Poor Farms

[Argie's Wife]

Just learned the other night that Alton had a poor farm.

I attended a presentation at the Gilman Library here in Alton that was given by a wonderful woman by the name of Barbara Gilman. She did a great job talking about some of the old homes here in Alton and the families (aka "Alton Royalty") that founded the town. There were over 60 people in attendance - better than our Deliberative Sessions, I should say.

After her talk, I approached her with some questions about some of my family but before I got a chance to talk with her, someone came up to ask if she had information about the Town Poor Farm, as she and her husband lived in the house that used to be the poor farm.

Hot dang. That was a neat discovery. I love stuff like this!

The house is on Rines Road in East Alton and was built in the 1770's. I'm working on getting info about the house, as I believe it wasn't built first for the Poor Farm but I could be wrong. It was originally on 250 acres of land. The town sold it to Charles Rines in 1876 and he divided it up quite a bit, as I'm sure you can imagine. The house and barn today is breathtaking and seems to be in good shape (at least from a distance.) But I love old farm houses - this is a gem!

I have found several census' that list the dwellers of the place (1850, 1860, 1870) and include the position of "Overseer of The Poor" which, as I understand it, was an elected position. I have census from that area from 1790 and 1780 but unfortunately those only list the men of the house and there's no markings on the documents that allow me to really tell who was a resident or overseer. I'm still digging and hoping to hit pay dirt soon via a list of election results or a budget line item or a report of the overseer of the poor - so many options.

Anyhow, I thought I'd post about my findings here.

Any of the other LR towns that had poor farms and still have the old building standing?

By the way - there's very little (almost none!) info about the poor farms of Belknap County on the web. Perhaps this thread could be fodder for that, as there is a website dedicated to the poor farms of NH.