Farmers of the Poor

[Chris_]

For all the faults of the poorhouse, the system it replaced was perceived to be even worse. In post-Revolution America, if you were poor, you could be "farmed out" at public auction to the lowest bidder.

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, an influx of paupers could wreck a town's finances. The first line of defense was "warning out"—a Colonial-era formality used to restrict a town's liability for the maintenance of the poor. A family moving into town would be warned by the constable within a few weeks or months to leave. Many of those warned out were respectable people who fully intended to settle and contribute to the community. But if any fell on hard times, a record of their having been warned out could absolve the town of any duty to provide support.

If an indigent person was found to have settlement in the town, relief might be provided for in the spring—often in early May—at a public vendue or "outcry." The New England Method called for a town's paupers to be auctioned off, individually or as a group, to whoever would pledge to maintain them by the week or the year for the lowest rate.

The event was "a ceremony much resembling the slave auctions of the South, with this difference, if a slave was very old and feeble, he sold at a low figure, while a pauper of the same class sold at a high figure." Able-bodied paupers were sold cheap and worked hard. "Persons were sometimes bid off as low as from twelve to fifteen cents a week," one Maine historian commented in 1886. "Wonderful people some of the forefathers must have been."

In Dublin, New Hampshire, "[t]he experiment was first tried in 1795, and was so successful that the practice was continued, certainly till 1822."

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[Eupher]

Good luck getting that system back in place these days.

We've become a nation of pussies. Can't force those who are able-bodied to sing for their supper - that wouldn't be the progressive way, now would it?

I love the idea, but it just wouldn't happen again.

[ColonialMarine0431]

I don't think I'd go THAT far.