History is a Story, Part One

Presenting: History is a Story, Part One

Content: "insanity," asylums, eugenics

• Main Voice(s): Emerson Cram 
• Special Guests: 
  • Supervisor V Fixmer-Oraiz, Board of Supervisors of Johnson County, Iowa (2022-present), and former Project Manager for the Johnson County Historic Poor Farm Master Plan (2017-2021)
  • Supervisor Rod Sullivan, Board of Supervisors of Johnson County, Iowa (2004-present)
  • Supervisor Lisa Green-Douglass, Board of Supervisors of Johnson County, Iowa (2016-present)
  • Carly McAndrews, Farmer, Trowel & Error Farm  
  • Alfred Matiyabo, Farmer, Africando Farm 
  • Kim Painter, Recorder, Johnson County of Iowa  
  • Pauline Kirkpatrick, Former Employee of Johnson County Care Facility 
  • Mira Cunning, Voice of Dorothea Dix 

Highlights
This conversation explores the historical significance of the Johnson County historic poor farm, examining its role in shaping social services and community relationships. Emerson reflects on the journey through time, the evolution of dependency, and the voices of those who lived in the poor farm. The discussion delves into the stigma surrounding dependency, the impact of scientific charity, and the importance of preserving history to understand present-day challenges. Ultimately, it highlights the need for a more inclusive narrative that honors the lives and stories of those who were often marginalized.

Conclusion
Dependency is a complex history that creates long lasting stigma. Community engagement is essential to reimagine land use. Sites of conscience can foster healing and understanding.

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 Maura De Cicco. All media clips are used for educational purposes only. Sound effects licensed through Pixabay.   

Funding
Research, writing, and production benefited from generous support: the National Communication Association’s Karl R. Wallace Memorial Award; The University of Iowa (UI) OVPR Arts and Humanities Initiative Standard Grant; UI Provost Investment in Strategic Priorities; UI College of Liberal Arts DSHB Humanities Scholar Award; UI CLAS, Summer Humanities Award.

Special Thanks
With thanks to Maura De Cicco; UI Departments of Communication Studies, Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies, and American Studies (Especially Angie Looney, Kembrew McLeod, Eric Vázquez, Naomi Greyser, & Hallie Abelman); State Historical Society of Iowa (especially Hang Nguyen, Allison Johnson, & Anu Tiwari); Sarah Keen, University Archivist, University of Iowa; V Fixmer-Oraiz; Kim Painter; Rebecca Dewing, Johnson County Historical Society; the 2024 Colby Summer Institute in Environmental Humanities, (especially Ashton Wesner, Astrida Neimanis, Marisol de la Cadena, Jason Moore, Mat Fournier, Molly MacVeagh, Francesca Martelli, Joe Riley, Rachel Rozanski, Chris Walker); Claire Fox; Teresa Mangum; Jennifer New; Phaedra C. Pezzullo; Constance Gordon; & 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 One, Part One: History is a Story.

Emerson 0:00 

Chapter One: History is a Story, Part 1.  

[ambient sounds of car driving on a road, followed by the click of a turn signal, followed by sounds of car tires turning on a gravel road, these sounds become quieter as a voice over from Emerson starts] 

My journey out to the “Johnson County Historic Poor Farm” sometimes feels like time traveling through Iowa City’s historic remnants of rail and roadways that have long shaped the lives of people who live here. I have long believed that to inhabit the places we live entails a depth that shifts beyond the present, reaching into the absences where the past continues to dwell. When I cross the Iowa River, I enter a buzzing location of medical research and patient care, juxtaposed to the Melrose historic district where its architecture marks a time when this area was still farmland. As the city expanded, the neighborhood became an automobile suburb and even later, the medical landscape on which so much of our lives we now depend. My trek takes me past university club golf turf and stacked apartment boxes, and memorials for Mormon settlers. Just as my attention wanes between pockets of newly seeded prairie, I find myself wondering how I could still be in city limits, and suddenly my gaze clips the warm, earthy red barn jutting into the sky, its silver cupola and weathervane reaching for the clouds. 

[ambient sounds of car driving on a road, followed by the click of a turn signal, followed by sounds of car tires turning on a gravel road, these sounds thread under Emerson’s narrative]

Emerson Narrates:
I signal, turn, and hit the gravel drive, and will usually find someone I know walking slowly from utility shed to the field or somewhere in between.
 
[a few seconds of silence]
 
Emerson Narrates:
Before the first time I stepped foot on site in the summer of 2019, I don’t think I’d ever heard of the concept of a “poor farm,” in the Midwest or anywhere else. I was raised with the arid mountains of Wyoming and Colorado, where I also developed a deep love and curiosity for how the histories of where we live shape our connection to those environments and to each other. I was always a little bit awkward, not sure how and where I fit, and learning to be curious about my surroundings grounded me in ways that I didn’t fully understand until much later in life, much of it spent in Iowa. Thinking about time, wind, and water as elements of change inspired me to think about a living world in fluctuation, turning sand and stone into treasured oddities with their own stories of complexity. I also sought out the stories of people whose histories tend to be treated as discards, because their stories painted a clearer picture of the how and the why we got here, where we are today.  

[the sounds of a guitar strum for a few seconds, and thread under the narrator voice]
 
Emerson Narrates:
Decades later, and now fully immersed in the landscape of the Midwest, learning to love the prairies coincided with my learning about the poor farm and its residents, the absence and presence of its prairie systems challenged me to learn with a landscape shaped by glacial drift rather than a mountainous orogeny that gave rise to the Rockies. [end of guitar music]

The Midwest invited lessons in how to touch life underground–in root systems and soil, the time and energy entangled in making biotic life, and how cycles of death and dying nourish ongoing lifespans far into the future. Stories about the prairie inverted grandeur spectacle and taught me how to perceive time and connection across seeds and trees rather than clocks and calendars. I would find myself searching for traces of the lives of those who landed here. I still struggle with the right word to use to describe their living arrangements—were they “residents,” were they “inmates,” as the record tells us? What I do know is that they were registered as “paupers” or the “insane” because aspects of their lives forced them into poverty long before any state in the U.S. would have dedicated social service systems. 

But they also landed here because for the time, the state recognized a “familial obligation” to support those bound to you through law or biological kinship, and it was only when those relationships were foreclosed did someone become a “public charge” or a “public ward,” the cost of their care now funded through tax levies and charitable organizations. It’s so easy to imagine that the people who resided here were abandoned by everyone around them. I want to imagine that they belonged to someone, that they might belong to us. Over the years, the people I would meet through this place felt that obligation to remember them, too. I talked with county supervisors, farmers and food systems workers, former social workers, support staff, archeologists and archivists, and historical preservationists. All of them, guided by a desire to figure out in messy ways what doing justice to these folks might mean now.
 
Even though the concept of a “poor farm” was new to me, conversations became points of discovery. Each time I met someone new, I asked, “what did you know about the poor farm before you started this project? And this is how some of them answered that question: 

V Fixmer-Oraiz, 7:02:
“...when the Johnson County Board of Supervisors put out that proposal…well, I had never heard of the Poor Farm. I had never heard of a Poor Farm in general, I’m not from the Midwest, which I’ve heard since, has Poor Farms are used as…threats to younger generations about if you don’t ship up or shape up, then you’ll be sent to a Poor Farm.”

Lisa Green-Douglass, 7:24: 
"I really didn’t know very much at all about the poor farm. I remember one time driving by it might have been the early 1990s and seeing white signs with lettering on it that said what it was, but I didn’t know what that meant. It was very evident that the buildings were no longer in use. So, I really knew nothing about it. I knew where it was, and that’s the extent of my knowledge.” 

Carly, 7:54:
"I think all I knew was that it used to be an asylum and that people used to be sent here. Whether they had a mental or a physical disability, they were just sent here against their will and had to work, so I think what I understood about it was that there was quite a heavy traumatic history.”

Alfred, 8:14:
"I didn’t know. I was shocked to learn. One day, I think it was the second season, I was complaining about the name, like “Poor Farm? Why are you calling this place “poor farm”? I always joke with Jason, sometimes, I say, we should rename it ‘rich farm.’”

Emerson Narrates, 8:26:
There were others for whom the site was more familiar–it was a place where they had worked as staff, or with administrators or residents as county social workers, or who had a deep sense of the connection between a place’s name and its history. Here’s Kim Painter, who has served as the Johnson County recorder since 1999. County recorders have the responsibility of preserving the historic records that detail the minutiae of county life–everything from real estate to marriage certificates to deeds.
 
Kim Painter, 9:00:
"I always tell people I think if you’re driving on a road trip and you go into any little coffee shop or a gas station and say, ‘Hey, tell me where’s the old county poor farm road,’ there’s going to be an answer and there’s going to be a road.”

Emerson Narrates, 9:14:
Before he was elected for the first time as county supervisor in 2004, Rod Sullivan’s first encounters overlapped with his time as a young social worker:
 
Rod Sullivan, 9:24:
"I was a social worker prior to my election to the board of supervisors and in that role, I had a couple of occasions to go out to what was then called the County Farm and meet with people. And so, I knew it existed. A couple years later or a year or two after I started in the field, it privatized and got the name Chatham Oaks, but still to most people in the field it was just the County Home. And I had some friends who are older than me that worked in the field and they started to give me a little background in terms of what the County Home was, who lived there, what types of people lived there, what it was used for, and their philosophies, if you will.”

Emerson Narrates, 10:06:
You’ll hear those names often–the County Farm, Chatham Oaks, and the County Home. I hear these differences less as a matter of opinion and more as a reference point for the discrete chapters in Johnson County’s story of social and mental health care services. For instance, in 1909, the Iowa legislature amended its own code to change the word “poor-house” to “county home.” After tearing down the former County Home building in 1964, Chatham Oaks was established with a new building.
 
After receiving a degree in recreation from the University of Iowa in 1980, Pauline Kirkpatrick secured a position working with residents at what she called the Johnson County Care Facility, and her experiences with the individuals who lived there made her reluctant to accept the name “poor farm:”
 
Pauline Kirkpatrick, 11:04:
“I graduated from the University of Iowa in 1980 and shortly after that, I got a job out at what was called Johnson County Care Facility. I just have to say that every time I hear “Johnson County Poor Farm,” I want to cringe.”

Emerson: Oh Really?

Pauline Kirkpatrick:
Because the people that were out there when I worked out there, they were wonderful, wonderful people. I don’t know how to express myself except to say they deserved a better name than Johnson County Poor Farm, although the reason they lived there was because they didn’t have money, all of them were, what you would call back then, mentally ill.”
 
Emerson Narrates, 12:04:
As I listened to the differing perspectives from Kim, Rod, and Pauline, the more I realized the dispute wasn’t really about what this now place of historic storytelling should be named… The County Poor Farm…County Home…County Care Facility…Chatham Oaks–all the same plot of land across time, but with very important differences in public and private funding or land use. Those differences matter beyond the headlines of newspapers or legislative debates. They cut to the heart of a fundamental question: how should social institutions meet the needs of those classified as “dependent”? But what did it even mean to be seen as, or legally treated as a dependent?

[the sounds of thick pages turning for a few seconds]

In Johnson County of 1855 (and really, the nation broadly), a so-called dependent was someone whose care was provided for by the public. It could describe a wide range of people who interfaced with charitable organizations or state entities like the county courts or overseers of the poor: people who were called orphans, or paupers, or widows, and the so-called insane, a term that applied broadly to anyone with what we would now call a psychiatric disability, or chronic illness, or even those believed to possess unruly behavior or moods at odds with social convention.

But within a span of 50 or so years, “dependency” increasingly became laden with pseudo-scientific meanings, as a burgeoning generation of social scientists evaluated the best way to make charitable institutions more “efficient” and streamlined. Even though the stigma of dependency preceded this period, the era of what was called “scientific charity” that took root in the late 1800s and early 1900s would deepen efforts to root out what they believed to be the real underlying culprit of poverty and disability. Moving “charity” efforts away from religious or social institutions into the domain of “science,” those within the world of scientific charity played an outsized role in the attempt to root poverty as a matter of biological investigation. The theories guiding the policy advocacy of scientific charity have long been denounced by a range of people, from disability advocates to biologists and geneticists, to new generations of social workers a generation of people who were forced to reflect on the impact of these ideas and their roles in the mainstreaming of a worldview we now call eugenics. A term derived from the Greek words eu and genic, translating as “good genes,” eugenics would pave the way for arguments to remove from society anyone deemed “unfit:” morally or biologically.

One of those key voices urging scientific reform of Midwestern charitable institutions was John L. Gillin. Raised in Hudson, Iowa, Gillin became a rural sociologist, first at the University of Iowa and later at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. His early career focused on classifying different types of dependency. In his book published in 1921, Gillin charted the distinctions between what he called “normal dependency”—think here of children in need of support from their parents—in contrast with what he termed “abnormal dependency.” He believed that abnormal dependency was a “social problem,” necessary to solve through individualized treatments or social design. Looming here in Gillin’s mind is the “pauper” who he describes as “a dependent without an independent spirit.”[1]

Reading these words now, after decades in which newer generations of sociologists and disability advocates have so clearly rejected these frameworks, I can’t help but think about how this tension between dependency and independence shape conversations about need and ways to meet those needs. But we often don’t sit with the histories where these meanings were created. It can be difficult to acknowledge these roots, but I also believe sitting with that difficulty can help us understand how these ideas were seeded into the soil, why people made the decisions that they did, and how the site now can help us to imagine  “dependency” in a much different way—one that binds us to each other because of the inescapable reality of human need.

[audio sounds of soft piano music that gradually fades and threads underneath the spoken narrative]

Because the Historic Poor Farm is a place connecting land to dependency, I also sensed bigger stakes to the name debate. Underneath it all was a familiar undercurrent of shame that so often travels with conversations about poverty and psychiatric illness in the United States. When I listened to different stories and perspectives, what I heard were concerns about what those institutional names symbolized to the dignity of residents. Shame and stigma are constant neighbors, especially around the charge of “dependency” in a culture that prizes “independence.” But they also seem to show up when we talk about parts of life often shrouded by secrecy. [end of the piano music]

Another challenge in telling this story is that voices of social reformers, courts, and oversight committees overpower most of the opportunities we could have to dwell with the voices of those who were on the other side of diagnosis or the legal process of providing relief. The question of who should make decisions about disability or dependency is something that courses through modern day disability justice chants: nothing about us without us! So much of disability history is written from the standpoint of the non-disabled, calculating diagnosis and cost, doing more with less resources, often at the expense of the most vulnerable. So, another way to sit with these roots is to ask: how do we listen for and later tell their story? And how can we do that when there are few, if any, traces of their lives that remain?
 
[sound of opening the asylum with lock and key, gentle banging, clacking and footsteps. The sounds of footsteps on the asylum floor continue under Emerson’s narrative]

The living remnant of some of the farm’s earliest days is a centerpiece of the site we know now. [sound of footsteps inside of the asylum] After that first visit, slowly shuffling my feet across the worn-out floorboards that dipped under our weight, I could never forget what I saw and felt. On either side of a narrow pathway, the weather-worn structure’s wooden cells were still in the early stages of preservation and restoration. The walls were full of residue of another place and time: layers of dust, thin rods overlaid on windows, prison bars that cut up the adjacent view of the Dairy Barn across the way. A sign that reads JOHNSON COUNTY HOME in slender silver letters a top peeling black paint on plywood leaned against the entrance wall. [sound of footsteps end].

But then the site’s former project manager V Fixmer-Oraiz called my attention away from the entrance to nearly illegible writings etched into softened wood in several cells. Those etches—nearly indecipherable—are largely all that remains of the people who lived here in the late 1800s. I have heard them called everything from rambles to gibberish, but to me, they are portals of connection.
 
Now, nearly 6 years after that first encounter, I’m still driving west on Melrose Avenue to the outskirts of Iowa City, my mind preoccupied trying to imagine what this might have felt like for those making the trip for the first, or second, or even potentially last time. What did it feel like to be taken here, to feel the outskirts, to be severed from home because no one could care for you? What were their thoughts, how did they hold their uncertainties of the days that lie ahead? And what were the reasons they found themselves on this roadway to begin with? 

[emphasized sound of a judge's gavel hit a table two times] 

How can this site—this asylum, the surrounding land and its remnants, tell their stories when the records that we otherwise have available efface them as people: with longings, hopes, and desires about how to live?

[energetic music plays and threads underneath Emerson’s spoken narrative]

As I record this in 2025, what community members call the “historic poor farm” brims with new growth, thanks to major local food projects seeded on site. GROW Johnson County, The Global Foods Project, and Iowa Valley RC&D’s Land Access Programs have each reimagined how the land can be used to meet needs–for growers and eaters alike. So, too, these food projects are accompanied by newly restored watersheds, native prairie, and trees in the process of forging their own savannas, where birds and pollinators are finding their way home. But what happened to this land and its historic buildings in the gap of time–between the poor farm era represented by the asylum and the revitalization of the land for production of local food–is less well known to the public. 

Why did an Iowa county decide to invest decades of time and energy with millions of public dollars and the development of private partner relationships? And how did those involved engage the frictions between historic preservation, food production and development, difficult histories, and the proposed value of local food infrastructure in search of available land? Following those frictions–between past, present, and future–helps us understand our place in each and maybe even how to build transformative relationships between people and public land.

[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]

So, what is a poor farm? Who were they supposed to serve? And why did the county preserve that name, instead of any of its others? Although “poor laws” and charitable relief are far older than the United States itself, as a fledgling new territory, Iowa’s first legislation passed in 1840, named “An Act for the Relief of the Poor.” This act was largely like Wisconsin but also borrowed from policies and practices found in Ohio, Michigan, and the Northwest Territories. In Gillin’s account of this history, Iowa adopted poor laws based on what relief a new fledgling state territory would be able to provide. Like those other states, Iowa’s initial laws imposed several restrictions on who could access that relief, and on what basis. 

These restrictions included residency requirements, family liabilities for care prior to a county taking responsibility, in addition to exclusions based on race. In other laws, the territorial legislature insisted that those who were “insane” paupers—meaning, those who did not have access to property or an estate to finance their care in state hospitals such as Mount Pleasant—they would qualify for the same forms of poor relief.  Like most state laws, amendments certainly came in the form of new definitions or restrictions, or changing terms of administration, like who was responsible for overseeing and managing the county’s institutions. 

Regardless of ongoing changes, state legislation maintained the overall mandate that individual counties and their associated townships would shoulder responsibility for the funding, oversight, and upkeep of authorized institutions. As county entities, poor farms were funded through tax levies, managed by a board of directors, and regularly inspected by small groups of citizens. And while this narrative can tell us much about what legislators did to authorize the building and maintenance of poor farms and county poor houses, the written laws can’t tell us much about what this might have looked like county by county—that requires access to a different perspective. 

[brief pause]

In February of 1855, Johnson County supervisors first raised the question: should we establish a poor house? Is doing so necessary or advisable? If you read through the meeting minutes stored inside thick red hardcovers in the office of the County Auditor, you’ll find that before 1855, the county assigned a “Pauper Fund” to provide “outdoor relief,” which might include anything from food, clothing, fuel for cooking or heating, or even medical care. Outdoor relief did not require a central structure where people would reside, instead distributed funds or goods based on individual needs as they came. But some outdoor relief even included so-called pauper auctions, in which residents would make bids on an individual’s labor, and when “successful,” they would supply room and board in exchange for work.[2] 

These models were not unique to Iowa. In a time energized by social reform, some reformers rung alarms, naming pauper auctions as indentured servitude and argued such practices must be replaced by something more humane. Also at this time, individuals who were legally judged “insane” were confined to county jails to segregate them from the broader public. 

Both models–auctions and jails–are necessary reminders that many of our negative national attitudes about dependency originate in systems of confinement and attitudes about how to reform socially undesirable attributes or behaviors. Some national reformers, most notably Dorothea Dix, gained traction in 1843 by documenting the range of abuse she witnessed in jails and asylums throughout Massachusetts. In her now well-known speech addressed to the Massachusetts legislature, she pushed for reform as “a voice for the mad:”
 
Voice of Dorothea Dix Narrator, 31:55: 

About two years since leisure afforded opportunity and duty prompted me to visit several prisons and almshouses in the vicinity of this metropolis. I found, near Boston, in the jails and asylums for the poor, a numerous class brought into unsuitable connection with criminals and the general mass of paupers. I refer to the idiots and insane persons, dwelling in circumstances not only adverse to their own physical and moral improvement, but productive of extreme disadvantages to all other persons brought into association with them.[3]  

Emerson Narrates, 32:36: 

For the times, her emphasis on living conditions and “physical and moral” improvement was not uncommon. In fact, their perceived connection was a driving force of reform, giving way to a boom in the building of state hospitals, asylums, and other spaces like sanitariums. In popular culture, our knowledge of these spaces is often filtered through images of large castle-like buildings embedded in pastoral settings. These are largely remnants of the “moral treatment” period of asylum care, in which reformers and the fledgling institution of U.S. psychiatry argued the built environment could foster treatment of “the whole person.” 

Architect Thomas Kirkbride, another formative voice, also believed there was a connection between moral treatment and the built environment. He went as far to believe that certain routines, schedules and movement could enable the internalization of control within the mad.[4] Nationally influential, Kirkbride designed or influenced the four state hospitals in Iowa—Mount Pleasant, Independence, Cherokee, and Clarinda. However, while people like Dix and Kirkbride may have believed they had good intentions for their times, their vision would compete with the voices of public administrators who believed these forms of care were largely inefficient. We would see the poor farm era emerge in Iowa and other states amidst calls for greater centralization of poor relief and asylum care, or what would be known as “care with economy.” These ideas of efficiency are well known in our world today, but their seeds were planted as early as the mid to late 19th century, later impacting every contour of medicine, politics, and culture. More to the point, these ideas would have enormous consequences for disabled and mad people, who notably, did not get asked much what they thought about “cures,” moral or otherwise. 

As recorded in the Supervisor minutes, Johnson County voted 987-146 in favor of the proposition to establish a county poor farm:

Voice of Judge Lee, County Judge Narrator, 35:31:
Ordered: That a tract of land for a poor-farm, not less than 160 acres, nor more than 320, be purchased, and a suitable building and improvements be erected thereon, for the poor within said county, not to exceed in the whole cost of five thousand dollars; provided the same shall be approved by a vote of the people of the county, at the April election, 1855. F.H. Lee, Judge County Court 

Emerson Narrates, 36:07:
After land purchase and construction, the county farm began operation in January 1856, with John W. O’Brien at the helm as the first steward. He oversaw all of the county’s dependents in what was initially a four-room wooden building. The original building separated individuals by gender, and otherwise the rooms housed the quarters for the steward and his family in one, and a kitchen in the other. According to Charles Aurner in 1912, a visiting committee insisted the total inadequacy of the current operation in 1861 and insisted that buildings be expanded and the “insane” be separated from the “poor.”[5] In response to that visit, the supervisors would authorize building the wooden asylum, which would be used to house the insane until 1886, when another visit by an oversight committee culminated in recommendations for another new building. That wooden asylum building, the last remnant of the early poor farm period, would then be converted into one of the buildings for the working farm. This is how the asylum building became a hog house; and soon after the name of this place would be known as The County Home.   
 
At this point in this story, I need to answer an important question about the classes of people who would have lived inside of the asylum building; why so little remains in terms of records of their life broadly, inside and outside of their time here.

We often expect historical records to answer the questions we have: why was the poor farm constructed? Who lived there? What did they do to pass the time? What were the reasons people landed here? Historical records can certainly shed light on these questions, but all records can be limited by how they were used, which means they represent limited perspectives and not the fullest picture possible. What do I mean by that? You might have noticed that all these details are quite boring. Budget books, minutes, and oversight committee reports are the lifeblood of county governance–and they certainly reveal crucial details; like, what crops were grown, or animals raised, or how did the county finance the farm at different times and what might have prompted shifts in that funding? We could even use census records to identify individuals who were residents. But any of those documents rarely tell us about the people whose lives intersected here, beyond why those with decision making power imagined their lives as a problem, or sometimes, what conditions were common or unique. Here again is County Recorder Kim Painter, who emphasized this point:
 
Kim Painter, 39:23:
Even though some of the more contemporary records which are more dull, they’re like accounting records, every time I look at these things, I think, well, these were patients, inmates, if you will, some different terms were used at different points historically…” (fade)

Emerson Narrates, 39:40:
You’ll hear more about those different economic, medical, or cultural pathways in chapter two. But listen to how Painter emphasizes one critical part of record-keeping and preservation: what we choose to save rather than discard reflects social power relations. 

Kim Painter, 40:00:
“[they] made these rugs that people bought. They raised these chickens that people purchased eggs from or raised these cows or whatever it is. There were human beings behind it who were in this institutional setting for reasons of mental illness, physical disability, or some kind of perceived impairment. Sometimes I believe women who were divorced, who were perceived to be unable to care for themselves economically because of how things were at the time also could end up there.”

Emerson Narrates, 40:36:
In 2023, I asked Supervisor Rod Sullivan to reflect on what kinds of stories the site can tell those of us today in Iowa City and Johnson County, and his response emphasized those social relationships, and how remembering this history was crucial:  

Rod Sullivan, 40:54:
“Well, I will admit I’ve got personal bias here. I’m a social worker, and I think my whole life I’ve always been a bit of an economic populist, maybe you could say. But I think we focus a lot on the farm of this, and not much on the poor part of this. People were placed there; they were forced to be there. They couldn’t leave. In some cases, they could buy their way out in the early days, but it’s almost like a sentence. And some people were probably happier with it than others. But I think it’s really important to remember that these are people who were put there against their will. And if them or their families had money, they probably didn’t have to go there.” 

Emerson Narrates, 41:42:
When a place like the historic poor farm intentionally shifts from a landscape for social services and agricultural use, we can call it a “site of conscience.” The concept draws from the work of public historians, advocates within and beyond disability and mad communities, and those currently working in social service fields, including community health and psychiatry.[6] The practices and ethics of preserving former places like the poor farm or asylums are still in the process of being determined, but those who work under the auspices of “site of conscious” also understand…[start of audio of soft guitar strums and ghostly singing that threads under Emerson’s ongoing narrative]
 

…that the past gives us a way of making sense of our present—around stigma, harm, potentially healing, and ultimately, the ways we culturally determine how to meet needs for care; even further how that term “care” has been wielded in ways to justify the mistreatment of mad and disabled people. 

 [elongated pause]

Emerson Narrates: You can continue listening to this story, with Chapter 1, part 2, Next, on Disability Ecologies.

Below are the references used in the writing of this material:
[1] John L. Gillin, Poverty and Dependency, (New York: The Century Co.), 1921.
[2] Leah D. Rogers, “National Register of Historic Places Nomination for Johnson County Historic Poor Farm,” July 8, 2014, p. 26. Link access to report.
[3] Dorothea L. Dix, "Memorial to the Legislature of Massachusetts," 1843. Accessed at Disability History Museum Library: https://www.disabilitymuseum.org/dhm/lib/detail.html?id=737&page=all, last accessed March 18, 2026.
[4] Carla Yanni, The Architecture of Madness: Insane Asylums in the United States (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 2007. 
[5] Leah D. Rogers, “National Register of Historic Places Nomination for Johnson County Historic Poor Farm,” July 8, 2014, p. 21. Link access to report.
[6] Elisabeth Punzi and Linda Steele, ed. Sites of Conscience: Place, Memory, and the Project of Deinstitutionalization, (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press), 2024.