"Growing Up In Kansas: The Poor Farm" by Kansas Elder Aldwyn

                                                              Memorial Stone at County Cemetery                                                                                                                             

     The site was located about two miles southeast of town. We drove across Black Creek and parked in a narrow drive next to the small fenced area.  It had been newly mown, weeded and well cared for.  There were only two grave stones visible on the small plot of ground.  Across the road was a wheat field with limestone pillars that once marked a fence around the County Poor Farm. 

       The marker at the south end was surrounded by Prairie Primrose and one plastic flower.  The recently laid stone to the north was shaded by the largest pecan tree I had ever seen.  Sure enough, the north stone marker was the grave of my Great Uncle Berry, Grandmother’s Brother.

        Their mother had died when they were children and the father remarried his house keeper.  This enraged Uncle Berry’s grandfather who disowned the family.  Uncle Berry’s father then moved to Kansas and took a homestead in Cowley County.  Unfortunately, he died within a short time after his arrival.  This left Great Uncle Berry to make a go of the farm at the tender age of sixteen.    

       Tragedy struck again.   It was believed that Great Uncle Berry went “coon dog hunting” one dark night and fell into the river.  Unfortunately, he swallowed a deal of water and contacted Cholera which proved to be fatal.  This left his sister and stepmother alone and faced with the upkeep of the homestead.  The Stepmother found this situation impossible, so she placed our Grandmother Emma in an orphanage and returned to her family back east. 

       At that time people were required to go to the Poorhouse if they were ill and unable to support themselves.  I think we call such taxpayer support “Welfare” in today’s society.  Sometimes I heard the term “outdoor Relief” when describing benefits.  The basic idea was that the poor would labor to off-set the expense of their keep. 

       An overwhelming sadness came to me as we stood in front of the stone and read the plain, short inscription.  So many forgotten souls lay in that small fenced area.  I was deeply moved as I listened to the wind move through the grass and trees that bordered the plot.  A dog barked in the distance as if to warn us that he had an eye out for intruders.  I like to think we all had a silent conversation with Great Uncle Berry and those who slept here.

      Ted Kooser’s poem “Site” captured much of the scene and feelings that we had that day.  I send it on with the hope that we shall remember those who helped lay our present families’ path.  They are certainly part of the foundations upon which we stand as well as for those who follow us. 

--  Elder Aldwyn

  Site

  by Ted Kooser

A fenced-in square of sand and yellow grass,

five miles or more from the nearest town

is the site where the County Poor Farm stood

for seventy years, and here the County

permitted the poor to garden, permitted them

use of the County water from a hand-pump,

lent them buckets to carry it spilling

over the grass to the sandy, burning furrows

that drank it away—a kind of Workfare

from 1900. At night, each family slept

on the floor of one room in a boxy house

that the County put up and permitted them

use of. It stood here somewhere, door

facing the road. And somewhere under this grass

lie the dead in the County's unmarked graves,

each body buried with a mason jar in which

each person's name is written on a paper.

The County provided the paper and the jars.

Ted Kooser is a poet and essayist, a Presidential Professor of English at The University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He served as the U. S. Poet Laureate from 2004-2006, and his book Delights & Shadows won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

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