Kim Quintal stands inside a building in Yadkin County that was once known as "the crazy house." It was part of the poorhouse system in North Carolina. (Journal Photo by David Rolfe)
Posted on 10/20/2007 1:01:56 PM PDT by Libloather
Roots of Care: Investigation of family tree, finds that ancestor lived in 'alms house'
By Sherry Youngquist
JOURNAL REPORTER
Saturday, October 20, 2007
Kim Quintal stands inside a building in Yadkin County that was once known as "the crazy house." It was part of the poorhouse system in North Carolina. (Journal Photo by David Rolfe)
YADKINVILLE - Off a dirt road, not far from the county seat, there is a small frame building in a field.
Walk closer and you see the bars over the windows.
Inside, handmade, crudely cut lattice separates stalls where people were once shut away.
People in Yadkin County called it “the crazy house.”
It’s one of the few buildings left from a haunting era, a time in North Carolina when the poor, the disabled, the mentally ill, the elderly and the orphaned had one thing in common-the poorhouse.
“These were places where local taxes paid for these people, the people who weren’t taken care of,” said Charles Bolton, the head of the history department and a professor at UNC Greensboro. “They had some kind of mental problems. They were orphaned, or they were impoverished.”
The county home evolved into today’s complex state system of human services, Bolton said. Although some poorhouses in rural counties such as Yadkin remained open until the 1950s, most were replaced early in the 20th century with federal- and state-government programs, including Social Security, publicly financed nursing homes, the mental-health system and child-protective services.
Kim Quintal, a graduate student in English, stumbled upon the crazy house outside Yadkinville after researching her family tree. She discovered that her great-great-great-grandfather had lived on the poorhouse farm that once included a large dormitory for orphans and others not put away in the crazy house. She was puzzled, so she began to dig, to look for answers. Why was he there? How were people who lived at the poorhouses treated?
“The first thing I felt was shock. Then I felt shame. I thought, ‘Oh, my God, why would my family be at the poorhouse?” said Quintal, 51, of Winston-Salem.
“But it was very common. It was the only form of social services. There are just so many strange stories.”
This year, she began to work with filmmaker Rex Miller to make a documentary based on her research. The Poorhouse will tell the story of the poorhouse farm in Yadkin County and those of other poorhouses across North Carolina. It’s currently a work-in-progress. A screening of the film’s trailer is scheduled for 6:30 p.m. Oct. 30 inside the Yadkin County Human Services Building in the commissioners’ meeting room. A discussion on the history of poorhouses in North Carolina will also be held.
The goal is to increase public understanding about how the poor were cared for in the past and to encourage dialogue about how we might do a better job today. Quintal has received about $2,000 in grant money from the N.C. Humanities Council to pursue the project and is looking for more money to finish the film.
The poorhouse concept comes from old English law that basically said that it was the community’s duty to take care of a certain segment of the poor, Bolton said.
In 1785, North Carolina passed a law that allowed counties around the state to establish poorhouses.
“It was a localized thing,” Bolton said. “It was much more of a personal system than what we know today. The conditions varied.”
The residents were sometimes low-level criminals, widows, the elderly, even people who once held jobs or had some sort of trade or skill.
There were many children who grew up in the poorhouses.
Around 1900, Protestant churches across North Carolina began to open children’s homes to help with their care.
“At that time, there were large families. Parents were sometimes unable to take care of children because of fiscal woes. There were a variety of infirmities that affected families back then,” said George Bryan, the president of The Children’s Home in Winston-Salem, which was opened in 1909. “If the father was the breadwinner and died, then that threw the family into economic woes.”
It’s difficult to trace exactly what led some families to the homes.
Quintal’s great-great-great-grandfather was a shoemaker. She was looking for his name in the 1880 census and next to it was listed “alms house.” She knows that he had three sons who joined the Confederacy on the same day and then within a year abandoned their posts and took an oath of allegiance to the Union. A fourth son was listed as a mulatto, and family members believe that he was murdered, rolled into a bonfire one late night. His daughter, who would have been Quintal’s great-great-grandmother, was raped and had an illegitimate son. She later married. The baby boy became Quintal’s great-grandfather.
“She had him, and he is the one I am descended from,” Quintal said. “She married and had several children. At the time, her father was in the alms house. She would have been married by then and had several children. It was so shocking.”
Quintal also found the story of a man who was in the poorhouse in Yadkin as an orphan. His father died in the Civil War and his mother died when he was a toddler. The boy grew up and later moved to Iowa and became a successful business man and state senator. He has since died.
She has also helped find a pauper’s cemetery about a quarter-mile behind the Yadkin crazy house. The graves are marked only with field stones. No one knows how many graves are there. But some believe that as many as 200 men, women and children were buried there.
Quintal’s great-great-great-grandfather died at the Yadkin poorhouse, according to the Yadkin Pauper Book, which she found in Raleigh at the state archives.
“They just made some comments … he had died,” she said.
In 1936, 86 counties had homes for the poor. What’s left today are a scattering of buildings associated with the poorhouses. Some counties sold the properties years ago. Some are no longer standing.
Winston-Salem’s last poorhouse, which became the county home in the late 1800s, was at the Sciworks property. Part of that building became Sciworks, Quintal said.
In Surry County, the county home is used today for a drug- and alcohol-abuse residential-treatment center. In Yadkin, only the crazy house and the barn remain on the county-home property, which was bought years ago by a family, then sold to another family. The poorhouse in Stokes County burned years ago.
Miller, the filmmaker who began collaborating with Quintal earlier this year, is fascinated by the poorhouse history.
“I’m intrigued by Southern gothic. This has a gothic twist to it,” said Miller, of Wilmington. “It’s a tiny little room in the middle of a field, and you’re locked away in it.”
good qustion
Bring back Eloise!
The syntax is a bit ambiguous--her great-great-grandmother was probably the sister of the three Confederate soldiers and the "mulatto" who was murdered, but it could be read to mean that her great-great-grandmother was the daughter of the "mulatto."
The poor houses were better.
Today’s society has lost the sense of shame that used to be associated with having to go to the poor house or being on the dole.
Because of that no one worries about getting welfare or tries to get off welfare.
I grew up in Elkhart County Indiana and they still had the “county farm” as late as the ‘60’s and 70’s.
Harvard, MA. has a Poor Farm Road for similar reasons. On this road, just before the Revolutionary War, when this area was considered the wilderness, a British soldier was buried on Poor Farm Road. He’d died in Boston of smallpox, and they buried him as far away from civilization as they could. Harvard is a half hour drive from Lexington and Concord, where the British got their comeuppance on the North Bridge. When you stand on North Bridge or place a handful of wildflowers on that British soldier’s grave on Poor Farm Road, those events seem to have happened yesterday.
Very True
My great great grandparents homesteaded in Grayson County Texas. After searching over a period of three years, I finally found their farm. I already had photos of their graves thanks to the internet. Their farm and the graveyard were turned into the poor farm. I’m not sure when. It’s just west of Sherman Texas. It is now a small sort of languishing subdivision surrounding what must have been the farm pond. Up a dirt road is the cemetery. Around the outside of the cemetery are a bunch of graves of people who died while living at the Poor Farm. They are late 19th and early 20th century. My ancestors, specifically my great great grandparents and no fewer than six of their descendents who predeceased them and their slave are buried in the middle. The day we visited it had been very dry and nothing was growing. Very sad place.
Did they lose it or sell it? There must be records somewhere...
These folks would have been very old or dead by the late 1900s. They settled Grayson county in 1848. They had four sons in the Confederate Army. Three died. They also lost a daughter at age 14 and three grandchildren.
I do know that the first time that the American Red Cross was called to service was in the late 1900s and it was the north Texas drought.
There’s a song, I think Dylan wrote it which makes me think of these folks:
Let us pause in life’s pleasures and count its many tears
While we all sup sorrow with the poor
There’s a song that will linger forever in our ears
Oh, hard times, come again no more.
‘Tis the song, the sign of the weary
Hard times, hard times, come again no more
Many days you have lingered all around my cabin door
Oh hard times, come again no more.
While we seek mirth and beauty and music light and gay
There are frail forms fainting at the door
Though their voices are silent, their pleading looks will say
Oh, hard times, come again no more.
‘Tis the song, the sign of the weary
Hard times, hard times, come again no more
Many days you have lingered all around my cabin door
Oh hard times, come again no more.
There’s a pale drooping maiden who toils her life away
With a worn heart, whose better days are o’er
Though her voice it would be merry, ‘tis sighing all the day
Oh, hard times, come again no more.
‘Tis the song, the sign of the weary
Hard times, hard times, come again no more
Many days you have lingered all around my cabin door
Oh hard times, come again no more.
‘Tis the song, the sign of the weary
Hard times, hard times, come again no more
Many days you have lingered all around my cabin door
Oh hard times, come again no more.
I have an elderly neighbor who grew up on a farm not too far away from the place mentioned in the article. She was part of a large family, although either a brother or sister was lost a few weeks after birth. Those were the days of house call doctors and VERY fresh cow's milk, chicken or frog. It was rough but it did toughen her to put up with today's nonsense. She's a fountain of information about how people survived back then. I'm fascinated by it all.
...it was the north Texas drought.
Did they own any of the land - or were they just surviving anywhere they could?
They did own some of the land. The year we were there was a drought year and I cannot imagine trying to feed a family on that land. My grandmother lived with us when I was growing up. She was born in 1888 in Indian Territory. Her parents moved from Sherman to west central Oklahoma to find a better life after that Texas drought although I cannot imagine how it was any better. My grandmother’s mother lost three babies to what they called milk fever. When the mother became pregnant, it was considered inappropriate to keep nursing the baby and that baby, 18-20 months old, would start to get his/her liquid other places and would, just like they still do in developing countries, die of diarrea. I have a photo of this poor woman, holding my grandmother who was at the time about 18 months old. My great grandmother had already lost two babies and the look in her face and the way she is holding my grandmother tells me that she is afraid of loving this baby too much. She did lose the one after my grandmother. And then, when she thought she had managed to raise three daughters and two sons, her first born son, at age 30, died of a septic tooth. She was never the same.
When I was going through menopause and my first born son was seriously ill, I thought often of this woman. I drew that photo and somehow found the strength to hold on.
I just got an update from my neighbor. She lost FIVE TO SIX very young brothers and sisters because of various illnesses. I can't imagine. These days, that would be considered child abuse. Back then, it was nothing but the latest epidemic that hit families. A few of her brothers and sisters fell to pneumonia. Others may have been affected by a simple cold.
Strength? I always revert back to those who never had running water or indoor plumbing. You want tough? How about traveling across country in a fricken' covered wagon? That hadda suck.
I have always had a soft spot for those who suffered in the past - for the good of the family. Those folks were doing what they had to do to survive. My family has done some of the same.
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