In October 2016, the Franklin County, KS, Rural History Club toured the Franklin County Infirmary in Ottawa. Now a private home, for many years it was the main building on a farm that housed the indigent and infirm of Franklin County. The following article is a guest post from Eldon G. Evans, now of Mission, Kansas, who has a unique perspective of the infirmary: his parents ran the farm for several years, and he lived there as a child.
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The sign, written in stone above the door, calls it the Franklin County Infirmary. It was known in its day by a great number of other names. It was called: the county home, the poor house, the old folks’ home, and the county farm. The most common name for it was the county farm. Even the records of the county commissioners of the day call it the county farm. To me it had another name in my youth. It was home.
