Franklin County Poor Farm System

The following guest article was written by Jo Mazzetta in about 2007 for her English class at Neosho County Community College. Now a medical coder at Ottawa Family Physicians, Jo grew up, and still lives, next door to the Franklin County Poor Farm. Jo also took the photos in this article.

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What I Knew

Pest house

I grew up on a farm east of Ottawa, Kansas. This farm is still owned by my family and I still live there. I have four sisters and they all live there as well. When we were kids, we would get our horses out and go riding, often all day with no particular destination in mind. My dad always told us to stay away from the Johnson Farm. It bordered ours on the west side. Dad told us Mr. Johnson didn’t like little kids. I never found out if he didn’t or not or if my dad was the one he didn’t like. Howard and Vivian Johnson lived on what was the Franklin County Poor Farm. I became interested in this farm when we found out about the unmarked cemetery in the cow pasture and the jail cell on the farm in the barn yard. I couldn’t imagine as a child what a place such as the poor farm could be. Was it a prison or a place for people with no money or family to care for them?

The Franklin County Farm

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.