Poor Farm Pathways, Part One

Poor Farm Pathways, Part One 

Content: “idiotic,” asylums; confinement; “insanity law”

• Main Voice(s): Emerson Cram 
• Special Guests: 
  • Julie Watkins, Events Manager, Johnson County Historic Poor Farm
  • Michael Hoenig, Project Coordinator, University of Iowa Center for Disabilities and Development
  • Dr. Jennifer Mack, Lead Bioarcheologist, Asylum Hill Project, University of Mississippi Medical Center

Highlights

This chapter picks at some key questions–why did people come here? Were the people who lived here “bad”? Join Emerson to dive in the unexpected ways poor farm histories reveal connections between agriculture, rural social welfare, psychiatry’s early U.S. history in asylums, and the regionalization of poverty relief law. Hear the stories about individual residents identified so far. 

Conclusion

Tracking how institutional pathways were made can connect the partial stories of the poor farm’s evolution, and help account for why “dependency” remains such a powerful stigmatizing term that connects powerful stories about waste, work, and deviance. 

Transcript
For a full transcript of this episode, visit: disabilityecologiespodcast.buzzsprout.com

Credits

Episode written and narrated by Emerson Cram, University of Iowa. Recorded with Riverside FM. Production and sound editing by Emerson Cram. 

All media clips are used for educational purposes only.

“How Many Stars in the Sky,” from the Harry Oster Folk Music Collection, Rita Benton Music Library, The University of Iowa Libraries. Thanks to Katie Buehner and Christine Burke.

Typing 5 lines.wav by soundslikewillem -- https://freesound.org/s/193971/ -- License: Attribution NonCommercial 4.0

Funding
Research, writing, and production have benefitted from generous support from multiple sources, including: the National Communication Association’s Karl R. Wallace Memorial Award; UI OVPR Arts and Humanities Initiative Standard Grant; UI Provost Investment in Strategic Priorities;  UI College of Liberal Arts DSHB Humanities Scholar; CLAS Summer Humanities Award.

Special Thanks

With thanks to Maura De Cicco; University of Iowa Departments of Communication Studies, Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies, and American Studies (Especially Angie Looney, Kembrew McLeod, Eric Vázquez, Naomi Greyser, and Hallie Abelman); State Historical Society of Iowa (especially Hang Nguyen, Allison Johnson, and Anu Tiwari); Sarah Keen, University Archivist, University of Iowa; Kim Painter, Johnson County Recorder; Rebecca Dewing, Johnson County Historical Society; the 2024 Colby Summer Institute in Environmental Humanities Seminar Participants, Claire Fox; Teresa Mangum; Jennifer New; Phaedra C. Pezzullo; Constance Gordon; and Jesse Waggoner. 

Audience Participation

• Call to Action: Do you have a poor farm or county home story to tell? Reach out to our team to learn more about how to share! 
• Support the Show: Share this episode with friends and colleagues & stay tuned for future episodes. 
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Transcript

Transcript for Disability Ecologies Podcast Chapter Two, Part One: Poor Farm Pathways

[audio of footsteps in the asylum building’s wood floors, with an occasional clanking sound, the audio fades shortly, as Julie stops to read a sign inside of the building]

Julie Watkins, Reading an Interpretive Sign, 0:31: 
“A final journey…”

[a few seconds pause to transition]

Emerson Narrates, 0:34:
Just now, you heard the sounds of footsteps moving across the floorboards of the historic asylum building. In the late afternoon of an unbearably humid day in early July of 2025, I had plans to meet up with Julie Watkins. This was one of those kinds of days that makes your imagination wander as you walk, as we observed the heat index climb well into the 100s. Officially, Julie is the Event and Program Assistant for the Board of Supervisor’s Office, and she works to support efforts to build community spaces through the site. We met for the first time in late 2023, to reestablish the Disability Advisory Committee, the group that advises site partners on a wide range of questions about access and disability history. After our regular monthly meeting at the county building, we hurried out to the farm and into the heat.

This was not our first, or second, or even tenth time inside of the asylum building. Far from it. Though, I couldn’t tell you now, how many times I’ve lingered inside these bare bone wooden bars. Each visit brings pause with the writings. The interpretive markers now installed here are meant to deliver some semblance of grounding in an otherwise disorienting environment. Those side-posts still keep the remnants of people’s time. The grooves in the supports closest to the floorboards also maintain the wear traces of hogs who moved against them and turned blunt edges into rounded surfaces. You remember the decision by either a supervisor or steward that they used this building for their hog nests after it was no longer inhabited by people. But with today’s humidity and heat, just 20 minutes inside felt like an eternity. With the temperature inducing a sweaty discomfort and more shallow breaths, my attention shifts to how we all have our own relationships to the vulnerabilities of heat intolerance. And so, the option to move freely into better conditions proves a stark contrast to the wooden bars….   

Julie Watkins, Reading an Interpretive Sign, 3:03:
“…A wide range of people lived, died, and were buried on the poor farm property. Some were born into poverty; some were only temporarily down on their luck. Others were elderly people without nearby relatives, especially recent immigrants, or who could no longer be cared for at home. Single mothers, orphans, mentally and physically handicapped individuals, and those with chronic mental illness or addiction also ended up in Poor Farm institutions across America…” 

Emerson Narrates, 3:30:
If my memory serves, Julie is reading a sign affixed to one of the cells located near the south-facing door. For new visitors or those returning, these words can provide something of a preliminary answer to a whole range of questions. Whether spoken or internally vocalized, visitors wonder: “why did people come here?” Why are there bars in a space supposedly about “care” for indigent people? In the last chapter, you heard some of the county supervisors past and present share their own reflections about these conditions. Their account: this environment was, in short, crude, inhumane, and also, reflective of that moment in time. It’s on visitors in the present to determine how far our systems have progressed since then, or if “progress” is a measurement in need of replacement. 

To the extent that we can imagine what this experience might have felt like, we can also wonder what we would choose to do, or not do, if we were the ones making decisions in the 1870s, or moments closer to us now. As a site of conscious, this place enables contemplation as much as it might force us to question the decisions made for our fellow travelers in different conditions of confinement today, and what kinds of conditions we are willing to let them endure.   

Julie Watkins, Reading an Interpretive Sign, 5:32:
“When institutional residents died without relatives to provide for a funeral, the county paid for their burial either in graveyards on poor farm grounds or in other municipal cemeteries. At least until 1901, many residents who died at the Johnson County Poor Farm and Asylum were buried in the graveyard on the wooded ridge to the south of the farm buildings. They were usually placed in plain wooden coffins, and graves with wooden markers or none at all. Any funeral services would have been very simple. Other poor farm residents were buried in the free ground at the Iowa City’s Oakland Cemetery with little ceremony…. Old age was the most frequent cause of death, according to poor farm records from 1879-1915. This is not surprising, since poor farms were the equivalent of today’s nursing homes. Other common causes were tuberculosis, dropsy, and pneumonia.” 

Emerson Narrates, 6:14:
In the last chapter, you learned how efforts to preserve the historic asylum led to calls to deepen interpretation. That work culminated in the installations detailing the broader environment of the times—the “why” of poor farms, poverty relief, and disability. The asylum’s now legible stories stem from the efforts of three vital community historians. First, there was Will Thomson, who you met in the last chapter. Will was joined by Joni Hindman, an Iowa City Genealogist, who has and continues to detail the lives of some of the residents, especially in relation to the cemetery. And finally, Leah Rogers devoted her life to historical research and archeology before her untimely passing in 2022, related to cancer. Over the span of her career, she completed over 70 nominations of different properties to the National Register of Historic Places.[1] One of those included the Historic Poor Farm and Asylum, and her final report was central to Johnson County’s interpretation of historic structures. That report also makes for informed decisions about the farm’s future. To my knowledge, Leah’s report is the first attempt to significantly and systematically interpret the farm’s earliest history, from 1855 and onward. 

[audio of guitar strumming threads underneath Emerson’s narrative]

And so, it isn’t entirely surprising to know this is the file that now former State Historic Society archivists at the Iowa City Research Center share with anyone who calls asking about the old county farm on Melrose Avenue. At first glance, this report is a story of enormous scale. By that, I mean what we call “the Johnson County Historic Poor Farm” or its other names, the “County Home” or “County Care Facility,” intertwines domains that typically do not cross each other’s paths.  

For all the ways the concept of a poor farm might be small and humble, I’ve found it also can overwhelm you. In my experience, that feeling is symptomatic of a process that chooses to follow metaphorical trails as they reveal themselves across the evidence that remains. As a place, poor farms teach us about histories of agriculture, labor, migration and the earliest iterations of social work and rural social welfare. To this already long list, we’d also need to include histories of how the state—as a concept and a political entity—imagines its purpose, and how it should be organized or used relative to meeting population needs. In other words, bureaucracy and administrative law, while truly boring, are actually crucial to understand how we came to the crisis we’re in today. 

Taking the time to glance over the speeches and writings of rural social reformers, as well as those entrusted by the state to care for the poor and disabled make it evident that poor farm histories also encompass the range of knowledge regarding the human body and mind. That knowledge is significant to what we include in the categories of “disability” and “madness.” In this time period, legal definitions of so-called “insanity” comingled with changing medical knowledge and how social reformers and later generations of rural sociologists would speak to what they called “social problems.” 

The edges of these different languages blur. They are independent terrains of constructed expertise, but they also shape and inform each other. And they do so in a time period crucial to understanding why descriptors like “dependency” have so many negative connotations. Places like the farm intrigue me for so many reasons. They hold the remains of people’s lives in the soil itself. They are record keepers rendered through biologic form. And they are also places that contribute to the sticky meanings associated to ideas about work and health, deviance and dependency. And for me, part of that intrigue is because when we take the time to dig through what, if anything, remains, perception of firm boundaries separating domains start to fall apart. This is especially true when people with an intimacy of institutions or policing or otherwise cast aside as “waste” have contact with these spaces and become our revered storytellers—creating portals of connection.

[audio of guitar music continues and threads under Emerson’s narrative]  

Now running on six years after this sleuthing adventure of mine first started, I find it impossible to imagine the creation of Iowa and the broader settlement of the Midwest region without considering the power of the state to build these institutions. Like, what it means in terms of accessing land, and creating diagnostic categories to justify the movement of people into institutions where the so-called “care” they might have experienced also coincided with the suspension of their autonomy and personal liberties. For many people in the years of the 1850s and onward, we also don’t have insight into the actual reason why their conditions would have necessitated living in conditions of institutionalization.

These stories feel like they have disappeared into the ether, locked up somewhere like hospital basements. We also attempt to gather stories from the repositories of cultural memory that turn mad people into objects of fear and criminality—films, docudramas, or Unsolved Mysteries. So, I remain steadfast in this mission and of letting the boundaries of what we might know and how we know to fall apart. In doing so, the names and their stories might be uttered once more, beyond the flatness of a number or an entry in a logbook documenting entries into the insane department. What new perspectives might we take in letting these boundaries fall apart? Or new perspectives from asking why a term like “insane” carries so much power? And in that falling apart, maybe our understanding grows, of not only how people came here through varied pathways—but why? What kind of person lived, worked, even died here? 

[audio of footsteps]

Julie Watkins, 14:25:
“Let’s see if there is a cell with writings…. I know there’s one with a poem in Danish. I don’t know what the language is…I think it’s gibberish…the poem that I’m talking about…but it’s very beautiful script that it’s written in, I think that’s in another cell. 

Emerson, 5:16: 
I think there’s one over here…

Julie, 15:28: 
Yeah, what are you supposed to do other than write on the walls. 

Emerson, 15:33: 
Yeah. I always think about how did people spend time here. 

Julie, 15:39: 
Yeah. 

Emerson, 15:45: 
There’s one…. I always feel like every time I come here, I see more than the last time. 

Julie, 16:02:
Yeah, and I think that the…. I mean I’ve been in here so many times and the physical space is…takes a few times to get used to and comprehend just because it is jarring. This is where people were kept, pretty much…. [sound of deep sign, a cough, and walking across wooden floors]. 

[a few seconds pause to transition]

Emerson Narrates, 16:39:
Building on the foundations established by Leah, Will, and Joni, I set out on what has felt like a never-ending journey, cued by phrases I first found scattered across the records that remain. To deepen what we know about the poor farm’s story, I followed references such as the “insane commission” listed in remaining records and newspaper accounts, in addition to logbooks of poor farm “inmates.” I revisited their findings and plotted my own, following hunches that sometimes led to nowhere and sometimes…to new connections and unmarked paths. 

I say “never-ending” for a few reasons, one being that historic research of bureaucracies are something of a fool’s journey, full of budget documents, lists on lists on lists, not to mention stops, starts, and sadly, sometimes, closed archives. But “never-ending” also captures how I carry my own way of feeling, engaging, and looking at these stories. What stories we hold with us when we visit the asylum will also shape how we might make sense of that experience, and the kinds of questions that become possible. To this point, Mike Hoenig, who was one of the members of the very first Disability Advisory Committee (DAC), referenced his own experiences with institutionalization at Vinton’s School for the Blind. 

Emerson, 18:24:
One of the framings of that committee was that a majority of people need to be in disability community or identify as disabled. Can you talk about why that majority factor is so important in terms of the advisory work that the community did?  

Michael Hoenig, 18:48:
Well, I think it's because people have lived experience, and in one way or another have maybe experienced either institutionalization or they've been close to it. Or if they've not had that experience, I mean, more and more people have not, but just still in terms of experiencing segregation, experiencing isolation that the people live there. And I think just being able to share expertise in terms of what supports have benefited them and what supports haven't. I think we're also, as people with disabilities in general, in a good position to educate about the impact of social stigma. And I actually, I went to a residential school, so I, for instance, am able to draw on that experience. And incidentally, that was not an all-bad experience by any stretch of the imagination, but it's a unique one that a lot of people don't have. Fortunately, we weren't pinned into a cell, and we were encouraged to write, and all kinds of differences. But I mean, living away from family and living in a group setting and that kind of thing, those are unique experiences.

Emerson Narrates, 20:11:
This chapter tries to answer some of those earlier questions—the how and the why—to deepen and denaturalize how we “know” disability, poverty, and madness.

Julie Watkins, Reading an Interpretive Sign, 20:38: 
“Studies of the 1880 census records have revealed details about the residents of the poor farm. Some of these details are sad, but edifying. Of 30 people living at the poor farm in June of 1880 23 were men, and 7 were women; all were considered unable to work, three were blind, and 8 more were disabled. 2 were epileptic. 9 were considered insane with 6 classified as idiotic. 5 were noted with old age, 8 were 70 or older. 13 (almost half) were immigrants, 11 were illiterate. The wave of European immigration into the Midwest in the 19th century resulted in residents from Ireland, England, Germany, Prussia, Bohemia, Scottland, Whales, and Bavaria.” 

[a few seconds pause to transition]

Emerson Narrates, 21:30:
As of the time of this recording, I’ve spent multiple years digging through records in different cities and states, and I know there’s still much more to find. Some of those materials may never be found. Others may never be made accessible for a variety of reasons. But like others making decisions about the historic site, I have my own ideas about what it might entail to do justice to residents’ stories. For me, part of that work entails reconnecting the networks of law, medicine, and social services that shaped their lives. These are the poor farm’s pathways. 

[transition into running Introduction, with guitar strumming and soft ooo vocals underneath Emerson’s spoken narrative]:

Disability Ecologies is a podcast series dedicated to telling the story of the Johnson County Iowa Historic Poor Farm throughout its lifespan: from its origins to attempts at preservation to the still unfolding dynamics on site today. My name is Emerson Cram, I’m a place-based researcher and storyteller based in a small college town in the midwestern region of the United States. Since 2019, I’ve worked alongside community members and county administrators to tell the story of the historic poor farm’s history, its planned transition into a national historic site, and a vibrant place for building connections to land and people through local foods. As a note on content, throughout each chapter, you will encounter historical language that describes disabled and “mad” people (or those who might otherwise be called mentally ill). This language is outdated and pejorative by modern standards. These terms and the content overall may feel triggering to some listeners. I’ve chosen to include terms within the historical record of social services, psychiatry, and social sciences because they are windows of meaning into the period, and it’s also important I be honest about what the historical record shows us about our past. [End running introduction]

Emerson Narrates, 23:56: 
It’s the end of October in 2019, and from what I remember, a bit more bone-chilling than what would have been typical for late autumn. I’m gathered with a small group of community members in a non-descript conference room of the yet to be renovated Health and Human Services Building in Iowa City. As we assembled “particle board brown” tables into a rectangle to cue the start the meeting, some of us sipped on warm coffee and talked, as Midwesterners do, about the blustery weather. Soon enough, the project manager, V Fixmer-Oraiz, welcomed us and shared reasons behind the convergence. Around the table were people like Joni (a local genealogist); archeologist Dr. Jennifer Mack, county recorder Kim Painter, Alex McKendree and Becky Dewing from the Johnson County Historical Society, and of course, Leah Rogers. From my memory, Leah exuded a warm and gentle energy, and was generous with her insights, especially towards guests present with their own questions and curiosities. 

Coming together past our niches meant working with the strengths of our collective knowledge. And so, the Historic Resources Committee was born, our purpose to address gaps that surfaced in the site’s storytelling so-far. Too, at that time, I was wrestling with my own questions, given where I was in the research process. Much of it encompassed my notes on the evolution of state legislation and how it deployed the language of “insanity” and “pauperism,” in ways that were new to me, but that I also recognized. That recognition struck me, as someone who regularly digs into the pasts of non-metropolitan regions to make sense of why we tell the stories that we do, especially when they relate to human difference. 

Although they did not begin this way, Iowa Poor Farms entwined with the frenzy of the asylum era, the building of state institutions for those marked as “delinquent, derelicts, or dependents.” These spaces included state hospitals for the so-called “insane” in Mount Pleasant, Independence, Cherokee, and Clarinda, in addition to state “epileptic colonies” and hospital schools like Glenwood and Woodward for people with intellectual disabilities. Those institutions also interfaced with those more commonly remembered as carceral spaces, such as State Penitentiaries at Fort Madison and Anamosa, in addition to industrial schools like Toledo and Mitchellville. State institutions also encompassed what was originally referred to as the Iowa Soldier’s Orphan Home in Davenport, later named the Annie Wittenmyer Home. Many of these names continue to feel like abstractions to me, because I have yet to experience them in actual space, beyond the surface of a page or an archival record. But in the material that I have encountered throughout the years of my journey, I see implicit and explicit connections between these institutions come alive: individuals moved between state institution and county home, based on their condition, or because no one really knew where to put them. 

Remembering now, this might have been the meeting when I first heard Dr. Jennifer Mack reference the metaphor “pathways.” 

[audio of suspenseful music that threads under Emerson’s narrative]

Someone might have asked, “I heard the county home took ‘bad’ people, is that right?” Or someone might have tried to ask about the diagnostic terms or descriptions for those who were adjudged as “insane,” which could mean a whole range of psycho-social maladjustments. 

It’s hard to know the difference between rumors and certain truths, meaning that any story someone knows could be rooted in the stories of actually existing individuals. They could otherwise be born of community stories, tabloid-like newspaper accounts, or even, degrading ideas embedded into the stereotypes of the nameless, faceless poor, or the “unruly” criminal insane. 

I won’t deny the unsavory bits: on December 7, 1900, an Iowa City newspaper printed the headline, “Stabbed the Steward: ‘Blind’ Kauffman Uses the Knife and Goes to Mt. Pleasant.” The Iowa Citizen reported Kauffman had resided at the farm for some time, though it is not clear how long—be it months or years. We learn that preceding his attack on steward George Wicks, Kauffman contested the limits both Wicks and the supervisors placed on his mobility. The reporter notes: 

Voice Iowa Citizen, 29:43:
“For a long time he has thought that he was ill treated at the farm, and he has a number of times appeared before the board with complaints. Lately he has been going about the country, contrary to the regulations promulgated by the steward. He was ordered not to go out unless accompanied by someone else, because in his blind condition he was likely to get into trouble and his appearance when walking along was such as to frighten women and children. He considered the order an unreasonable one, and when Supervisors Fisher and Miller were at the poor farm he went to them with his complaints. They told him he would have to obey the instructions of the steward.”[2]

Emerson Narrates, 30:38:
The article goes on to describe the unfolding of events that led to the knife attack, which I won’t repeat here. But I do wonder, what should we do with this story? We could judge Kaufmann’s character and his decision to resort to a violent attack on George Wicks. Even the newspaper can’t tell us exactly how to make sense of this event—the reporter, again: “Whether this affair was simply a display of temper or a case of insanity is not definitely known.” Even now, over 100 years later, we’ll never know—hell, who knows if this is one of those dramatic tabloid-like stories meant to sell papers to the larger public. 

We do know that Kauffman struggled with the steward immobilizing his movements, and this he registered with the supervisors. But there’s also a level of nuance here that we might miss when caught up in the spectacle of a knife attack. The deeper clues are reference to how his appearance would frighten “women and children” he encountered during his travels. 

To me, this story reminds me of what were known as “Ugly Laws.” These were ordinances used in cities to regulate the public presence or movement of people cast as “unsightly” or “beggars.” And, as disability historian Susan M. Schweik argues in her formidable book on the subject, these laws played an invisible yet palpable role in cities throughout the United States. Their function was for city planning, and a mechanism to police movement through public space. Those impacted by the laws were, in turn, afforded movements only in the betweens of institutions like the poor farm and the asylum. Those marked as transgressive live, as Schweik writes, on “the fast-tracked line from one form of house arrest to another.”[3]

So, in turning just for a moment to the metaphorical paths of travel, a listener can shift away from once again playing the role of judge and jury. Instead, pathways bring our attention to the situation and mechanisms of travel. How did someone like Rose Flood, for instance, know how to seek out relief? Who in the county had the responsibility to take residents from the town’s center, across the river, and to the outskirts of town? How did someone within or beyond Iowa courts know that someone was “insane?” 

[a few second pause to transition] 

Dr. Jennifer Mack, 33:56:
“Because like I said, we really haven't solved these problems. One example of a gentleman who was buried at the poor farm, it's a story that's just heartbreakingly familiar today. A man from a good family, seemingly all the advantages who suffered from addiction. And because he was charming and he had connections, he was given chance after chance, but he was just caught in a cycle of getting sober and relapsing and disappointing his family until he finally died of his ruined health. This is a story from 130 years ago, but it's a story that we all know if it hasn't affected you personally, it's affected someone that you know. So, these historical stories are really just as relevant today as when they happened. There are some people who are born poor and can never escape from that cycle of poverty, particularly if a disability prevents them from getting employment or getting education. And then there are others who have relatively prosperous lives that could be ruined just by a bout of poor health or a series of financial misfortunes or sometimes both. The census bureau report from 1904 identified that there are two separate almshouse populations. There are people who are down on their luck seasonally, like farmworkers every winter. And then there were people who were permanent residents until death.”

[a few second pause to transition] 

Emerson Narrates, 35:25:
In Dr. Mack’s account, I heard a great emphasis on the situational: the cyclical power of addiction, or barriers that could inhibit the capacity to work or access an education. This is a narrative that makes us linger with individual circumstances of poverty, and to go further to grasp how those circumstances might be a conclusion created because of a wide array of factors. 

There’s another tricky detail that I need to mention here. Today, we might say that those who were residents were here because they struggled with “mental illness.” We also conflate the phenomena of poverty, disability, and so-called insanity. But in the poor farm period, which begins in 1855 and continues well into the early 20th century, these terms had distinct meaning. But those who were seeking poor relief and those who were judged as “insane” were largely undifferentiated.[4] This means that they were often subject to the same laws, for a time lived together under the same roof, and were subject to similar kinds of moral judgment. The reason why these distinctions matter is because ideas connected to poverty and various shades of insanity also ascribed to aspirations of “cure.[5]” And chasing cure anticipated how different institutions approached what they perceived as “social problems” and their supposed solutions. 

[audio of soft guitar music strumming that threads under Emerson’s narrative]

Following the metaphor, pathways aren’t always forged in unique ways—they can be repetitions or patterns of already existing cultures of relief. Some of the interpretive plaques highlight these connections to far away times and places. Based in the history provided by John L. Gillin’s History of Poor Relief Legislation in Iowa, poverty relief in this state modeled laws established in 1790, in Early Ohio and the Northwest Territories.[6] Geographically, the Northwest Territories encompassed land south of the Great Lakes region, enveloped between the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. 

But the practice of poor laws goes back even further, to the Elizabethan English Poor Laws of 1601. The similarities between these systems are evident, based on shared titles (like “Overseer of the Poor,” and a hierarchy of classification assigned to those perceived as deserving and undeserving. The difference between categories largely revolved around capacities to work, or if you were an orphaned, dependent child. 

I remain curious why—in the midst of massive institution building projects—a range of actors charted out lists of physical, intellectual, or emotional states or conditions perceived as necessitating institutionalization. What, and for who, is institutionalization for? 

[end of guitar music]

We can learn a great deal about any social arrangement based on how they answer that question. And in so doing, reconstructed stories of people like Rose Flood, Hugh White, Orange Douglass, and the many named and unnamed others enables visitors to follow their respective paths to this old farm on Melrose Avenue.

[2 seconds of silent transition]

Dr. Jennifer Mack, 39:37:
The educational function of the cemetery and the poor farm project at large, they're really vital to making it relevant and giving people a reason to visit. It's sometimes very hard for people to understand when they just sort of have these assumptions and just stereotypes. It's something that I'm dealing with with my current project as well, the Asylum Hill Project where we're dealing with a huge cemetery that was associated with the first Mississippi State mental asylum. But not everyone who was sent to this institution had what we would today consider mental illness. They were sent here for a variety of reasons, and it's the same thing with the poor farm. It's not just the nameless, faceless poor. There are so many different things that can happen in a life course that can lead you to end up at an institution like this. And understanding those different pathways again helps people to discuss things like disability and poverty.”

[a few seconds of transition]

Emerson Narrates, 40:42:
Imagine the visual: pathways connect, they are routes or tracks worn by the movements of others. For every person’s biography that we unearth, we find patterns across entry points—almost to the point where an individual story becomes a familiar genre. And so, I also find myself asking what we should do when over time, those paths appear as natural characters in the environment. In turn, what we know of the “nameless and faceless poor” is an all too predictable description. Empathy will be out of reach when what we think we know distances us from the educational potential of asking, “what if one of mine… or even, me?” 

[a few seconds pause and transition]

Sometimes we have to acknowledge the overarching map itself, not only the individuals who travel these pathways. In other words, who created the paths, what map did they use to guide them? And when was it made, and for what purpose and whose benefit? Why a gravel road instead of dirt? Yeah, okay, the metaphor is stretching a bit here, so I won’t dwell… 

Coming face to face with individual stories is an opportunity to embody these systems in flesh and bone, but these are partial stories. The push to create more stories, even in spite of missing records is one of the real educational successes of the historic site itself. Beyond the depictions of individual circumstances, which humanize and personalize different circumstances of relief, I want to turn to the mapmakers themselves. I want to ask: why these paths in particular? What can they tell us about the story of “dependency” as public waste?

[audio of a few seconds of accordion folk music]

Stacked against the wall in the county auditor’s office, you can find a shelf holding hefty red volumes that document the Board of Supervisors’ first century of actions. Prior to and even after the vote to establish the poor farm in 1855, Township Trustees and the Supervisors ordered direct relief funds to individuals needing assistance—often in the form of clothing, housing, food, or physician expenses. The central relief agent of this time was known as the “Overseer of the Poor.” Iowa did not invent this name, nor did the United States. As a reminder, this position is a relic of British Poor Laws, record keeping, and budgets, and most important to my own questions, they distinguish between those cases to support and which cases to deny.

[a few seconds pause]
 
Moving my eyes down each page, I find these records can tell us at least a few stories: first, individuals within Johnson County sought out forms of relief, in the form of boarding, or food from other residents or recognized relief agents. These were people whose family members would not or could not shelter, clothe, or feed them, necessitating they turn somewhere else. And those who sought relief also confronted the limits of “the law of settlement.” Backed by the Iowa Code, this law conditioned legal residency as the basis of the grounds for relief. In the law as written, the details tell me the “law of settlement” constituted the basis of legal legitimacy for a broad swath of new Iowans. These were women who may have been widows, so-called “illegitimate children,” or those recognized as non-white, which could have included any number of Eastern European immigrants in the 1850s who were not yet considered “white.” 

Another available story is that even after the creation of a centralized “poor farm,” the county continued to provide individual relief for short time. However, they primarily paid on receipt the expenses for fuel, bedding, and food for the farm’s steward, in addition to his stipend. When making sense of line after line of entries, and those even before 1855, I also hold close the reality that farm laborers would often travel from farm to farm or town to town, desperately looking for work. More to the point, part of the crisis of the poor farm era stemmed from a mismatch between people’s need, available work, and the available narratives that coupled moral worth with a spirit of independence. This is one of many stories that condition our perception of another loaded term—meritocracy, a metric for the alleged worth of any poor farm resident. 

[audio of a few seconds of accordion folk music] 

My eyes again move line by line, the flourishes of preserved pen strokes blur against each other, but I focus again when I see a first reference to an “insane pauper” on April 18, 1856. This person was one listed as “removed,” most likely because he did not fit under the terms of settlement. Instead, he was listed only because someone else was seeking renumeration for the action of his removal. At a certain point, these line-by-line entries eventually give way to fuller reports of the poor farm’s conditions, the productive farming operation, and ongoing matters of county oversight. So too, the individual stories give way to shorter entries or reference points, punctuated by… 

[audio of a few seconds of accordion folk music]
 
…longer spaces in between, filled with other matters of county administration. 
 
Amidst all of these lists of crops grown, and the numbers of people residing over the years, however, my mind lingers over the consistency of language describing those residents. These terms themselves might open up, for instance, stories about the relationship between the state government, the asylum system in Iowa and elsewhere, and in particular counties…. relationships that are far too vast to do justice here. But each term—like, “insanity,” “idiotic,” “unable to work,” “incurable”—each of these a place holder for another period of time. 

It’s not so much that these terms are outdated or pejorative, though they certainly are. During a tour, when a member of the public asks me what different diagnostic language might mean, or what the modern equivalent might be, I always struggle to answer definitively. Because, as I say, “it’s complicated.” Apart from what any of these might have meant to describe the psycho-social behaviors of any one individual, they were terms developed and used by institutions with power over populations. That power included the ability to define, to surveil, and to institutionalize. And at times, it meant where someone could go when they did not have the support network to otherwise live out their days, until their final breaths.

….You can continue listening to this story, with Chapter 2, part 2, Next, on Disability Ecologies.

[audio of a few seconds of accordion folk music]

[1] Leah Rogers Obituary, https://stewartbaxter.com/obits/leah-rogers/
[2] Iowa Citizen, “Stabbed the Steward, ‘Blind Kauffman Uses the Knife and Goes to Mt. Pleasant.” December 7, 1900.
[3] Susan Schweik, The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public. (New York: New York University Press, 2009), pg. 77.
[4] Chris Chapman, Allison C. Carey, and Liat Ben-Moshe, "Reconsidering Confinement: Interlocking Locations and Logics of Incarceration," in Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada, ed. Ben-Moshe, Chapman, Carey, pp. 3-24 (Palgrave, 2014). 
[5] Eli Clare, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure (Durham: Duke University Press), 2017.
[6] John L. Gillin, History of Poor Relief Legislation in Iowa (Iowa City: State Historical Society, 1914), pg. 3.