History is a Story, Part Two

Presenting: History is a Story, Part Two 

Content: asylum, "insane," cemetery  

• Main Voice(s): Emerson Cram 
• Guests: 
  • Supervisor V Fixmer-Oraiz, Board of Supervisors of Johnson County, Iowa (2022-present), & 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)
  • Kim Painter, Johnson County Recorder 
  • Will Thomson, Armadillo Arts
  • 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 conversation explores intricate relationships between memory, preservation, & historical narratives surrounding the asylum and Poor Farm Cemetery. Emerson discusses the importance of recognizing the power dynamics at play in preserving the stories of those who lived in these spaces, the discomfort that comes with confronting difficult histories, & the role of imagination in understanding the past. The dialogue emphasizes the significance of community involvement in preservation efforts & how physical remnants of history serve as important record keepers.

Conclusion
Preservation saves & honors structures & stories. Discomfort can lead to deeper understanding and value. Rumors reflect community desire to understand its past. Preservation can be a form of forgiveness & a commitment to future generations, preservation & restoration can be an emergence story. 

Transcript

For full transcript, visit: disabilityecologiespodcast.buzzsprout.com

Credits
Written & narrated by Emerson Cram, University of Iowa. Recorded with Riverside FM. Production & Sound Editing by Maura De Cicco. 

All media clips used for educational purposes only. Sound licensed through Pixabay.

Iowa City Public Library, “Tell Me Your Story: Bob Burns,” Interview with Ellen Buchanan, 1991; August 9, 2017. 

The Proper People, “Exploring an Abandoned Asylum–Decayed Buildings with Power,” May 26, 2023. 

Tom Naples, “Prairie Farewell,” Music from the Depression, no date.    

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, & Hallie Abelman); State Historical Society of Iowa (especially Hang Nguyen, Allison Johnson, and Anu Tiwari); V Fixmer-Oraiz; Kim Painter; Rebecca Dewing, Johnson County Historical Society; Claire Fox; Teresa Mangum; Jennifer New; Phaedra C. Pezzullo; Constance Gordon; and Jesse Waggoner. 

Funding
Research, writing, & production benefited from generous support: 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; UI CLAS, Summer Humanities Award.

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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  • Instagram: @disabilityecologiespodcast

Transcript

Transcript for Disability Ecologies Podcast Chapter One, Part Two: History is a Story.

Emerson 0:00 

Welcome back. You are listening to Disability Ecologies, Chapter 1, History is a Story, Part 2.

Recognizing these power dynamics, at least implicitly, energized decades of efforts to save and repair the asylum structure and the land of the farm itself, to honor the people who may have lived and died here and in some way, save not only their stories, but also the opportunity to engage with their lives in such a visceral way. Not everything could be saved, and time and again I heard stories of how records or materials that might have stayed around were discarded at different moments. Not necessarily because people believed they had something to hide, but because when a person dies, we typically turnover keepsakes to their next of kin. Family plays an enormous role in memory keeping, and where do one’s keepsakes go if kin is a wish instead of a reality? I asked V Fixmer-Oraiz to share what materials they had found in a closet at what was formerly known as Chatham Oaks:

V Fixmer-Oraiz, 1:19: 

So, even since the seventies and eighties, they found a lot of photo books of a lot of the residents there, which was really cool. They used to do a lot of social events. So they had like Christmas pageants. And so that was really cool to see how much more in the community Chathum Oaks and its residents were. Cool and sad, because now, of course, I mean, we don’t need to get into politics too much, but like with the privatization of Medicare and that kind of stuff, it’s really that the facility has far fewer residents, like a dozen or less. And really it can host, I think, up to 50. And at one time did. Hearing stories or seeing pictures of people in the back of the pickups, and they would drive them over to the picnic tables on the south side of the farm and you know, host events there. But then there were also things, there was a wedding certificate from, I think it was the late 1800s. And clothing, jewelry. I think there was some old firefighter materials, like a hat and a mask, some of the old gas kind of masks...  just random things like that. 

Emerson Narrates, 2:31: 

I asked V what other challenges they encountered when documenting the site during the first stages of the preservation master plan: 

V Fixmer-Oraiz, 2:42: 

I think I had mentioned it's really just that a lot of those artifacts are gone, and it's just unfortunate it's hard to tell those stories. And I've also heard people just disparage the fact that the county's trying to do anything, that it's not a place that we should be highlighting and celebrating and investing this much in. And even the name was controversial, just maintaining the Johnson County Historic Poor Farm name, I think really ruffled some feathers…At the time when we were talking about it with the supervisors, it felt particularly charged though to name it something else, to name it after somebody or something. It just seemed like the best course of action was really just to name it what it is to retain that history. And even though it is not the best of the county there, at the time, I think it's worth noting that if we don't know where we've been, then how are we going to move forward in a way that's very mindful of the lessons learned?

Emerson Narrates, 3:52: 

On my drives out to the farm for active growing seasons or activities related to the Disability Advisory Committee, I have found the one way to cope with the sense of loss around these materials is to hold hope that perhaps there might be unclaimed materials within the community: in a basement or attic box, or a family story, or something else. Until then, I will visit the site when I can, connecting with the remains of the early years in hopes of opening a door to the past and the vantage point of the people who were forced to come here. 

[audio of soft piano music]

Peering into Johnson County’s more recent history, I was surprised to learn of some earlier preservation efforts. From what I can tell, calls to preserve were steadfast and most apparent immediately following moments of unsettling discovery. Please note, the following includes some details about the discovery of human remains. 

Leah Rogers was one of the formidable drivers of the effort to preserve the farm’s stories, as an archeologist for Tall Grass Archeology. Sadly, she passed away in 2022. In her interview with Mary Donovan, the former Executive Director of Chatham Oaks, she learned of the discovery of the poor farm’s cemetery in the 1960s. Allegedly, construction on a small pond was under way when workers discovered what they believed to be human remains, and work stopped immediately. As the work of Chatham Oaks continued but relied less on farming beyond chores for residents, local farmers leased the land, likely growing corn. Otherwise, the area remained unused, and new generations of the board of supervisors debated what they should do with that land—a golf course, a new jail, space for new county buildings. All of these possibilities failed. 

But it would turn out that as early as the 1970s, people in the community argued that preservation of this story—uncomfortable as it might be—was crucial. 

In the article “Old, New Views Toward Mentally Ill Pointed Out,” published by the Iowa City Press-Citizen on February 23, 1970, Linda Svoboda documents what I believe to be the first time the asylum was used, in their words, “to dramatize the stark contrast between old and new attitudes toward the mentally ill,” within Iowa and beyond. Svoboda was writing of a film presentation at the dedication of the new Mid-Eastern Iowa Community Health Center. One image caught the Press-Citizen’s attention: the outer edges of the photograph capture both sides of the narrow interior, lined by individual 8x10 cells assembled by 2-by-4 timbers. Gathered at the center are approximately four hogs with noses to the wooden floor covered in what I imagine might be wood chips or hay. 

During his time as county supervisor between 1971-1975, and again between 1987-1990, former state senator Bob Burns dedicated substantial time to research the historic asylum–thumbing through pages of cursive in old county record books. Here he is talking about that experience with Ellen Buchanan of the Iowa City Public Library:

Voice Ellen Buchanan, 7:49: 

“I’ve talked, Bob, to a friend and fellow supervisor Dick Meyers, and he said that you really have a sense of history…and it’s a very unique history that you are preserving. And it has to do with um, the home that’s been restored relatively speaking that housed the insane and poor in the mid 1800s. I’d love people to know your involvement: when did you first read about it…like was it in supervisor minutes or what and how it all came to be on the register…?”

Voice of Bob Burns, 8:22:
“Well, the first I knew about it was when I went on the board in 1971, within a month or so we were visiting the county home and the other two supervisors Kessler and Pribble took me out to show me this and said this…we’re using it as a hog shed then and said uh this used to be the home of the insane. And uh every Supervisor has always been conscious of this but most of the county didn’t, as a matter of fact. In the last two or three years when I bring it up, I found people who live very close didn’t know it was there. An interesting thing is, I ran into some real antagonism, somebody says ‘what do you want to preserve that old hog house there for?’ Well, it wouldn’t be there if it wasn’t a hog house. There were originally two wings there with a central building. This one was for the insane, so it had all the bars and the cells. And I suppose a very practical farmer or board of supervisor said, ‘well, what a wonderful place for sow pens.’ And that’s why it’s there. The other building is gone, no sign of it, all of the others around it. And that’s why it was there, because it was useful for a sow pen, from about 1886 up until…I think they discontinued using it shortly after I came on in 1973 or 4, but it had been used in that whole time, almost some 90 some years.”

Voice of Ellen Buchanan, 9:39:
“For hogs…and how many years do you think it was used to house the…”

Voice of Bob Burns, 9:43:

It was used from about 1860 to 1886 when they built the first new county home that preceded the one that’s here. It was a large though modern county home. It was used up until then. And it’s something that will just about send shivers down your back when you go out and see this place. It was heated with an old potbellied stove, which I’m wanting somebody to donate, so I put another pot-bellied stove in there. You can see the area in the top there where there was a fire started and when you think of all of those people in those cells and the fire started, I don’t know when it started, I can’t find anything in the minutes yet…

Emerson Narrates, 10:24:
The bigger picture of this preservation story can fill an entire chapter of this podcast, but there are threads in Supervisor Burns’ story worth highlighting: are land, people, and animals only valuable to the extent of how they can be used, or made useful? Is there in common about usefulness that connects the residents to the land to the sows who also were kept in these conditions? There’s a lot there to sit with, in a lot of discomfort, but Supervisor Burns continued his story to emphasize how preservation of the moments that are discomforting have a different kind of value.
 
Voice of Bob Burns, 11:09:
But I also had a thing I felt very strongly about that sometimes what we should be preserving are things we aren’t so proud of…

Voice of Ellen Buchanan, 11:17:
I’m sure it’s showed everyone how far medical care has come in how many 100 and over 120 years.
 
Voice of Bob Burns, 11:24:
Now you walk into that, and I’m looking forward to taking you out, Ellen. And you just think, well, what if one of mine were in here, in this barred place, wooden bars, you know?
 
Emerson Narrates, 11:33:
Supervisor Burns has great faith in the power of imagination—to put yourself in the time and place of those who might have resided in the asylum—so to understand what it might have been like. Moving deeper, he ponders “what if one of mine?” I might pick up to say, my family member, my community member, my…his wondering is what happens when we go searching for missing evidence, for any trace of the past that might remain, be that in books or floorboard. He is asking us to grapple with what we do when the archive cannot deliver the answers to the questions we have about the past. 

[a few seconds of bird sounds from the historic poor farm site. Sounds of asylum lock unlocking threads under Emerson’s spoken narrative]

What I was starting to hear was that preserving our ability to tell stories about the past with the remains of those who were closest to it—the land, this space, that oak tree at the farm’s southern edge—can become a way of honoring those who lived and worked here, and as those in the county believed, doing justice to the mistakes of those supervisors of earlier generations. Preservation can be a commitment to who we value, a way of reimagining how a collective can design itself in ways to honor community needs with dignity. Preservation can be an act of forgiveness. Preservation can be an emergence story. Now we must sit with the painful parts—the asylum. Please note that some listeners might find these descriptions difficult to hear or read.
 
The asylum is the farm’s oldest remaining structure, and the only remnant of its kind in the entire state. To say it is difficult to experience doesn’t even come close, but doing so, as people relayed to me over the years, often leads people to connect what they found to other faraway places or times. While reasons for that confinement differed—from political prisoners to enslaved labor—there was something at stake in the attempts to understand and forge those connections based on the building itself.
 
Some listeners may have already experienced the sensations of slow movement on a narrow path that separates two rows of wooden cells, so small they make you wonder how someone would sleep. Depending on the time of year, the heat can feel immense, like you might be swallowed whole. The potbelly stove in the middle of the pathway recreates a former scene where the ceiling caught fire, likely circulating smoke and ash in an already stuffy enclosure. Floorboards creak and bend, and at times details make your jaw drop: small scratches in the wood’s pliable surfaces, and no way to tell when they might have been inscribed, or curves in the bars closest to the floor, winnowed down by the weight of hogs moving in and out. Now, visitors will also encounter museum placards that share details to help visitors make sense of this environment. Maybe “sense” is the wrong phrase—but, at the very least, the mounted stories accompanied with photographs, maps, and text of social policy of the late 1800s gives us an anchor for meaning. Supervisor Rod Sullivan spoke to this in our 2023 conversation:
 
Rod Sullivan, 16:19: 
Although I'm sure the folks at the time felt like they were doing the best they could by the folks who lived there, it's a pretty barbaric way to house a human being. And when you walk in there and see the stuff that's been scratched into the walls by fingernails and nails and other things, you get a little sense of horror.And I think it's just important that we keep that, that we preserve that. It's like the people who had my job allowed this to happen to other humans, and they did it in the name of the people of Johnson County. And they weren't alone. It happened all over the country. I'm not trying to say these were bad people, but wow, we've come a long way. I just think that that building needed to be preserved to tell that story, because otherwise people don't know that story.

Emerson Narrates, 16:51:
In the case of this building, I want to say that horror is the point, the physical structure is the record keeper. And it matters, as I’ll talk about more in Chapter 2, that what one encounters in the asylum now is an outcome of recommendations proposed by the Disability Advisory Committee connected to the farm—a disability majority group comprised of county residents. I asked Will Thomson, who would design the interior exhibits and interpretation, how he connected to the site as someone with a background in museums, and he spoke to the impact that it had on him after the first encounter: 

Will Thomson, 17:37:
“I think the deepest part of it was realizing what 19th century poor farms did, and how they functioned, and the attitudes that they reflected in the treatment of the residents and the use, the motivations and philosophy behind 19th century poor farms were these folks considered themselves as enlightened. They were making a vast improvement for the treatment of the poor and disabled, they thought. And when we look back on it, we see a very different picture, but clearly it was something that the folks of the time were intending to be a vast improvement over what had been done before.”

Emerson Narrates, 18:29:
But what he said next really stayed with me. He drew my thinking away from the asylum as this static object, overladen with stories of state law and county administration, and turned to imagining this place as full of traces of the people I had been searching for. 

Will Thomson, 18:50:
“For myself personally, it was the asylum that really captured my imagination because once I spent time inside of that building and saw the inscriptions on the walls and started to think of the residents as individual human beings, and some in quite desperate circumstances for 1870, 1880. And it stuck with me, and I kept coming back to that in my head and mentioned it to other people over the years.”

Emerson Narrates, 19:25:
That shift of perspective through the impact of the writings as evidence of individual human beings made me want to pause for so many reasons. The writings etched into the soft wood have now been cared for and preserved with the appropriate expertise. The process of noticing, discerning potential meanings, and then finding ways to ensure the longevity of these traces connects historical preservation to the value of people traditionally treated as discards. We cannot change the past, but we can try to make portals that insist these folks were individual human beings, no matter what attempts to frame them as waste on the public. Thomson emphasized the value of the traces left. 

Will Thomson, 20:21:
But when I finally got a chance to work with it and really dive into the details of the lives that were lived there, I saw it as a large artifact, let's say, because I'm a museum person. When you talk about artifacts, you're talking about man-made objects that had a utilitarian purpose as opposed to objects which could be aesthetic in nature, like paintings and sculpture. And historic buildings are artifacts in the sense that they preserve the wear traces, the provenance of their existence in the boards, in the timbers. And that to me is where people visiting can learn so much directly. And the haunted nature, if you will, although I'm a fairly pragmatic person when it comes to describing things. But I think haunted could be a way of saying, you can hear the voices of the people who lived there, some of whom had for 20 years never been out of the Poor Farm.

Emerson Narrates, 21:35:
I wish I would have exchanged more with Will about this idea of haunting, in part because historical asylums are so deeply loaded with these kinds of meanings. Think of haunted asylum tours 

Audio from The Proper People Explore an Abandoned Asylum, 21:50:

In today’s episode, we’re exploring the Central Islip State Hospital on Long Island, New York. The hospital started as the farm colony for the Manhattan State Hospital in 1899. Farm colonies allowed the patients to get away from the city, and it was believed that working in the farms or the many workshops helped heal mental illness. Over the years, the population began to increase, and the campus was greatly expanded. It was split away from Manhattan and became an independent hospital. 

Proper People Speakers, 22:20:

Now this is creepy as hell. [audio features sounds of breathing beneath a mask, and muffled voices] What to go upstairs? [audio features sounds of breathing beneath a mask, and muffled voices, footsteps walking upstairs] I think this is the school building. Look at this. Are these the hospital beds? Or maybe dormitory beds.     

Emerson Narrates, 23:25:

or lists of Iowa Haunted Places, a curiosity that originally enticed ghost hunters to come to the poor farm’s asylum in 2008. In these cases, desire for “haunted” spaces can be a discomforting relic of attitudes about mad people as inherently scary. And I also think another way of considering haunting can be an acknowledgement of a presence left behind—something felt but perhaps not entirely known or seen or heard. I can only imagine what walking through the asylum might feel like without access to these portals to a mad past. Here’s Will again, speaking to the importance of those traces.
 
Will Thomson, 24:15: 
The people who lived in the asylum left intentional marks as well as their subconscious marks. And the building itself, the surprise that most people have is how primitive the structure itself is. The bars were made of two by fours and the brackets, the iron brackets that held the sliding steel rods that kept the doors from being opened voluntarily. The kinds of traces that you can read clearly are the ones that tell us the stories of the individual people who live there. And I think that a museum person's business in doing a project like this is to accentuate the presence of those marks and not get in the way of them. And certainly, the fact that it was used as a hog barn, it was ironic because here it was suddenly suitable for animals when we had stored human beings in it for a decade. And taking away the irony, of course, is the fact that we have the asylum simply because it was turned into a hog barn. If it had not been, it could have been torn down, and we'd never see what's there today.

Emerson Narrates, 25:49:
Thomson also emphasized that the history of the building now is also the history of its repurposing and restoration—a decision to salvage for reuse, and then an intention to preserve and repair and memorialize—all of these reflect a longer story of communities making decisions about value. 

Will Thomson, 26:14: 
It was restored, of course, the floor completely rotted out, and they had to raise it and restore the floor and repair damage that was caused by years of being a hog barn. And some of those traces are still there, and they should be because it tells us a clear history of the building. But it's simply there because the Poor Farm staff decided to salvage it, to use it as another function when they built the subsequent building, which was a four-story brick building that was built over where Chatham Oaks is today. That building no longer exists either.
 
The fact that the historical buildings can be preserved and used as examples about how things used to be and were structured when the Poor Farm was active. Those points are saved, too. And when a society does that, it builds museums. Museums are structures that say to a community, this is the stuff that we think is important.
 
And we're preserving it. We're preserving it. And people want to go in there and say, okay, let's see why it was important. Let's find out what our society thinks is important.

Emerson Narrates, 27:30:
I also asked Thomson to talk about how he navigated the challenges of available records, particularly those that can represent the perspective of the residents rather than those of the steward, or county administrators, or the medical field of the period.

Will Thomson, 27:51: 
Well, the records that do exist are fragmentary, of course. And the amount of time that's passed, 140 years since those days of the first asylums and all that. We have a lot of general sociological knowledge about 19th-century management of the poor from the English concepts of the poor house, or the debtor's prison or what have you. Or Bedlam, which Bedlam was a place before it was an adjective. But the specifics of people that lived there, and you have to look at some of those inscriptions on the walls and try to decipher them. And understand that, maybe this person was educated, because the handwriting is so clear and distinct. And the words are spelled with a sort of character that indicates a kind of middle school progression of knowledge, but the handwriting is clear. And yet there's no syntax. It is clearly written by someone who's living in their own world. You can't quite figure out what she's trying to say, but there it is. So, we can take that in directly and imagine what that might have been like. 

Emerson Narrates, 29:12:
Imagination is a powerful tool, by which I mean we never have access to certainty when accessing these portals. This is the tricky and yet generative force of human communication—we so badly want to connect our experiences to what we encounter, but how we make sense of that information is filtered by our own experiences in the world in addition to social terrains of meaning. This means holistically we live in a world of multiple and at times, conflicting narratives. 

Disability culture lovingly reminds us, always, that friction is not something we need to fear, it can be a way to deepen understanding of the fuller possibility of how people connect. These inscriptions for me were portals to search for and imagine what their worlds might have been like: inner thoughts, feelings, moods; how they connected to their sense of self in a place that I can only imagine felt like the world was crashing in. My searching came from a place of my own experiences with medicine and a deep yearning to connect. This way of making sense of the inscriptions also resonated with Michael Hoenig, who was one of the foundational members of the Disability Advisory Committee, and who provided guidance and feedback on the preservation of the asylum building.

Michael Hoenig, 31:07:
Well, actually I think the writings are. I think those are important for people to realize that these people had thoughts, and they were reduced, unfortunately, to having to scrawl them in whatever way they scrawled them. I don't know if this happened so much with the Poor Farm, and I know that there have been a lot of projects around the country over the years where people that lived in places like the Poor Farm when they died, they were just buried in unmarked graves. And I know that there have been initiatives to put a stone up that puts the name as opposed to number 238, or whatever the number happens to be, to give that person a name. And as somebody who really appreciates history and connections to our past, and just dignity, I have always really appreciated those kinds of efforts.

Emerson Narrates, 31:42: 
Names, indeed, matter; naming someone is a recognition of their dignity. I asked Will if he could speak to his ongoing findings, of residents not as a general descriptor, but to individuals with names, thoughts, and memories. 

Will Thomson, 32:05: 
In another cell, for example, I found Swedish writing on the wall. And if I hadn't noticed that I might not have looked for Swain Larson in the records that we do have. And the 1880 census is edifying in the fact that there were like, a dozen categories, little check marks and notations, that were made in the census that indicated what his issues were. We knew he was 47, for example. He was a cabinet maker. He was adjudged insane in 1878 and removed to the asylum. In 1880, he was largely blind and suffered from seizures as well. But Swain Larson was the only, and it could have been Svin that somebody misspelled in the census record. So, we're not even sure what his first name really was. And yet it does put him down as married. So, his family couldn't deal with him, whatever had happened, we don't know. But that research is going on. We're Joni Hindman, one of the participants in the community committee, has been doing research on a number of these residents. And being a cabinet maker was a pretty respectable trade. And this guy had obviously gotten to a point where he could not care for himself and was put there. But now we know exactly which cell he was in. So, you're one step closer because of research. And those pieces can still continue to be pulled together because we do have that building as a touchstone for the individual lives that passed through there.

Emerson Narrates, 33:57:
I also learned about Rose Flood and Hugh White. 

Will Thomson, 34:03:
Rose Flood is one that comes to mind. She was placed in the asylum in 1860, when she was 24. She was single. She was crippled and illiterate and was still there 20 years later. According to the 1880 census. You're able to track people through the 10-year census intervals and find, oh gosh, they're still here.

There was a guy named Hugh White, who resided at the Poor Farm for almost 37 years. He was described in records as being mild and gentle in good weather and bad. He walked in circles, never more than 10 feet in diameter, six to eight hours a day for an estimated total of 162,000 miles. He wore out so many shoes that the officials eventually taught him to ... the most helpful way to walk was to take off his shoes, because they couldn't afford to keep buying him pairs of shoes, because he kept wearing them out. So, he would take his shoes off at the start of a walk and put them back on when he was finished. In her will, when his mother passed, she requested that Hugh receive a decent burial. So, he was buried in Oakland Cemetery. And that was a step up from some of the residents who passed away in the facility. Because they were taken down the hill to the burying ground, the cemetery that's about a half a mile south of the asylum building.

Emerson Narrates, 35:35:
When you stand in the middle of the asylum building with the south door open, your gaze can linger beyond the plots of marigolds, snapdragons, or okra fields, into the bank of trees on the horizon. You’ll hear more about the cemetery in later chapters—and how the county continues to determine the best way to remember those buried there. One of the people who contributed to those discussions was Dr. Jennifer Mack, who at the time worked in the office of the state archeologist. You’ll also hear more from her in Chapter 4, but here I find myself remembering how she challenged me to rethink stories about “isolation” of residents.

Dr. Jennifer Mack, 36:24:
But what I've learned is that the "inmates" of institutions of poor farms and asylums, they really were not as isolated in life as we on the outside tend to think. For one thing, in Mississippi, surviving correspondence shows that the administration was constantly in contact with the families of the patients. They were giving them status updates, keeping them apprised of health issues, warning when death seemed imminent.

And I imagine that similar things were happening in Johnson County with people who still had families on the outside. I think I mentioned previously the disabled woman who resided at the poor farm from its opening in 1855 until her death 45 years later. She clearly had no family on the outside to visit her, but that doesn't mean that she was alone.

Because any places where humans are put together, a community forms and there are friendships and there are conflicts. But just like on the outside, the idea that life doesn't end with institutionalization, even if you are in that permanently institutionalized population, you still have a life and you still interact with people. And it's clear from news stories collected by the researcher, Joni Hindman that people who were sort of local characters before they ended up at the poor farm, they weren't really forgotten on the outside either.

Their deaths were marked in the newspaper, little biographies appeared. So, in life, I think the poor farm residents were not as isolated as we think of looking back, but certainly where they ended up in death did become isolated and somewhat forgotten.

Emerson Narrates, 38:07:

I will never know—exactly—what it must have felt like to be confined to that wooden asylum structure. Nor will I have access to specific traces of connection between those in the asylum and those on the outside—beyond the writings on the wall. Beyond portals between now and then, those writing on the walls must have believed they were writing to someone… These questions linger with me, still, and fill in the gaps, the space between the administrative records and the felt experience of being here in the 1880s. This is also the place where rumors are born.  

At the end of the day, imagination grounded in empathy is crucial to the task of connecting with the past. It’s asking: what would this have been like? Felt like? But what happens when the available archive cannot render answers to your inquiry? Especially in the context of difficult histories like the poor farm, we want to understand: how could people do this and how did people survive this? 

Professionally, I know that people make decisions based on what they know, and what they know is grounded in the wider social context available to them. And this awareness doesn’t provide much comfort to people who live closer to the experience or reality or even the inherited trauma of psychiatric confinement for those within disability and mad community. Imagination, too, can help us navigate that complexity—a friction that might enable something different to unfold and emerge—and some of that, I believe, might be rooting at the farm today, and we’ll explore that more in later chapters.

In the process of my conversation with Dr. Mack, it became clear that one way people complete gaps in available meaning, is to rely on their own experiences with institutions. Experiences range from direct—we ourselves experienced life inside an institution—or indirect, say, a parent or grandparent in assisted living or a nursing home, or, a sibling, a child. When I first started listening to community members account for stories about county homes or the poor farm, I heard insistence that stories that spoke of stigmatized behavior or unsavory characters were simply “rumors.” 

Rumors emerge from the desire to make meaning where there are few places to guide you. They can flow into conversation in unpredictable ways. But I have become a believer that rumors are part of the story, too; although rumors are not history in the very narrow understanding of that word, they are very much evidence of the capacity and need to understand with the cultural tools and collective meanings we have available to us, and to connect, at times, to understand the roads we may have traveled individually and collectively. And rumors are in some ways the reality of a desire to understand in the gap of documentation. Here’s county recorder Kim Painter.  

Kim Painter, 42:03: 
“When you see the books and you start to look at that and you consider the whole texture and the whole fabric of what it all means, it's a fairly complicated and you can have a lot of different responses emotionally and in other ways to what you see. The actual notes, particularly those of admissions of persons, first of all, what's left I think is an iceberg. We are missing seven-tenths of what we should have is what I believe. Just things weren't kept. Things were lost to history or fire or flood or whatever it might've been. 

Emerson Narrates, 42:43: 

I think Kim would agree with me that until we can have access to a bigger picture—of records or materials related to the different chapters of the farm and county home—we will collectively make meaning with a partial story. And, as we do so, we can also anticipate that story might open and fluctuate and need careful reflection, and that if and when that time comes, it must be done with the lived experience and guidance of those most impacted by the care policies and practices of the past and present. Stories will become less partial and fragmented when we are willing to hold the frictions they create. Friction is a life practice of disability culture and teaches us how to hold complexity in a generative way. 

Beyond the missing archives, though, part of me was also wondering how much those “rumors” (of bad behavior or character by residents, especially in the late 1800s and early 1900s) are based on the echoes of early 20th century social scientists and charity workers, and how they characterized those who needed support, especially over long periods of time. If you remember the phrase “abnormal dependency” from earlier in this chapter, the voices of social reform in this period also played a powerful role in determining who was worthy and who was not, and their knowledge building around this hierarchy continues to shape conversations even today, as the next chapter will take on. What this has meant for me, is that searching for the stories of the people who were here also requires thinking about why they were defined as “social problems” to start. Rumors are part of how we should talk about the shared or collective memory of the historical poor farm and surrounding social service ecosystem, and we can sustain a curiosity that allows us to grapple with a broader context of meaning in conflict.  

I will close this chapter by repeating preservation and restoration can be an emergence story. Too often we otherwise believe that restoration is about a return to an earlier condition, but that is not what I found thinking through what remains of available records and the county’s efforts to preserve and make those accessible to researchers and the broader public. Emergence is possible through restoration, because it is a commitment not only to the people who have passed, but one to the future—the chance to repair not only buildings and soil systems, but our relationships to each other. What if the poor farm as a site of conscious generates the space we need to imagine a world where “discards” are not imaginable, and our needs for care can be supported by community? This is a fundamental question that lives and grows within spaces of disability culture and advocacy, far beyond the vantage point of social services. Here’s Kim Painter again, speaking to the need to preserve it all: 

Kim Painter, 46:38: 

I think it's been an incredibly important effort, and I think many places have just absolutely razed these buildings down to the ground and thereby eliminated any possibility of recovering history, claiming history, whatever, however you'd like to describe it, or just having the conversation about what these places meant to the community and what they were and what the lives were like there. 

I think that does great credit to Johnson County, and I think it is a way to honor the people who lived there. I would say the people who worked there and who tried to provide the service, we were at a specific point in time in our approaches to health, mental illness, disability were not what we would want today, but there were people who were trying very hard. It was a beginning place; I guess you could say. It's important to know that and to recognize that for any bad things, for any difficult, negative, harsh things. I'm sure there were some very good things that had happened in some moments that were really important for people that were positive as well. I think this kind of an effort helps to preserve all of that.

Emerson Narrates, 48:00: 

In the next chapter, we’ll turn closer to how medicine and law helped shape the different pathways to the farm, and ask: why is this medical history—of diagnosis, claims to cure, and therapeutic practice worth remembering now? Until next time… 

[music plays…guitar strums and voice sings: Goodbye to the Prairie, goodbye to the wind. I’m leaving on the next train that’s coming ‘round the bend. Don’t matter where I’m goin, ‘cause I know where I’ve been…]