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."
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.
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.