Lives lived, and lost, at the Kittery Town Forest

Kittery purchased the land for the Town Forest, once known as the Poor Farm, in 1820.  An 1852 Auditors report (the oldest I've uncovered) mentions the Almshouse.  Since the original purchase included a house and a barn, the town was probably using it as an almshouse for many years prior to 1852.

Back in 1820, in Kittery, Maine, the town purchased the original 13-acre plot that became the Town Farm or Poor Farm.

Sometimes when I walk in Kittery’s 72-acre Town Forest, I wonder what became of Ella Hill and her girl Annie. From 1891 to about 1897, Ella and Annie lived here at the Town Farm, or Poor Farm. In 1891, the town spent $2 to move Ella and two children to the almshouse. She arrived with an infant son, Fred, in her arms. He died on May 22 that year and probably dwells in an unmarked grave nearby.

Ella had another son, John, born around 1878 when she was 20.  The 1880 census tells us that she and two-year-old John lived with Rachael Fernald and worked as a domestic servant. Ella’s father, John Hill, a farmer, died in 1880, so she perhaps went to live with and work at the Fernalds  to keep body and soul together for herself and her baby.  No husband is mentioned in the scant records I’ve found that document Ella’s life.  After the census, young John disappears, so perhaps Ella lost two children.

At the almshouse, Ella and little Annie probably ate supper each night with Adelaide and Charles Leach. By that time, Adelaide, about 60 years old, and Charles, her 49-year-old younger brother, had been residents, or “inmates,” of the almshouse for more than 2o years. Perhaps they provided comfort to Ella when her baby died. Perhaps she comforted them when William Leach, possibly their brother or another relative, died there on January 23, 1892, at age 64.

More inmate deaths followed during Ella’s stay. In 1892, Mary Taylor, age 45 died, followed by John Ricker, age 80, and Abigail Clements, age 79. Not long after, 88-year-old Joseph Parsons arrived. Perhaps Ella helped care for these elders to earn her keep.

Ella and Annie stayed on until around 1897, when they disappear from the Kittery town reports. Did Ella marry? Did she find employment in one of Kittery’s big hotels, or somewhere else?

Town records are silent on her eventual fate. They tell us a bit more about Adelaide and Charles, both of whom lived most of their lives at the Town Farm, and died there. On January 22, 1901, Adelaide died. Although the town report listed her name as a farm inmate for more than 30 years, nobody caught the mistake that named her “Annabelle Leach” in the vital statistics.  Charles died 15 years later, on September 20, 1916.

What the records don’t reveal is why the Leaches, an old Kittery family with roots dating to the 1600s, landed at the almshouse. They arrived, it seems, with other members of the Leach family, including their parents, Ebenezer and Iza, some time between 1861 and 1871; a town report from 1861-62 records expenses for “partial support” of 30-year-old Adelaide Leach at a private home. The 1860 census tells us that Ebenezer Leach was a fisherman, as was his son Charles. Various town reports  list the “Leach property” as under town ownership, valued at $500 in 1906 (but not part of the Town Farm, valued at $2,000). What fate befell the Leach family, so that they lost their land and perhaps their livelihoods, and ended up living out their days at the Town Farm? Why did two young adults — Adelaide and Charles – stay at the farm?

The blue-marked Quimby Trail offers a loop walk of about 3 miles through the forest.

The blue-marked Quimby Trail offers a loop walk of about 3 miles through the forest.

Today, the Town Forest is one of the Kittery’s under-the-radar resources, one in which I’ve enjoyed walking, running, and biking since the 1990s. Over the past 20 years, the forest surrounding the town land has shrunk, as housing developments have sprung up on all sides, but the Town Forest remains a great place to wander, and to wonder, about the people who once called this place home, including a good number who still remain, buried somewhere in unmarked graves.

In 19th century New England, the “poor farm” was a well-established institution where some residents worked at farm chores to pay their keep. However, evidence in Kittery’s town reports suggests that taxpayers generally supported the five to eight residents who lived there, with the town paying a salary to a “superintendent,” and bills for flour, wood, food, and other necessities, and even for hiring nearby farmers like William Haley and Samuel Norton to do the mowing and other heavy chores. Although it’s possible that “inmates” took care of a small garden, most were too old to do the hard physical labor of farm work.

The 19th century almshouse has a reputation as a misery-filled place where all manner of humanity was thrown together, elderly widows and young children mixed in with vagrants and drunkards. But some poor farms, especially in rural New England, were more convivial and communal – places of shelter and community where residents might play cards together or just enjoy the benefits of human companionship. They were more like small old-age homes, where elderly residents who had no family or whose family wouldn’t or couldn’t care for them lived out their last days.

The forest offers no dramatic vistas, but lots of old stone walls, a family cemetery, and other remains of the past that speak to lives lived and lost here.

The Town Forest offers no dramatic vistas, but lots of old stone walls, two family cemeteries, and other remains of the past that speak to lives lived and lost here. Here in the Haley Family Cemetery, walkers will find Captain Haley’s 1864 gravestone embedded in the ground, surrounded by other unmarked or illegible stones.

I suspect that the Kittery Town Farm almshouse had a community-like feel to it.  Adelaide and Charles Leach surely enjoyed the company of little Annie Hill, who lived at the farm until she was about seven. 

In 1820, Kittery purchased the original 13 acres for the farm, along with a house and a barn, for $325. Later, Captain John R. Haley left 59 surrounding acres to the town. It’s unclear when the town began using the house and land as its “poor farm,” but a town report from 1852 mentions the almshouse, so I suspect the land was purchased specifically to serve as a home for the poor. Some sources that discuss the Pepperrell family note that one of the Sparhawk brothers of Loyalist William Pepperrell ended up living at the almshouse (and the timing, around the 1820s, sounds about right, as a Sparhawk born in the 1750s or 60s would have been an elder by the 1820s).

Town records suggest that the town began to move away from using the almshouse as the shelter of last resort in the 1920s, when the number of residents declined to two and then to one, Mary Gunnison, an elderly woman who lived there with caretakers Mr. and Mrs. Charles Hall until around 1922.  

Later, the town rented the farm for a $175 a year.  In many years, maintenance expenses outweighed the rental income, which probably led to the decision to demolish the almshouse in 1961.  Many Kittery residents today still remember riding the school bus past the almshouse on Haley Road.

Evidence of porcupine activity in the forest; the porkies love the bark of the many hemlock trees.

Evidence of porcupine activity in the forest; the porkies love the bark of the many hemlock trees.

Somewhere in this forest is a lost and unmarked pauper’s burial plot that probably holds the Leaches and the other souls who died while living at the Town Farm. When the snow melts, I’ll continue to look for it, as I wander, and wonder, about these people, their stories, and why they landed at the poor farm.

Sources and resources

The Town Forest, at 77 Haley Road, runs between Haley and Lewis Roads, with parking areas on both ends. At the southern end, the former town pound, where stray livestock was once corralled, is an interesting feature.

I welcome any comments or additional information that might fill out this story about the Town Farm.

The Town Farm now features one main loop trail, about 3 miles long, known as the Quimby Trail, named for the late Conrad Quimby, a retired newspaper publisher who called Kittery home for many years, and as Chair of the Conservation Commission spearheaded the creation of walking trails in the Town Forest. Numerous herd trails also thread through the forest.  Hunters regularly tramp in these woods in the fall, and more adventurous walkers can plunge deep into the forest without fear of getting hopelessly lost (especially now that residential development surrounds the forest).

Walkers will find the Haley Family Cemetery, on the Quimby Trail, soon after it bears left (from the Haley Road entrance). The Lewis Family Cemetery is located at the Haley Road entrance, next to the Town Pound.

The Rice Library holds town reports dating to 1874. More reports (but not all) can be found in Maine’s Digital Commons. The earliest report I found was dated 1852.

Some general information about the 19th century poor farm comes from David Wagner’s excellent study of six New England town farms and almshouses: The Poorhouse: America’s Forgotten Institution,  New York; Rowman and Littlefield, 2005.

Information on the 1820 purchase is from the March 3, 2002 Portsmouth Herald article by Amy Wallace, “Kittery Hunts for Town Forest Solution,” by Amy Wallace.

Hunting is permitted in the Town Forest, so I recommend wearing hunter orange Monday to Saturday from November 1 to mid-December and avoiding the forest altogether at dusk and dawn, when hunters are most active. No hunting on Sundays.

 

About Dianne Fallon

Maniacal Traveler Dianne Fallon writes from a house in the Maine woods in . Her interests include travel, hiking and the outdoors, and history. Find her on Instagram @themaniacialtraveler.
This entry was posted in Family and Kids, Maine places, Seacoast (mostly) History and tagged , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

8 Responses to Lives lived, and lost, at the Kittery Town Forest

  1. Steve Dow says:

    Hello,
    I was interested in the story of the Hills, so did a little digging. John Henry Hill moved to Eliot, marrying (in Portsmouth) in 1897. This marriage record lists Ella Hill as his mother (born in Dayton, Maine), with no name for father, except says “deceased”. John later worked for the railroad, and died in Eliot on 11/08/1909, from typhoid. Death rec (and obit) does not mention parents. Ella may have gone to York, Maine, as someone of that same name and age was there in 1910 census, working as a servant. This Ella died on 8/7/1910, aged 53, in York, from tuberculosis. No parents listed on death record.

    Just thought I’d pass this along!

    • Dianne says:

      Thank-you, Steve, for adding to the history. Even though we can’t really know about John’s inner life, I am glad to know he married, perhaps had a family of his own, and lived nearby his

  2. Dixie McLean Tarbell says:

    Hello, I’m so appreciative of your historical and travel posts! My grandmother’s grandmother, wife of Charles Hill of Charles Hill Road, Kittery Pt., died in childbirth. Baby Cora Hill was raised by her two brothers until she reached puberty and they put her in the Town Farm. She remained there until Moses Randall, my grandmother’s father, took her out and married her. My grandmother was Alice Randall Higgins. I didn’t know any of this until my mother, Constance Higgins McLean, told me in her last few years of life. This story in my background makes me appreciate my present life, knowing the poverty my great grandmother bore!

    I wonder if there is a recognizable gravesite at the Charles Hill house, which went out of the family when no one claimed it when the opportunity arrived, perhaps in the 1960’s.

    I have an interesting article which I will find and send asap, recounting that the abandoned house still had a picture of the donkey on the wall before the home went out of the family. Word was, the Charles Hill family loved their donkey so much, they let him in the house. Eccentricity is in my genes!

    • Dianne F says:

      Dixie, another reader, Joyce, has posted on my post about Punkintown about visiting a cemetery near Bartlett Road where she believes her great-grandmother, Cora Hill, is buried. (I hope I got that right). I suggested that she look at your comments here and you may want to look at her comments. So fascinating!

      Also, members of the Higgins family still live on Charles Hill Road today.

      And yes, so easy to take for granted what we have today. Too many people forget that until the 1930s, there was no social safety set.

  3. Barbara Shearer says:

    Joyce an I went to that house an saw the cemetery. We were shown the Donkey I believe the photo shows him looking out the window. It was what was left of the ironical home. The cemetery also had graves that had a rock for a headstone an footstone. It was believed to have been slave graves.
    I used to ride my bike there as a kid. But I went down Tennys Hill Road an wentbto it that was butvit was no longer there. We went down the Bartlett Road. The owner was very nice. My grandmother told me it was the old Hill house.

  4. Dixie McLean Tarbell says:

    Joyce and Barbara, if you go there again, maybe post some photos? I’ve been meaning to go look there to see some of my long lost roots, but don’t know if I’d recognize the correct place. Cousin Brian, who lives nearby, might be able to help, though! Thanks for posting- happy to hear the donkey photo was preserved!

  5. Lynne T. Conte, Ph.D. says:

    I am looking for the Abbot family, who were farmers. My great, great, great grandfather was born in Kittery, Maine in the year 1834.

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