Montague County Poor Farm
Montague, Montague County, Texas
Marker Inscription
MONTAGUE COUNTY POOR FARM ON MARCH 15, 1888, MONTAGUE COUNTY JUDGE GRIFFIN FORD OVERSAW THE PURCHASE OF A PLOT OF LAND ABOUT ONE MILE EAST OF THE TOWN OF MONTAGUE TO BE USED AS THE COUNTY’S POOR FARM. THE LAND WAS RENTED FOR THREE DOLLARS AN ACRE WITH THE UNDERSTANDING THAT THE RENTER COULD KEEP ABLE-BODIED NEEDY AS FARMHANDS. J. M. MARTIN WON THE FIRST BID, ACCEPTING $10.40 PER PERSON PER MONTH TO BE THE FARM’S FIRST OPERATOR. MARTIN WOULD FURNISH FOOD, BEDDING, CLOTHING, MEDICAL EXPENSES AND THOSE ASSOCIATED WITH BURIALS. THE 1887-88 ANNUAL REPORT OF THE STATE’S AGRICULTURAL BUREAU LISTED 16 PAUPERS BEING HOUSED AT THE MONTAGUE COUNTY POOR FARM. THE FARM WAS MOVED IN 1899 TO 320 ACRES WEST OF MONTAGUE. A NINE ROOM “BIG HOUSE” WAS BUILT FOR A RESIDENCE AND A NEW WATER WELL WAS DUG. WITH THE LARGER LOCATION AND HOUSING, THE 1900 U.S. CENSUS LISTED 21 INDIGENTS LIVING AT THE POOR FARM. IN NOVEMBER OF 1934, THE COMMISSIONERS COURT ALLOWED THE BROCK FAMILY TO MOVE THEIR HOUSE TO THE POOR FARM, LEAVING THEIR HOME TO BE COUNTY PROPERTY. THIS WOULD BE THE THIRD DWELLING USED AT THE POOR FARM. LAND WAS ALSO RENTED OUT TO FARMERS WHO WISHED TO PLANT CROPS THERE AND THE COUNTY SOLD ITS CATTLE HERD. IN 1935, THE FEDERAL WORKS PROGRESS ADMINISTRATION (WPA) ESTABLISHED A PROJECT TO PRODUCE GARMENTS FOR FAMILIES IN NEED. MONTAGUE COUNTY AND TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY CAME TO AN AGREEMENT IN 1938 TO LEASE 56 ACRES FOR THE GRAPE EXPERIMENT AND HORTICULTURAL RESEARCH STATION IN MONTAGUE. DECEMBER 1939 SAW THE END OF THE COUNTY’S POOR FARM. THROUGH THIS SIGNIFICANT INSTITUTION, MONTAGUE COUNTY MET THE NEEDS OF ITS DISADVANTAGED CITIZENS FOR MORE THAN 50 YEARS. (2012)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In 1888 Montague County established a poor farm east of town, renting land to an operator who housed and fed the needy in exchange for their labor; its first year listed sixteen paupers. Moved to a larger tract in 1899, it grew a "big house" for residents and, by the 1930s, hosted a WPA garment project and a Texas A&M horticultural research station. The county closed the institution in December 1939 after more than fifty years of caring for its poor.
Why it matters
The poor farm records how rural American counties met the needs of their destitute before the modern welfare state, and how New Deal programs reshaped that care.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, rural counties across America carried the weight of caring for their poor almost entirely on their own. There was no Social Security, no federal safety net, no unemployment insurance. When age, illness, disability, or plain bad luck left a person unable to feed themselves, the county became the caretaker of last resort — and the most common form that care took was the "poor farm."
Montague County sat in the northern reaches of Texas, a landscape of working farms and ranches where a hard season could ruin a family. When the county judge oversaw the purchase of land for a poor farm in the spring of 1888, he was doing what county governments everywhere were doing: turning open acreage into an institution that could house, feed, and, wherever possible, put to work the people who had nowhere else to go.
The idea behind it was as much economic as it was charitable. The able-bodied among the residents were expected to help work the land, offsetting the cost of their own keep. It was relief blended with labor — a philosophy of self-sufficiency that ran deep in rural America and shaped how the poor were treated for generations.
People & events
The story begins with a county judge who, in March of 1888, arranged the purchase of a plot about a mile east of the town of Montague. The arrangement was practical to the point of bluntness: the land was rented out cheaply, with the understanding that the renter could keep the needy who were fit for work as farmhands. The first operator won the job by bid, agreeing to a fixed sum per person each month, out of which he was to furnish food, bedding, clothing, medical care, and even burial costs. That single line — that burials were part of the contract — tells you plainly how final a place this could be for those who entered it.
In its very first year, a state agricultural report counted sixteen people living at the farm. As the need grew, so did the institution. In 1899 it moved to a much larger tract west of town, where a nine-room residence known as the "big house" was built and a new well dug. By the 1900 census, the population had risen to twenty-one.
The twentieth century reshaped the place in ways its founders could never have imagined. In the mid-1930s the federal government's Works Progress Administration set up a project there to produce garments for families in need, and by the end of the decade part of the land had been leased for agricultural and horticultural research. In December of 1939, after more than fifty years, the county closed the poor farm for good.
Its place in the American story
The Montague County Poor Farm is a local chapter of a story that played out in nearly every county in the United States. Before the modern welfare state, the poor farm — sometimes called the poorhouse or county farm — was the dominant institution for what was then called "indoor relief." To understand one is to understand how an entire nation cared for its most vulnerable citizens for well over a century.
The timing of the farm's final years is no accident. The arrival of a federal work-relief program on the property in the mid-1930s, and the closure of the institution at the end of the decade, bracket one of the great turning points in American history. The New Deal, and especially the Social Security Act of 1935, began shifting the burden of caring for the elderly and the destitute from the local county farm to the federal government. As those national programs took hold, the poor farm as an institution faded across the country — and this one faded with it.
What survives here is a record of an older answer to a question every society must face: what do we owe the people who cannot provide for themselves? For more than fifty years, the answer in this corner of Texas was a working farm and a big house on the prairie.
If you visit
Come to this spot expecting quiet rather than spectacle. This was never a monument in its own day — it was a working institution meant to be useful, not admired — and the land around Montague still carries that unhurried, agricultural feel.
Stand for a moment and picture the layout the marker describes: the residence that housed a couple dozen people, the well that watered them, the fields worked partly by the residents themselves. Let the number sink in — sixteen souls in the first year, then twenty-one — and consider that for each of them, this was home, and for some it was the last home they knew.
A visit here rewards the traveler who likes history that isn't loud. Fold it into a broader loop through north Texas ranch and farm country, and let it be the stop where you slow down and think about the ordinary people who never made the history books — the poor of a rural county, and the neighbors who, imperfectly, tried to look after them.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Griffin Ford
- · J. M. Martin
Related events
- · Works Progress Administration garment project
Themes & tags
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