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Ine iarm had tour cabins, the overseers house, barns and outbuildings. The cabins were all doubles with an upstairs and two rooms below. The paupers shared the quarters. “There weren’t many families. Sometimes we’d have a mother alone with her children but most of the time, the people were elderly. I don’t remember a complete family—with mother and father—coming the eight years we were there,” said Mrs. Woodward.
The cabins lacked bathroom and kitchen facilities. Mrs. Woodward did all the cooking in her kitchen and then the poor farm’s residents took their plates back to the cabins. “They ate just like we ate. I fixed the same thing for everybody.”
Much of the food was raised on the farm’s 300 acres. There was a huge vegetable garden worked by Mrs. Woodward and people from the poor farm who were physically able to help her. The beans, tomatoes, squash, peas and other vegetables were canned along with fruit from the orchard. Potatoes and onions were stored in the root cellar. Every year, Mr. Woodward and the “year man” who helped him on the place butchered the 14 or so hogs they’d raise. They tended the cattle, sheep and horses on the 300 acres and grew hay and corn.
Mrs. Woodward milked the eight cows that provided the farm with dairy products, then skimmed and churned the milk. ‘We didn’t have refrigeration. We had a spring and a spring box,” she recalled.
The Woodwards had a flock of laying hens that kept the farm in eggs. “When we sold the extras at the store, the county got half and we got half,” he remembered. Old chickens were killed and plucked and tossed in the pot. “We never had store-bought chicken. It was unheard of,” Mrs. Woodward added.
The washing for the poor farm and its people was done on a board by the overseer’s wife and anyone fit enough to help her. White clothes were boiled. She baked all the bread with flour from Fletcher’s Mill and made soap every fall from meat scraps and lye, enough to carry them through the season.
“Some of the people were capable of starting a fire in their cabin in the mornings. Some you had to do it for them,” Mrs. Woodward continued.
The Woodwards nursed the poor when they were sick “Dr. Snead would do the doctorin’. Dr. Smith before him,” Mr. Woodward added.
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