35.

65 Joy Riley Worley (2008) called this a “tractor shed.” At one Historical Historical Observations by Mrs. Worley The jail was painted red at one time. It had a It had time. at one red painted was jail The covered area back servedin the that as an open shed for tractors. [It is not stated, but her family may have added the back.] shed on the Mrs. said Worley this tank was there when she child.a was It supplied water for theirhouse (No. 13). time, her father laid brick on use the the floor to space as a workshop. This building was was there Mrs. Worley when called it young. a She “chicken coop” and said there was a similar one to the west (E). Mrs. Worley did notanything recall here. being Cummings could have been confusing it with the No.house described Worley.18 by Mrs. Mrs. Worley remembered location the outhouse this much about F (see She below). didn’t recall except house that lived farmhands in it. not discussed they in kept remembers chickens Worley Mrs. the brick addition. Mrs. said Worley this barn was there before 1947. in late Probably built 1930s or early 1940s. It Mrs. bornthere was was when Worley in 1947. ctures and Features** ical tank wooden on top of ick building with tin roof. Too Observations on Stru made recently Burt made by Cummings leasee (2007). frame. as to have built a “chickenbeen elaborate coop,” what but its not function sure was. Cummings. Two large debris piles may have remains from that a was former in house this general location. since collapsed site 2007 visit). yardand area. 15 houses 13 and No. on south side. roof. Note: This barn does not appear on the 1938 photo. aerial barn 1938 on the This appears roof. Note: photo. aerial resources on the 1898–1912 Bell County Poor Farm property resources on the Noround barns two Larger with wooden of the No Large wooden barn. No of Smaller the two wooden barns with round Nored frame garagebrick Wood with addition No around wall Rock enclosure and concrete No br Small No area This pointed was out by Burt Yes Wood frame building. Some repairs were Yes Wood frame house with porch (porch Possibly Metal cylindr Poor Farm? Associated with Associated Description enclosure 1 Bell County Jail 23 Water tank 4 Wood barn A 5 Red brick structure area Burned house 67 Old house A 8 Concrete landscaping 9 Garage A Wood barn B 10 Wood barn C Feature Number* Resources With Physical Evidence Table 2. Inventory of existing and possible historical Table 2. Inventory

66 membered an outhouse membered older “colonial” style – membered this windmill this membered e, the garage, and e, a the Joy Riley Worley (2008) Historical Historical Observations by This when house Mrs. was on the property Worley was little. Her family lived in this house they 1954) bigger(ca. and rebuilt the while 1953 (13). house little. was Worley Mrs. lived Worley in an home that was in this same general area until she 5 was years This home old. burned in December 1952, and her family built the new home on this spot in 1954. This newer home burneda yearin 1989, after family moved the back here in 1988. She re and another outbuilding. Mrs. Worley remembers four components: the cistern, the washhous wooden chicken coop (was west of the cistern was washhouse). the The oldest and went with the house. colonial Mrs. Worley she said re as a girl.young e. This garage was Mrs. on the when property ctures and Features** use with porch. Has similar Has with use porch. Observations on Stru features tofeatures structure No. 6. Enclosed within and wall rock a concrete portion (No. of 7). the Some of the northern structure is still standing. The southern area burned, there and no significant portion intact except for chimneys.two of the old near road entrance to the property the railroad tracks. are Three present components and enclosed by the wall rock and (7). concrete The components are a garage, washhouse, and an above-ground cistern Theis cistern. cemented limestone blocks, and the cemented is nodules. limestone washhouse Garage has cemented one blocks wall and of limestone and columns concrete of brick and cistern block. The to the probably dated period of All the other colonial house. are components probably later additions. The cistern could date to the poor farm period or a little later. blades). (missing intact mechanism mill There cinderblock, is and a wood concrete, enclosure at the base of tower. No Corrugated tin walls on fram wooden No Large mostly burned. complexin 1954, built Yes Wood frame ho possibly Unknown Metal frame windmill stand with portion of associated Poor Farm? Some elements Some Associated with Associated Description (three rock-walled structures, all attached) 11 Old house B 1213 Garage B area Main house 14 Entrance columns15 Structure complex Possibly Brick columns theon and north south sides 16 Windmill Feature Number* Table 2, continued

67 – – – – Joy Riley Worley (2008) Historical Historical Observations by rley remembered the “storm cellar,” Mrs. Wo This was where the “sheep shed” was located. was shed” “sheep the where was This This was where a “storage shed and outhouse” were located. There was a “pig pen” in this general area between the two barns (see No. 17 also). Mrs. Worley Mrs. said Worley this feature was where the pigs used to be. [It may have been a trough for feeding wateringor pigs.] “MigrantWorley Mrs. worker that house.” said it was hole razed not too a long dug ago. They and dumped the debris in it. She described this house as rooms, facing west with three a porch, a and fireplace. area “Livestock loading scales” and which went she when intoshe wasThey young. filled it in with “Model T parts” and other debris. . ctures and Features** observed, but this area was not was area this but observed, red an obvious not debris but r trough. Concrete rubble to the fact scatter. Area extensively Observations on Stru location of former building. The 2004 aerial 2004 The of former building. location photo shows this building (or a foundation for it?) probably so it was removed in only years.few last examined closely. pad designated as No. 21 and water trough 17 could No. be associated. constructed of in constructed nodules limestone concrete; poorly built. large two nearby.with debris piles disturbed feet. south suggests a second located trough was to it. adjacent NoNo No evidence found. Concrete pig No was pens evidence of No Now filled with prickly pear cactus. Walls No Flat concrete foundation pad only No Some scatte Possibly Light arti UnknownUnknown Series of five flat foundations, each 16x1.5 16x1.5 feet UnknownUnknown 16x1.5 feet depression Small only. Poor Farm? Associated with Associated Description water trough concrete foundations foundation pad foundation location A location Structure BC location Structure location Structure 17 Concrete stone and 18 location House 1920 of linear Series 21 Linear concrete 22 Concrete foundation 23 Linear concrete Depression; cellar 24 trough water Concrete No Small wate Feature Number* Resource Locations With No Physical Evidence No Physical With Resource Locations Table 2, continued

68 cation near the railroad cation near the ys this was a “tractor work area” Joy Riley Worley (2008) Historical Historical Observations by outside the tractor shed (No. 3). Mrs. Worley remembered a second small red small second a remembered Worley Mrs. brick building similar to No. 4. This one was to the west of No. 4. Mrs. Worley remembered that the outhouse was west of the house between (No. the 6) two and trees. east-west fenceline. hole” outhouse in this lo tracks. Mrs. Worley sa Mrs. Worley remembered a “well” along the Mrs. Worley remembered that there was a “3- ce. ence. ctures and Features** ence observed; area extensively Observations on Stru disturbed. probably different probably privies different with associated at house times. various No No obvious evidence. Unknown Generaleviden location; no Poor Farm? Associated with Associated thor and investigator. principal Description location F Outhouse location Possibly Generalevidence. were There location; no E location Structure Not likely No evid D Outdoor areawork G Outhouse location Unknown Generalevid location; no H Well location Feature Number* Table 2, continued are * numbers keyed Feature Figure to the 14 map. ** These are observations by the au

69 70 References Cited

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