What Farm Families Did With Grandparents Who Could No Longer Work

A man of seventy pitches hay at the mow, gets half of it up, and stops. There was no retirement on an American farm. No date, no pension, no last day. There was only the morning a man could not get the hay up into the mow any more, and what the household did about it. This is what farm families actually did with grandparents who could no longer work, and the answer is not the poor farm. The great majority of them stayed exactly where they were, and they kept working, because every farm had a ladder of tasks and age simply moved you down it. Ploughing to harrowing. Harrowing to driving the team. Driving the team to mending harness in the barn. Mending harness to shelling beans by the stove. This covers what the old actually did all day, the second farm they ran from the kitchen and the woodshed, the room off the kitchen and the small attached grandfather house built onto the end of Pennsylvania farmhouses, what happened in families that had no farm to hand over, and the law that made adult children liable for their own parents. And it ends with the document that decided all of it, written years in advance, signed, witnessed and recorded at the courthouse, which specified the room, the firewood, the bushels of grain, the pounds of pork, and who would pay for the funeral. The Poor Farm tells the true stories of what happened to old people in America before pensions, nursing homes, Medicare or Social Security existed. Built from county records, admission ledgers, newspapers and the laws themselves. If your family farmed anywhere in America before the 1930s, there may be a support deed in a county deed book with your surname on it. If you have found one, or you have a story from your own family, put it in the comments. New stories every week. Some visuals are illustrated recreations, used where no historical images exist. They are intended to illustrate events, not to depict exact likenesses.