The Poor Farm of Nottingham, NH

The house would be overseen by a man who would "manage to best of his ability" the farm. "He shall have the power to cause all Paupers that may become inmates of the farm labour according to their best abilities, and shall punish these disobedient and obstinate Paupers who can, but refuse to do as they are directed.

- Monday April 9, 1838, Town of Nottingham Bylaws & Regulations 

adopted in reference to the newly purchased Town Poor Farm.

Our introduction to the Poor Farm of Nottingham began with an afternoon stroll through the South Side Cemetery, an activity we find ourselves doing quite often when driving with no particular destination. Cemeteries, especially the older ones, can be a plethora of both beauty and local history, and although this one was unremarkable of any extravagant monuments we found one curious stone in the back left corner that simply read "In Memoriam". It stood near several unmarked graves, but despite our poking around we found no further information and left the cemetery having added another item to our to-do list - figuring out who or what was being memorialized here.

We reached out to the Nottingham Historical Society for answers, and if you've never spoken to anyone at your own local historical society I encourage you to take the opportunity if it ever arises. In 100% of my experience these are folks eager to offer you their time and resources and are truly appreciative of your interest in local history. I exchanged several emails with a volunteer named Leanne who not only replied with details of the memorial, but sent newspaper articles and meeting minutes from their archives as additional resources to its story. The stone was erected for residents of the town's former Poor Farm, and a timeline of its history is as follows:

The first motion to establish a poor house, or in this case a poor farm, was voted for on March 8, 1836. The motion was defeated, but two years later on March 13th a poor farm was again voted for, and this time the purchase of an existing farm was approved for its establishment. In a sign of how drastically different these times were, among the stipulations of how it should operate was that the farm must be overseen by "A suitable and desirable man who has a wife." 

The idea behind the farm was to give poor or vagrant people work to do in exchange for a place to live. An average year might see a half dozen or more people living there, such as in 1849 when 8 "paupers" were cared for and the farm was running so smoothly that the annual review resulted in no changes to its operation. But not all residents were there voluntarily. It was also a house of correction wherein "any one who through idleness and bad habits is unwilling or unable to support his wife and family so that they are town charges for forty-eight hours or more shall be imprisoned." In other words, if your family ended up on the 1800's version of welfare due to your own laziness, you were sent to the Poor Farm to work. There was no tolerance for deadbeat dads two-hundred years ago.

On paper a poor farm might seem like a great idea, but it had its share of detractors who repeatedly tried to shut it down. Perhaps unhappy with their taxes going to support the poor, or perhaps thinking the county's poor farm would be a more efficient solution than the town's, in 1843, 67 Nottingham residents - the required "sixth part of the town voters," - called for a special meeting to disband it. The farm survived this challenge but with it came the stipulation that they keep detailed records of each person living there and whether they worked to earn their keep, and that these records would be printed and distributed to voters within the town.

Under this scrutiny the farm continued to run for three more decades, but at a special meeting on March 29, 1872 a vote was finally passed to sell the farm and all its property, thereby shutting it down. 150 years later the house is still standing and in fact is occupied as a private residence. We gave it a drive-by one afternoon but it was set too far back from the road to get a picture of without crossing the line into creepersville.

34 years of housing vagrants saw many deaths occur at the farm, and since many of these residents had no family to claim them they were buried right there on the property. There they remained until the town had the bodies exhumed and moved to the South Side Cemetery in 1910, and this motion was passed to erect a monument in their honor.

But who was removed from the farm will forever remain a mystery, as by the time they were dug up no records existed to identify any of the bodies. They are the remains of the unknown, residents of a time unimaginable to most of us walking around with computers in our pockets today, and they are remembered with a simple and nondescript stone that is perhaps symbolic of the lives each of them lived.

Further Reading:

Concord Monitor - What if the poor were sent to work on town-owned farms? They were, and it wasn’t pretty

https://www.concordmonitor.com/poor-houses-and-town-firms-chichester-nh-historical-society-3582343

Piper Cherokee Wreckage on Saddleback Mountain

April 10, 2020

On May 28th, 1973, pilot George Delmar left West Haven Vermont on a flight bound for Rutland airport, also in Vermont. Following a previously failed departure from a nearby grassy field, his single engine airplane had suffered wing and propeller damage that he planned to have fixed in Rutland. Bad weather forced him to radio ahead and say he was instead turning for "home" - where Delmar lived in Walpole Massachusetts - but he never arrived and by the next morning a search had begun for his small, yellow and white airplane.

The Burlington Free Press - Wed May 30, 1973

Over the next five days, 25 airplanes and a privately owned helicopter made 113 sorties in an effort to find Delmar's plane, all without success. Because Delmar had not filed a flight plan for his detour, Aeronautics Commissioner Charles Miel said that searchers could not focus on a specific route and therefore were searching "all of southern Vermont". After five days without any leads, the search was called off.

The Burlington Free Press - Mon Jun 4, 1973

It wouldn't be until five months later that a group of hikers from the University of New Hampshire would locate Delmar's crumpled airplane in a "particularly inaccessible spot" of Saddleback Mountain, in the neighboring state of New Hampshire. The students blazed their path back to Route 4 in Northwood and called authorities with the location of the wreck.

The Portsmouth Herald - Tue Oct 23 1973

Delmar was a 25-year old race car driver who had flown to New Haven to participate in weekend races, but having no more than 50 hours of flight experience and holding just a student's pilot license, he wasn't trained in blind flying and therefore unqualified to fly in bad weather, factors that turned fatal when combined with the prior damage done to his aircraft. His body was finally recovered and laid to reset, however, as with many aircraft that have crashed within our mountains, the wreckage of the plane was left in the woods where it fell. Retrieving a body from a location such as this is hard enough in itself - retrieving the entire plane is often just not practical.

45 years after this tragedy we hiked to see Delmar's plane, and it looked much like I imagine it did when it crashed back in 1973. As it was described at the time, this spot is not one you're apt to just stumble across, and being so hidden from the public it seems to have only been touched by nature, not by any misguided souvenir seekers. Unfortunately that does happen at sites like this, but the only disruption here was this pair of trees that had fallen onto the plane.

Although crumpled, one side of the plane was still recognizable for what it used to be. The other side was a shredded pile of metal, and my belief is that this is where it was pried apart to extract Delmar's body. 

A few years had passed when in April of 2020 we made a return hike, and the only thing that seemed to have changed was that the downed trees were a little more rotted. A lot more rotted, in fact, enough to where between the combined muscle of our family we were able to lift them up and toss them aside, a feat that had my teenage daughter feeling pretty good about herself. 

And after cleaning the brush and debris off the plane my wife and I felt pretty good too, in that perhaps we restored just a small amount of dignity to the place that has now become George Delmar's memorial.

* Thank you to our friends at wermudfun for introducing us to this site and for all their extensive research.

* George Delmar, 1972