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
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