What Happened to Widows in 1900 Who Had No Sons

Two men walked through her kitchen with a list, and every single thing in it had to be written down and given a price. In 1900 an American widow received a third of her husband's estate, and the law called it dower. Not a third to own, but a third to use for as long as she lived. She could not sell it and she could not leave it to anybody, and at her death it went to his children. That was the part the law handled. The part no statute handled at all was who took her in, and on an American farm the land went to the sons and the sons kept the mother. A widow with no sons had a share of a farm that was about to be sold. This is the machinery that stood around her: the 40 days of quarantine, the commissioners who walked the fields on foot to set off her third, the short list of household things nobody could touch, the maintenance clauses that made a son legally enforceable, the daughters' husbands who were obliged to nothing, and the calculation a court performed on the rest of her life before it paid her. It ends with one phrase, written into a great many American wills, that reads as generosity and was not. 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 there is a will in your family from before 1935, find the part about the widow. The phrase is usually in the third or fourth line, and it is very easy to read straight past. Put it in the comments if it is there. More from The Poor Farm: What Farm Families Did With Grandparents Who Could No Longer Work The County Poor Farm: Where America Sent Its Old People America Had No Nursing Homes Until 1935 — Where Did the Old Go? 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.