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EARL LEAF: My name is Earl Leaf. I retired from teaching junior high English about 20 years ago, and I started writing my family history. I've written thousands of pages about Chisago County. That's where my parents grew up, about an hour North of Minneapolis.

I've written biographical sketches of 2,000 people who died in the county. But some of the people who died here are missing. I know they're here. I've seen the death and burial records. There's Johanna Lindgren. She was born in Sweden and died about 1900.

Olof Larsson is here, too. He was a bachelor farmer, and he died in 1899. They both died at Sunrise Farm. That was the county's first poor farm. But they didn't just die. They disappeared. Their graves are here, but there are no markers.

Old maps show the poorhouse cemeteries in a farm field that now belongs to Orrin Askeland. A while ago, Orrin and I drove out to the field where the graves are.

ORRIN ASKELAND: Over there is where the poor farm buildings were at one time, on the other side of the road. Right here, there supposed to be about a-- isn't it about a a fourth of an acre that's set aside?

EARL LEAF: Yeah. Well, it's about the size of a football field.

ORRIN ASKELAND: Yeah. So it would be here like this someplace.

EARL LEAF: If we can believe that the records were correct, then there are at least 25 people buried here.

ORRIN ASKELAND: And there's no sign of anything though. Because, see, it has been plowed up for at least, I would say, at least 70, 80 years.

EARL LEAF: Not all of the old pauper's cemeteries are hidden in farm fields. They've been found on college campuses, under parking lots, and in suburban construction sites. In Fargo, people unknowingly visit the old poor farm cemetery every day.

This is Trollwood park. A pack of kids is racing across the grass. They don't know that beneath their feet lie hundreds of bodies. Jeanette Stanton walks among the unseen graves. She was a county commissioner about 20 years ago when the county board voted to mark these graves. She says it appears the agreement has been forgotten.

JEANETTE STANTON: There were people who didn't have friends or family. So you know, who cared? And that's sad. That just really sad.

EARL LEAF: This is one of three pauper's cemeteries in the park. The county poorhouse used to be just up the hill. It was called Golden Acres. It's gone now and there's no trace it was ever here. The only marker is a big rock engraved with the words, County Cemetery number two. It sits on the far edge of the park where not many people see it.

JEANETTE STANTON: There's absolutely no doubt in my mind that it should get a good sized marker that people are going to stop and look at and think about the people who were buried here.

EARL LEAF: Historians have a list of the people buried here. The graves were likely marked with wooden crosses, but those disappeared decades ago. Now, it takes a trained eye to find the rows of graves.

LOWELL BRENNER: Here's an aging grave here. There's probably another one. And there's probably another one.

EARL LEAF: Lowell Brenner has dug up more than 100 bodies in this park. When he was studying to be a mortician in college about 20 years ago, he was hired to move graves. The Red River had cut into the bank and exposed coffins and bones. There might still be 1,000 poor people buried here.

LOWELL BRENNER: We don't know who those people were. We don't know their stories. And maybe we should. Should there be a huge and beautiful monument to remind the community? I think that would be way over and above what any of these people could have ever dreamed of. I think we need to acknowledge that this is what it is. And I don't think that's a scary thing.

EARL LEAF: Across the country, thousands of people were buried in unmarked graves at poorhouses. A few of those graves are marked now. It's usually the work of a persistent relative, someone like Randy Wall.

RANDY WALL: We should see the little cement numbers someplace here. Boy, the grass has grown over a lot of them.

EARL LEAF: Randy Wall walks across a grassy field near the St Louis County nursing home in Duluth. The barn from the old poor farm is visible through the trees. Randy Wall's looking for his great, great uncle's grave marker.

RANDY WALL: There's Uncle Paul. Paul Nikander. He was born March 15, 1854, and he died here at August 11, 1937.

EARL LEAF: Randy Wall marked his uncle's grave five years ago. He was lucky to have some help finding it. It looks like someone filled soup cans with cement and scratched a number into each one. They stuck one in the ground next to each grave. There are hundreds of graves in this field marked with just numbers. Randy Wall says, once he found his uncle, he had to put up a gravestone.

RANDY WALL: I think a stone gives a final resting place, some dignity. It also lets people know I was here. If we're not remembered, we didn't live then. I mean, who's going to know we lived? Who's going to know our story?

EARL LEAF: Randy Wall only knows part of his great, great uncle's story. Paul Nikander was a bachelor lumberjack for decades. According to family lore, he went back to Sweden in the 1930s. But Randy Wall learned the truth when he wrote a family history a few years ago. He came across Paul Nikander's death certificate and it listed his place of death as the Poor Farm in Duluth. And that's all Randy Wall knows.

[H. T. MARTIN, "THEY HAVE TAKEN HIM OUT OF THE POORHOUSE"]

(SINGING) They have taken him out of the poorhouse.

To the Potter's field of rest.

He has taken him out of the poorhouse.

With the piece of death on his breast.

A lot of people have traced relatives to poorhouse cemeteries. Linda Cornell found her great, great grandmother on a poorhouse roster in New York. Now, she runs a website called the PoorHouse Story and calls herself the PoorHouse Lady. She wants everyone to know the poorhouse Story.

LINDA CORNELL: I think it's terribly important that we realize that if we only know the history of the rich and famous in our community, we really don't know our history.

EARL LEAF: Linda Cornell says poor people have been looked down on throughout American history. The conventional wisdom was, poor people deserved to be poor. The thinking was, poverty was caused by character flaws. Linda Cornell reads from a poorhouse roster. It explains why each person was there.

LINDA CORNELL: Intemperance, idiocy, idleness, vagrancy, debauchery-- that one sounds interesting-- lunacy, blindness, indigent and destitute, old age, lameness, sickness, deaf and dumb, decrepitude, orphans, bastards, illegitimate children.

EARL LEAF: Mental illness and chemical dependency were common among poorhouse residents. But Linda Cornell says many people in turn of the century poorhouses had lived middle class lives until illness or injury left them penniless. No matter where they came from, everybody at the poorhouse was an outcast.

LINDA CORNELL: These were people who were not held in the community. Their lives were not valued. Their history wasn't respected. And there was simply no reason to feel that their passing needed to be marked for history.

EARL LEAF: There were thousands of poorhouses across the country. Most of the buildings are gone. Only the cemeteries remain. It's been 50 years since the last poorhouses closed, and they're mostly forgotten. But some of the people who worked in poorhouses are still alive.

These men and women helped old folks get dressed. They gave them baths. They tried to keep alcoholics sober. They gave food and medicine to people who heard voices. They still remember the people that they cared for so many years ago.

SPEAKER: Most of them were single people maybe or maybe a little bit tetched in the head or something that they weren't too bright.

SPEAKER: They were so mental. Some of them, they'd go up in a room and they'd rave and raise Cain and pound on the floor, and step-- well, you'd think they were going crazy. And then they'd shut the door and come down just like nothing happened.

SPEAKER: They were sober. They were good guys. But they like their booze.

SPEAKER: We had one man who would come to the kitchen and he would sit and he would talk about his homeland. And he would cry tears. He wanted to go back so bad.

SPEAKER: There were a lot of crafty people then, like this old Swede. Now, we had a blacksmith shop with a big grindstone. And the hand sigh for cutting grass, it would take him an hour to sharpen up that sigh. And he'd get out there to cut grass and it would be like a machine. Perfect, he'd lay that grass down just perfect. But then in later years, he got disgusted-- I suppose we all did-- and he climbed up to the third floor and took a swan dive off the top. That was the end of him.

SPEAKER: Most of my people were nobodies. They didn't have a home. They had no people.

SPEAKER: The people didn't come to see him very often. They seemed to put him out there and forget him. And that was the tough part of it. These people were your own. So you couldn't help but worry about them either. You had to help them the best you could. We tried.

EARL LEAF: Some poorhouses were clean and had plenty of food. Others were filthy places where people went hungry. It all depended on where you lived and who was on the County Board. In the 1920s, the federal government sent volunteers to examine more than 2,000 poorhouses. A report concluded that conditions were shameful.

SPEAKER: Is it possible the members of the local board at Salem, New Jersey, do not know that the inmates of their old inflammable three-story building that has no fire escape sleep on the third floor? Is it possible the members of the Board of Supervisors of Shawnee County, Kansas, do not know their poorhouse and its inmates are infected with bedbugs and body lice?

Is it possible the local authorities of Anoka County, Minnesota, do not know the miserable, dangerous, filthy condition of their poor farm? It seems the policy of many local boards is to give a pauper just enough to tide him over from one month's misery to the next.

EARL LEAF: In the mid 1800s, there was no welfare system, just something called outdoor relief. Elected officials of the county or town dealt with each request for help. If they thought the person really needed help, they'd dole out a few dollars for food or shelter. The system was confusing and expensive. So governments established poorhouses patterned after the almshouse of Elizabethan England.

Michael Katz says the idea was simple, discourage people from asking for help by forcing them to work for food and shelter. Katz is a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He's written a book about the history of welfare. Katz says the poorhouse was an abject failure.

MICHAEL KATZ: It didn't cut down on outdoor relief. Outdoor relief kept growing. The second thing is they were incredibly expensive. It cost far more to keep somebody in one of these poorhouses than it did to help them with a little bit of food or shelter. Third, it proved impossible to put the inmates to work.

EARL LEAF: Katz says many people were at the poorhouse because they couldn't work. In rural areas, many poor farms had a vegetable garden and kept a few chickens, hogs, and cows. Sometimes they raised enough food to feed the residents. But counties quickly had to give up on the idea of poorhouses could pay for themselves. Michael Katz says most historians have ignored the poorhouse.

MICHAEL KATZ: For some reason, it seems to offend our sensibilities and our image of what this country was so much that we have suppressed it. The poorhouse was the most stigmatized of public institutions, and it's one that we seem to want to forget.

EARL LEAF: But Michael Katz still sees shadows of the poorhouse, and he hears echoes of the thinking that created the poorhouse system. Early poorhouses were catchalls for anyone who was down and out, a lot like homeless shelters today.

In the 1800s, counties tried to separate the worthy poor from the unworthy. They used those very words. People decided orphans were worthy, so they built orphanages. Then they built asylums for the mentally ill. Poorhouses became places for old people.

Michael Katz says it's still hard to agree who deserves help and who doesn't. He says it's easier than it was 100 years ago for poor people to find food and shelter and medical care. But there's still a strong tendency to blame them for being poor.

MICHAEL KATZ: It seems to me that we want to warehouse the most undeserving of the poor, those people we consider to have the least merit and the least claims on our sympathy. In a sense, I think we recreated poorhouses in the forms of shelters for homeless people in our cities in the 1980s and 1990s.

EARL LEAF: It's dinner time at a Morehead homeless shelter. Dozens of people line up for a meal of hot dogs, French fries, beans and lettuce. Director Gary Groberg says the number of people coming to the shelter has increased in the past couple of years. Groberg has heard about poor farms. Sometimes he wonders how much has changed.

GARY GROBERG: Things have kind of come full circle unintentionally. I really do believe it was unintentional. We're sort of right back to I've got a shelter that's got people with mental illness, people with chemical dependency. I've got families with kids. I've got single women. I've got single men.

EARL LEAF: A lot of people have slipped into poverty in recent months, people who never expected to find themselves in a homeless shelter. There's a picnic table in the shelter parking lot. Three men sit in the sun listening to James Brown on a boombox.

Mike's been a self-employed construction worker most of his life. Recently, he's been sick and not able to work. He's been at the shelter off and on the past several weeks. Mike says it's clean and the food's not bad. But he says people look at him funny if they know he lives at the shelter. If he doesn't tell them, they treat him like anybody else.

MIKE: Like if I walk out on the job site, I'm in control. You know, the people are talking to me and wondering this and that, and you're here and you feel like a little whipped puppy walking around, begging to go outside because you don't have the freedom to go and do what you want anymore at all.

EARL LEAF: 100 years ago, Mike might have lived in a poorhouse, and that's where he would have died. Today, you can still end up with nothing and die unmourned. But these days, you get your name on your grave.

SPEAKER: Over the Hill to the Poorhouse was produced by Dan Gunderson and Chris Juhlin of Minnesota Public radio, narrated by Earl Leaf, and edited by Euan Kerr.

[FLATT AND SCRUGGS, "OVER THE HILLS TO THE POORHOUSE"] I gave them the place that they raised on.

The deed to the farm and more.

And now I'm alone and forsaken.

And now I'm turned from their door.

I'm old, I'm helpless, and feeble.

And the days of my youth has gone by.

And ain't over the hills to the poorhouse.

I must wander a long way to die.