Kaufman County Poor Farm

Texas made counties responsible for their poor in 1869, when an amendment to the state constitution put the duty on each one. Kaufman County commissioners began looking for land in 1874, bought more than 408 acres in 1881, a mile and a quarter from the courthouse square, and had buildings up by November 1883, according to Texas Time Travel. It calls the farm the only such site in Texas still owned by its county. About 27 acres remained in 2012, when Preservation Texas listed the farm among the state's most endangered historic places.

What the plaque says

Kaufman County Poor Farm As did many Texas counties of the era, Kaufman County created a poor farm in 1883 in order to provide the indigent residents and families of the area with food, shelter, and medicine. This work program replaced earlier relief efforts. All able-bodied persons were required to work, including resident guards and county inmates convicted of minor crimes who were originally brought from the jail daily for labor; by 1893 they were housed on the farm. In the 1930s the farm was used to demonstrate new agricultural techniques. Usually filled to capacity, the farm operated until the 1970s. By 1997, a cemetery and a few buildings remained. (1997)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• No. 1 British Flying Training School Museum — 11 mi
  A free museum at Terrell's airport where about 2,200 RAF cadets learned to fly between 1941 and 1945, with logbooks, uniforms, letters and original training aircraft.
• Fair Park — 30 mi
  The State Fair of Texas grounds since 1886, where the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition left one of the country's greatest concentrations of Art Deco exposition buildings.
• African American Museum, Dallas — 30 mi
  Founded in 1974 at Bishop College, a free Fair Park museum holding the Sepia photograph archive, African art and A. Maceo Smith's papers, and the story of the Hall of Negro Life.

More markers nearby

• First United Methodist Church — 1.5 mi
• Kaufman County — 1.7 mi
• Mrs. William P. King — 1.7 mi
• Colonel Isham Chisum — 1.7 mi