What social and moral duties we have toward the poor, the disabled and the elderly are perennial questions, but perhaps surprisingly, they dominated public discussion when Kansas was in its infancy.
One finds an answer to such questions, or at least its remnants, about four miles north of Iola on farmland once known as the Allen County Home, or as it was known by most, the Allen County Poor Farm.
Today, few traces remain, including building foundations, a dance floor, a pond built by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and several metal crosses reportedly demarcating a cemetery.
Not to mention the ghosts, whose sadness and emptiness seem to echo on the prairie wind.
There are references to the poor farm as early as the late 1860s, when the editor of the Register advocated “that such a farm should be at once put in operation.”
Rather than any ethical argument, they simply pointed to the cheap cost of land, and contended that the institution might not only be self-sustaining but even profitable.
Such appeals must have worked, for by March 1872 county commissioners passed a resolution stating that “all paupers and charges upon Allen County, shall be conveyed to and placed in the care and custody of the Superintendent of the Asylum, for the poor of Allen County.”
Soon after, an idyllic scene emerges. A caring physician named Driscol had taken charge, new buildings popped up and the peach and apple trees were blooming.
By 1911, someone “who visited the poor farm … suggested the name of the farm be changed. Halting at the gate of the well-kept farm, surveying the broad acres green with growing grass and gardens, stocked with fine fat cattle, hogs and chickens, he commented it was more like a pleasant country home.”
Yet many starkly contrasting reports exist, such as a mention in the 1927 Register to the effect that: “trustees and others should not misrepresent the accommodations of the poor house. There are no changes of clothing kept for the inmates, nor is the house kept as a first class hotel. Some who have recently taken lodgings there are said to be sorely disappointed.”
Standing in the pasture south of the farm, watching the storm clouds gather, I found myself wishing someone remained to provide a picture of what life had truly been like there, to say whether the peach trees had made up for any shame, mistreatment or other indignities that might have come along with them.
Indeed, one dreams “inmate” eyes watching farm buildings burning at various points across the years, and wonders if they were accompanied by sorrow or strange elation, feelings of vindication by those pushed to the margins of society for being “abnormal.”
SO WHO were some of the “inmates” at the poor farm tended to by “the overseer,” those who had been categorically prevented from participating in society and perhaps disciplined and punished in the name of remaking who they were?
The infamous Daniel Boomhover was tried for insanity in 1876. “The jury returned a verdict of ‘unsound mind,’ but failed to find him a fit subject for the insane asylum. He was sent to the county poor farm.”
Ellen Freet was a 50-year-old woman whose health had been failing rapidly and had no place else to go.
Richard White, too, had been quite ill for some time, “with a decided disposition to dropsy.” He died on the farm at age 63.
