A New Pen Pal!

 “ . . . it was the poor caring for the poor that rescued them from total chaos.” – Toby Hightower

My home county in Kentucky, Trigg, is bordered on the east by Christian County; Christian County is bordered to its east by Todd County. Christian is the most populous of the three, by a factor of five or more.  Neither Trigg nor Todd counties have a daily paper, Christian does. Based in the county seat of Hopkinsville, the "Kentucky New Era" serves as a regional daily paper.

My mother and father still reside in Trigg County and like most really old people they still read actual paper newspapers. Mom was doing this very thing last week when she came across an article that she knew I would be interested in. So she clipped it out, pulled out an old-fashioned, #10 standard business envelope, sealed it up, wrote my street address on the front of it, (by hand!) stuck one of the world’s few remaining postage stamps on it and dropped it off at something called a ‘post office’.

When I called her dutifully on Mother’s day she mentioned that she had done this. She didn’t say a lot about it other than I’d find it interesting.

It arrived on Monday. Twenty four hours later I had a new pen pal.

It was actually two articles, one by the staff writer Jennifer P. Brown (“Writer’s quiet life thrives on contact, May 12, 2012) and “Annals of poor help explain mother’s role” by Toby Hightower.

Ms. Brown wrote kindly and respectfully about Mr. Hightower, stating that he recently moved to Indiana, is 91 years old and a full time caretaker for his Alzheimer-stricken wife, Iona. He is also a regular, twice-weekly columnist for The New Era, as well as a contributor to the weekly "Todd County Standard". He is a retired teacher and served in World War II. (Salute!) But that wasn’t the part that fascinated me most, it was this part, from Mr. Hightower’s own column: “From 1927 through 1933, my father was the keeper of the Todd County Poor Farm.”

My mother was right. I was very interested.

For those of you who have known me for a while, you will recall that a few years ago I developed an interest in the poor farm system of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. I had located the farm site here in Jefferson County, Mo, visited it, stood in the overgrown, untended and unmarked cemetery. (which actually was the seed for my interest in visiting cemeteries as a hobby/contributor to findagrave.com) I contacted the local historical society and found out as much as I could, which wasn’t a whole lot. I even wrote a blog post about it on this site.

I’d stated that I was going to write something, a novel maybe, or a series of essays/stories on the subject. I did in fact start several chapters of a fictional work based on the life and experiences of a young girl and her helpless/emotionally incapacitated mother on a poor farm in the 1880’s.

Several attempts.

The problem was in the details. I knew the raw facts, that most counties in the U.S. had established the farms beginning just before the Civil War, and that most were closed down after other welfare systems came into being in the 1930’s and 40’s. I had names, census data, and a few clippings from archived newspapers across the country. But that was about it.

When it came time for my characters to do normal, everyday things, I came up empty. Questions far outnumbered data. Records of the era are all but gone in floods, fires and neglect. Very few survivors of the farms can be found alive. Most of the farms themselves no longer exist, except a few that evolved into asylums and nursing homes.

So the work dried up. I occasionally tried to fill in the gaps, but some were just too big. Names and dates were nice, but they spoke so little about the actual lives involved. And since I wanted to reanimate their lives in story form, not in some cold, statistical documentary, I was unable to go further without simply making stuff up. If I’m going to make stuff up to tell a story, I’d just as soon have space ships and time travel, it would appeal to a wider audience.

So I sent an email to Mr. Hightower. I told him about my interest and asked him, politely, for recollections, anecdotes and observations.

To my surprise, he was not only agreeable, but very forthcoming. He was a child when his father was appointed superintendent, around seven years old, but he lived on the farm for the next seven formative and impressionable years.

He replied: “I am so glad to find someone who is interested in those poor people who fell under had times and wound up in poor houses.  I spent seven years of my childhood in close contact with such people and I have several stories that I will tell you as times goes by. I was seven (1927) when my father became supt  of the poor farm and the number of residents was around twenty-five but the depression which started in 1929 caused that number to double.”

He continued:

“I will tell you a few stories of individuals and tonight I will feature an old lady in her seventies who was active in the cooking operation by her own choice.

Mary Mays was an intelligent widow with a son who was mentally handicapped.  Mary and her sister had both fallen on hard times through long illnesses and deaths of their husbands.

The two sisters and the handicapped son were assigned to a small cabin but they took in an eight year old orphan girl and mothered her tenderly. They kept the cabin scrupulously clean and Mary was the clear leader of the little unit.

One day Mary lost her most prized possession--her wedding ring- and was almost totally devastated.  A young Black man, Charlie Key, who was a quite ill resident, figured that she might have lost it in the dish water which had wound up in pig slop and he carefully sifted through gallons of slop and found the ring.

Mom had only a fifth grade education but she knew a little about leadership and encouragement. She baked some simple cakes and held a little celebration of the finding of Mary's ring”

 Wow.

He encouraged me to ask specific questions, which I did.

“1. Were there 'typical' meals? Special meals? Hog butchering, etc.? How about during the dead of winter?
2. What sort of clothing was available? Bedding?
3. How frequent/infrequent were visits from church or charitable organizations? Sunday services?
4. Was there schooling for the children?
5. How much involvement, if any, was there with the local law enforcement?
6. Were the residents in Todd County segregated by gender/race/affliction?”

Plus a few more.

And by the next day, the answers started flowing in. I’ll not print them all here, but though none of it was really alarming, it was all very real and human. We spoke of human nature, of the peculiar but essential spirit that enables people to rise above the starkest adversity and seek, or if necessary, create a society, a family, an order amidst disorder, regardless of how miserable and bleak.

 In one exchange he closed: “Looking back, I am unable to see how my parents managed, but I realize that it was the poor caring for the poor that rescued them from total chaos.”

Though this largely unilateral information exchange is still very young, I have already learned a lot, I’ve been recharged. Something will become of this. 

  This welfare system, with all it's warts and wrinkles stood as the national standard for nearly a hundred years. It describes the treatment of the most helpless among us. It should serve, for bad or good, as an example of that which has been tried. This is certainly history that, if forgotten, we're certain to repeat.
 Times were mostly hard for our ancestors, few safety nets, tough conditions, rugged souls. Yet as a young, immature society we still cared enough to try something, to do something, to care for those that could not care for themselves. And they were people, real people, hundreds of thousands of them. Sure, we hear about the cowboys, the railroad barons, the pioneers and founders, but what about the downtrodden, the forgotten? They too had lives, loves, joys and fears. Their lives were worth no less to them than ours are to us. These people knew struggle and adversity that would crumple most of us here and now. How did they get by? What got them up in the morning? What about their hopes and dreams? How do you sit around and just simply wait for your cheap (lowest bidder) pine box to be lowered into a forever unmarked grave, with no one you ever knew in attendance other than those other pathetic souls in the very same situation, to grieve over your loss?
And most importantly, what gave them joy?