FARM BOUND: LANDSCAPES OF SELF-SUFFICIENCY, DEPENDENCY, AND PENALITY IN PACIFIC NORTHWEST POOR FARMS

Delaney  McMillan Piper

doi:10.7273/000003355

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, county governments throughout Washington State established poor farms for the provision of the poor and infirm. Poor farms were institutions of poor relief (the poorhouse) and institutions of agricultural production (the county farm). While these institutions were widespread and featured prominently in government operation in their time, their history has been largely forgotten and understudied. Significantly, historians have neglected the agricultural and environmental aspects of the institution’s history. By illuminating themes of environment, labor, and the agricultural economy this thesis offers fresh understandings of the history of the poor farm in the Pacific Northwest region and the United States more broadly. Government officials selected the poor farm because of its long tradition in the United States, but in the Pacific Northwest region the institution took on new significance. This thesis finds that the “agrarian” model of social provision was central to the developmental processes of settler-colonial communities, symbolic of Euro-American’s regional control, and aiding in the transformation of the Puget Lowlands and the Columbian Plateau into productive, agricultural landscapes. While officials imagined the farms would be self-sufficient, their misunderstandings of poverty, cultural stigmas, and policies made it so there was often a shortage of able-bodied laborers. This encouraged officials to utilize prisoners to fulfill their labor needs. In the 1910s, public interest in the farms grew as middle-class taxpayers became interested in addressing poverty and reforming government operations. Writings from this time reveal class-based tensions between the paternalistic, even resentful, perspectives of middle-class visitors to the farm, and the perspectives of poor residents. While broad class-based resistance among the poor never emerged within the farms, residents did not passively accept meager conditions, often advocating for improved conditions and resisting poor treatment. In the 1930s, as the Depression set in and economic stress increased, officials increasingly decided to abandon the agrarian model of welfare. Rather than attribute this solely to the effect of New Deal legislation, this thesis identifies the increasingly tenuous economic viability of farming, during a period of intense agro-industrialization, as a primary contributing factor to the institution’s decline.

FARM BOUND: LANDSCAPES OF SELF-SUFFICIENCY, DEPENDENCY, AND PENALITY IN PACIFIC NORTHWEST POOR FARMS

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