On December 17, 2024, I gave a Zoom presentation on the Montgomery County Poor Farm and its Almshouse for Montgomery History. Almshouses were in some ways a precursor to the state hospitals for the mentally ill. Some of my ancestors were inmates of almshouses (also known as poor houses) in Connecticut and Rhode Island. This is a video of my talk.
I grew up in the Hungerford neighborhood in the 1960’s. Also we lived on Monroe St. in the late 50’s. People were buried on either side of the dirt road leading to the Poor Farm house. As small kid’s we used to use the freshly dug graves as forts, using a piece of plywood we “borrowed’ from the nearby construction site of the Stoneridge community to cover the grave….instant fort. We would come back the next day and some poor soul would be buried there with a little metal frame holding the name of the person written in ink. After the first rain…..the name was gone…and soon the metal frame was gone as well. These graves were as far up as behind present day Dogwood Park. I remember people being buried well into the 1960’s. There was also the remains of a silo (a round concrete base) along that road.