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[ music playing ] Almost every community had something like that.

WOMAN: A poor farm was designed to provide shelter and food and sometimes health care for people in communities who were destitute.

WOMAN: This is the time before there was such a thing as Social Security and other social programs.

WOMAN: Anyone who could not support themselves, anyone who didn't have a reliable paycheck, anyone who was possibly in a transient labor situation, the county would then refer them to one of these houses.

WOMAN: If you were sick and needed a doctor, they were going to call one and they were going to pay for it.

WOMAN: But there's still a stigma attached to having to go to the poor farm.

It was the last resort.

WOMAN: And it was what you did to take care of your people who couldn't take care of themselves.

[ music playing ] MAN: We just discovered this a couple of weeks ago.

We have maps and tubes in the attic, and I just decided I needed to look through them all to see if there was any more information.

So this mark here is Leper's Grave right there.

NARRATOR: Hidden inside Washington Park's Hoyt Arboretum is a mystery people have been trying to solve for decades: a long-lost grave resting somewhere among the trees.

I think on the map there's a pencil mark that says, like, 375 feet from this spot.

And that's the spot I measured from based on the scale of the map, so we just have to walk 375 feet from here, supposedly.

More than a century ago, the Multnomah County Poor Farm operated in what is now Southwest Portland's Washington Park.

[ people chattering ] The actual poor farm itself, you know, had a much bigger footprint where the zoo is.

And the World Forestry Center area, the main center of the park, is where the actual poor farm buildings were.

[ music playing ] The farm provided housing and care for thousands of needy people who lived and often died there.

According to newspaper accounts, one resident, sometimes called Wong Luey, arrived at Multnomah County's Hillside Poor Farm in 1906.

Believed to have leprosy, county officials isolated him in a small shack away from the main building.

I just imagine it was pretty... pretty lonely.

It's fairly isolated.

I imagine it was very difficult.

It sounds like he had thought that he may be able to return to China.

When he died in 1907, newspapers reported the shack was burned and the body buried in a pauper's grave at the site.

At different times, markers indicated the location, but those are all long gone.

But it's all just guesswork, really, just trying to see.

I feel like everything that we have, between the maps and the descriptions that show up in some of the articles, they all put it in this, like, general area.

Here's "Ah Hung."

Is that the person you're looking for?

The Multnomah County Archives houses some of the rare records for the Hillside Poor Farm, which operated from 1868 to 1911.

Wong Luey doesn't appear to show up on any of the official documents.

Surprisingly little is known about what was once the state's largest poor farm.

There's really not much to document 40 years of pretty important existence.

But sometimes new material is discovered.

A surprise donation, like this one, can provide valuable information.

So this is the scrapbook.

It's a recent accession that we got from a fellow that contacted us and said that he had some records from the Hillside Poor Farm.

I was pretty excited about that because there aren't many records that exist about the Hillside Poor Farm.

This for sure is the superintendent's house here.

I think this is the hospital.

[ music playing ] Multnomah County's Hillside Poor Farm was just one of thousands of relief institutions that once dotted the nation.

Known as poor farms, county hospitals and county homes, they were a refuge for the needy in a time of few social safety nets.

WOMAN: Unless you had community support or a certain amount of wealth, it was very easy to end up in a situation of destitution during this period of time.

Poor farms developed as a kind of American evolution on a British system.

Please, sir, I want some more.

Blimey!

He wants more!

BIRK: I think when we look at the early 19th century, when a lot of poor farms are being developed and built for the first time, there is a belief that people who live there have done something wrong, but I think the way that society viewed poor farms changed over time.

People are starting to recognize that sometimes you can end up poor or sick or alone and vulnerable through nothing that you did.

In the 1840s, the region's first non-Native settlers and fur trappers set up early laws requiring counties to care for their poor.

WOMAN: In the West, in Oregon, it was very unorganized at first.

But it started right away, just like schools did.

Education was important and taking care of people who couldn't take care of themselves was also important.

[ music playing ] When Jackson County started, it was mainly a boom town.

There was a lot of miners looking for gold.

And when people couldn't take care of themselves, people would just find them dead in their cabins.

Before there was even a state, local governments paid doctors to care for the needy.

One of the first was John Beeson.

His experiences in southern Oregon would lead him to write the book A Plea for Indians and become a national advocate for Native American rights.

But in the 1850s, Beeson cared for the sick and dying in his home.

And then John Beeson would apply to the government for reimbursement, and that's how it was handled in the beginning.

What had been a general practice became law in 1854, when the territorial government required counties to take care of their indigent residents.

[ man reads on-screen text ] A commission or judge determined who got help, what type and how much.

Anyone deemed a "rogue" and "vagabond" could be denied relief.

While direct cash payments were usually reserved for the so-called "worthy poor," like widows and veterans, others could end up at a poor farm.

AURAND: The idea behind the poor farm was a means to house impoverished individuals while also recouping some of the cost associated with caring for them.

Sometimes counties built the facilities on working farmland and hired a superintendent to run them.

BIRK: Those people in charge could make or break the experience.

They could be the difference between cleanliness and filth, between good meals and terrible meals, between sometimes physical mistreatment and compassionate care.

So it really did matter.

It mattered who you had in charge.

They're not just for the finances, but also for the care of the residents.

Other times it was cheaper for the county to pay local families to open their homes and be reimbursed for any care they provided.

It was still called a poor farm or sometimes a county home, and the residents were often known as inmates.

WRIGHT: The main caretaker would be a farmer, and he'd have his wife doing the feeding and taking care and all of those things.

AURAND: You could certainly have people who were caring for a number of individuals that was comfortable to them and their household or you could have people who were looking to make the most amount of money from the county taking in more people than they could reasonably afford to feed and clothe and shelter.

In the 1890s, Jackson County's poor farm caretaker made $4.50 a week per person.

A report described the house as small, old, and utterly unsuited for its purpose.

[ man reads on-screen text ] Residents reportedly got all the tobacco they wanted and were listed as satisfied with their care.

But it's impossible to know what residents really thought.

There are almost no personal accounts from the residents themselves, and very few images.

We lose a little bit of the narrative thread from people who lived there but maybe didn't want to talk about it.

They didn't want their families to know they had been there.

They didn't want to think about why they ended up there for a short period of time.

And then some people who lived in poor farms didn't have any family connections at all, so there's no one to remember that person, there's no one to kind of remember why that person lived there or that they were there in the first place.

The Southern Oregon Historical Society in Medford is one of the few repositories of rare poor farm records, going back decades.

These are handwritten registers that give the name of the person, their relatives, if they have any, their age, their complaint.

Gus Newbury ended up being the superintendent of schools and he became a representative for Jackson County.

He was a big deal.

Very handsome man, very dapper.

He ended up at the poor farm.

This is Sebastian Schumpf.

He was from France.

His occupation is a woodturner, and his complaint was a broken arm.

Poor farms took in everyone from unwed mothers and abandoned children to seasonal workers and anyone too sick or injured to care for themselves, including those with disabilities and the mentally ill.

It was mostly old people and white men, but there are, from the records, Chinese, there are Blacks, there are young people-- a widow with four kids-- who are there temporarily.

They just have nowhere else to go.

Most relief institutions are long gone, but a few remnants exist, giving clues to what life was like for residents.

That area down there was the actual farm part of this poor farm.

They had orchards and gardens, and the inmates who had been miners in the Gold Rush days actually would go down to Bear Creek and pan for gold just because that's all they knew how to do.

I don't know if they ever found any, but they kept going every day.

[ music playing ] According to an 1892 report, all but three counties provided some type of relief.

Most used poor farms run by independent contractors, including this home in Lane County, operated by Dr. Benjamin Russell.

AURAND: By all accounts, he treated the people who entered into his home as he would family.

Russell was a Union Army veteran and former prisoner of war.

He and his wife Maggie settled in Thurston as a community doctor.

He was known to travel by horseback to do any sort of medical needs that the community would have, but he was in ill health from his service in the Union Army, and so he was unable to travel as much as he could.

And he was actually really worried about being able to support his family-- he had eight children.

When he asked the county for aid, commissioners offered him a job running a poor farm.

He actually started something that was essentially a clinic for impoverished populations.

Most of the people who came to Russell's house were either ill or elderly.

Many people felt that poor farm residents should work on the farm for their care, but often that wasn't realistic.

What they found out very quickly was that people are coming to a poor farm as a means of last resort, they're coming because they cannot work and sustain themselves outside of the institutional setting.

And if they could work enough to make enough money, they wouldn't be here.

BAXTER: People are human with dignity and should not be forced to work themselves to death or to feel like there's some sort of moral failure just because they're poor.

In the first 20 years of its operation, Multnomah's Hillside Poor Farm helped over 1,500 people.

According to a report, about 1,000 were white males, over 400 residents were Black.

Chinese numbers are not noted, though their names and nationalities are found in the registers.

Among the thousands who came here, many never left.

This is actually one of my favorites in the whole thing, this picture of the cemetery.

There isn't much known about Hillside's graveyards.

These were pauper graves and there are few documents about who ended up here or where exactly they're located.

A cemetery like this, it's kind of interesting to think about the fact that there were a lot of people buried there.

Newspaper accounts indicate bodies from unmarked graves have turned up several times over the decades.

They've found bodies-- contemporarily, they've found bodies on the zoo grounds.

In 1904, an investigation found that poor farm superintendent J.E.

Courtney kept faulty records, sometimes putting several bodies in a single grave, and illegally sold bodies to the University of Oregon Medical School.

The following year, another investigation found the new superintendent also kept bad records and buried five babies in a single unmarked grave.

While in Jackson County, a 1907 investigation found abuse.

WRIGHT: There was usually at least 12 or 13 people in that house, and it's a tiny house.

They were not adequately fed.

They reported in the paper, just "filth."

They gave it scathing reports.

A new county owned and operated farm was built within weeks.

It was a two-story building.

It had a full basement with a furnace in it.

It even had plumbing, which wasn't a standard thing in 1907.

The county hired the Wells family as superintendents, living and working on the farm.

They had a big porch that surrounded the entire building, and most of the pictures that you see of the poor farm, there's people sitting out on that porch.

When William Wells died, his wife Irene took over.

She elicited her family to come help her.

She had hired women, she used the women who came to the poor farm to help cook and do the laundry.

Some people wrote in the paper, "They're hardly poor out there.

They get better fed than I do."

By the turn of the century, Oregon lawmakers saw large institutions as a more cost-effective way to take care of society's most vulnerable residents.

AURAND: At this point, you're kind of leaving the era where it was individualized care provided by a person and moving into this really institutionalized facility to essentially just contain poor populations.

In 1911, Multnomah County closed Hillside Poor Farm in Southwest Portland.

Eventually that land would become Washington Park.

[ music playing ] BAXTER: A chunk of land out in Troutdale wasn't nearly as valuable as a chunk of land sitting up against broadly expanding Portland.

Over 200 residents moved to their new home in Troutdale.

[ music playing ] If it was going to be an institution, it wasn't that bad an institution.

NEWSREEL NARRATOR: An early showcase of Multnomah County was the Multnomah County Farm near Troutdale, Oregon.

It was the largest and grandest poor farm in the state.

It would eventually grow to 345 acres.

A crop of potatoes to be proud of.

BAXTER: And they fed all the people at Edgefield, they fed everybody at the county hospital, they fed everybody at the jails, and they sold surplus for profit.

So, I mean, it was an operation that really worked for folks.

For 70 years, it was home to thousands of people.

One of the most famous residents may have been Frankie Baker.

♪ Frankie and Johnny Were sweethearts ♪ ♪ They had a quarrel One day... ♪ The song "Frankie and Johnny" has been attributed to her life.

In 1899 in St. Louis, she fatally shot her abusive boyfriend.

She was acquitted of murder and eventually ended up in Portland, where she operated a shoeshine business for 14 years and tried to live down the notoriety.

♪ He was a man ♪ ♪ And he was Doing her wrong... ♪ In 1935, she sued over the Mae West/Cary Grant movie "She Done Him Wrong," which featured the ballad.

But she never made any money off the songs, films, or stories about her life.

Frankie ended up at the Multnomah poor farm and later died at the Eastern State Hospital.

The county relief system began to change with the Great Depression.

[ music playing ] BIRK: There are a lot of people coming to the poor farm for the first time before some of the New Deal programs kick into gear.

Counties couldn't keep up with the growing needs.

In Oregon, a state relief committee formed to help overwhelmed counties.

Still, people everywhere struggled.

NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: The Great Depression left millions of able and willing Americans bewildered and jobless.

In 1933, the federal government came to the help of local agencies which had fought a courageous but losing fight against the growing need for relief.

The New Deal set in place a series of laws to address poverty.

It shifts the source of who supports the poor and how that process works.

It moves the burden of expense to the states and the federal government for the very first time.

This Social Security measure gives at least some protection to 30 millions of our citizens who will reap direct benefits through unemployment compensation, through old age-pensions, and through increased services for the protection of children and the prevention of ill health.

The New Deal legislation marked the beginning of the end of poor farms and the long legacy of county-funded relief.

Social Security had a very specific clause in the original legislation that anyone who was going to receive Social Security could not live in a public institution.

And so by the early 1940s, the late 1930s, a lot of counties are closing the institutional part of the poor farm.

Around the country and state, many facilities closed altogether while others transitioned to nursing homes and county hospitals.

So it never gets rid of that need at the local level.

And so counties are always kind of trying to figure out which type of aid, where they might be able to send people.

It ends up being a really complicated process.

A state public welfare commission was established to administer social services.

It included divisions dedicated to medical care and social work.

But while most counties were winding down services, Jackson County improved theirs.

[ music playing ] WRIGHT: In 1949, the county decided to build a new, modern building.

They were flush with money.

It was after the war, and they decided to build better accommodations.

But it changed the character of the poor farm.

There was no porch to sit on, they didn't have group meals anymore.

Their meals were brought to them in their rooms like a hospital.

It operated for decades, and in the 1980s, finally shut down.

But the county retained and used the building until 2020, when the devastating Almeda Fire tore through the community, destroying thousands of homes and buildings, including the old poor farm.

So when they cut it, they'll start to take things out... MAN: As part of the debris removal, the cornerstone plaque survived the fire, and there's a time capsule inside.

No one knew the time capsule existed.

It was finally opened more than 50 years after being placed.

The big surprise will be whether this survived the fire or not.

I don't think there's going to be a gold nugget or anything, but... [ all chuckle ] I'm shocked that it survived the fire that well.

This is a return envelope from the Jackson County Court, and it says, "This contains a ballot calling for special levy to construct the Jackson County Farm Home," of which this cornerstone is part of.

The time capsule also included a letter from a county commissioner who supported updating the poor farm.

"I'm very glad to see the completion of this new building to replace the old wooden one.

We hope it will be the means of helping many who are in need of assistance.

May it serve the public well until something newer and better is needed and built."

[ people chattering indistinctly ] The commissioner's grandchildren happened to be in attendance for the opening and had no idea the letter existed.

He was very community-minded, it sounded like.

He was extremely community-minded.

I remember taking things to people.

Because we had cows, we had sheep, we had chickens, we had a huge garden.

And I remember we'd box stuff and take them, but never made a show of it.

You knew who needed something.

[ voice breaking ] A lot of memories.

Sorry.

A handful of facilities continued to operate for decades.

In the 1960s, Multnomah County's poor farm transitioned to a nursing home and was renamed Edgefield Manor, the first in Oregon to offer physical rehabilitation services.

But with fewer and fewer residents, it became too expensive.

In 1975, the county ordered it to wind down services.

NESBIT: They wanted to tear it down.

We began to look at the building, began to look at the people that were here.

Sharon Nesbit covered the stories for the local newspapers and became invested in saving the history.

Welcome to the Sharon Nesbit Room.

We knew that there were stories here that needed to be told and we should be here collecting them.

The last resident moved out in 1982.

Neglect and vandals left the once grand buildings in disrepair.

But Nesbit and others decided the facility needed saving.

It was a big fight, and they thought I was crazy, which I...

I've been accused of that before.

So it was not a problem.

Eventually, the buildings were placed on the National Register of Historic Places.

That's when the McMenamin brothers bought the property.

I can remember Edgefield when we first did that out in Troutdale, people had driven by that building for 50, 60 years and never been inside, had no idea what it was.

So to open it up to the public, they were fascinated to see what was going on.

NESBIT: There is history everywhere.

And the McMenamins found it and took it and ran with it in every part of the farm.

Today Edgefield retains the character of the poor farm while honoring those who lived, worked and died here.

Lucky was the one who sat out by the gate out there, by the highway, and waved at people.

They named the bar after him.

I think the most important thing to remember is that these individuals are just as much a member of your community as someone who has a job, has a family here.

BIRK: It did become a home for a lot of people.

They relied on it, they got comfortable there, they didn't have anywhere else to go, they didn't have anyone else to rely on.

WRIGHT: It was a good way to give them dignity and a place to call home.

There's more about "Oregon's County Poor Farms" on Oregon Experience online.

To learn more, visit opb.org.

[ music playing ] Leading support for Oregon Experience is provided by... Major support provided by... Additional support provided by... the contributing members of OPB, and viewers like you.