Couple trying to preserve history of county’s poor farm

By PAUL LORENZ

paul.lorenz@mcleansborotimesleader.com

McLEANSBORO — Long before public aid as we know it today, the government offered another form of public assistance — the almshouse, or “poor farm.”

Two Hamilton County Historical Society members are trying to gather and document the history of the poor farm in this county before that history — like the poor farm itself — disappears.

“If it’s not documented, it’s lost, in time,” Marion Russell said. “The history of the county is valuable. We’ve got a (former Illinois) governor buried here, and that’s important, but the common people are important, too.”

Common people being, in this case, the poorhouse residents — also known as “inmates” — and the people responsible for the day-to-day operation, the superintendents or caretakers — also known as the “keepers.”

For about the past year, Russell and his wife, Pat, have been researching the Hamilton County Poorhouse and Farm, which was located on county land about two-and-a-half miles northeast of McLeansboro.

They’ve combed public records from the state of Illinois and from county board meetings here.

And in the genealogy library at McCoy Memorial Library, Pat Russell has been trying to transcribe the fading entries — dating back to 1898 — in a poor farm ledger book before the book literally falls apart. The face of the old hard-bound ledger book appears to be a little larger than the front page of a modern newspaper.

“Every time you get that old ledger book out, something falls out of it,” Marion said, pointing to a bit of yellowed paper on the floor.

The Russells are recording all of their findings in a notebook which, when complete, will be given to the genealogy library, they say.

And the historical society is planning to publish the transcribed ledger.



How it started

It all began in 1839, when a law passed to establish county poorhouses, to hire keepers of the poor and to levy a property tax to support poorhouses.

“Before that, the county would pay (private citizens) to have these people housed,” he said.

The Russells believe Hamilton County’s first poorhouse operation was established around 1870, they said. It was originally a 160-acre operation on county land.

“It started here as two log structures — one for the caretakers, one for the inmates,” Marion said.

The almshouse/poor farm originally was intended to be a place for people who couldn’t afford or didn’t have a place to live, Russell said. The people admitted were to be laborers on the farm, with one person to oversee the operation.

But it didn’t work out that way, because many of the people admitted were physically — and in some cases, mentally — incapable of doing the work, Russell said.

“The poor farm became a place for those without family or anywhere else to go; a place for children as well as adults, and a place for the insane and sick to be housed and taken care of,” he said.

But residents who were able did work at the poor farm, Russell said.

“Some cut wood for their cooking and heating,” he said. “Some of the women who were able worked in the kitchen also.”



End of an era

Russell unexpectedly “kind of got hooked on this,” he said of the research project.

“The president of the historical society asked me if I knew where (the old poor farm) was, I said yeah, he asked me to show him, and the next thing I knew, I got interested in it,” Russell said.

During their research, the Russells have come to realize that “most of this information would’ve been readily available 50 years ago,” he said.

“But as people die, you lose a piece of what you need to know,” he said.

The advent in the 1950s of what became the modern-day public aid system did away with the poor farms, Russell said.

The last poorhouse in Hamilton County closed in the early ’50s, and the wood-frame structure is long gone.

But a pauper cemetery is still there, across the road and north of where the poorhouse used to be, Russell said. Charles Lewis, who died as a result of being run over by Shawneetown Train No. 40 on March 23, 1917, was the first person to be buried in the cemetery.

“It was for anybody in the county who couldn’t afford a funeral,” he said.

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