POOR RELIEF
County Homes
The early almshouse or poorhouse, as it has usually been termed, was a direct descendant of the old English Workhouse. Undesirable classes of population, vagrants, and other misfits of society, were dumped into them. In the first annual report, 1870, of the Board of Public Charities of North Carolina it was written of the county almshouse:
'"These are the receptacles of the infirm, aged and diseased who are destitute or cast off by unnatural, or equally poor kindred, the orphan, and the child of poverty, for whom beats no heart warm with the kindly emotions. Here is almost equal banishment from the presence of human love and care as in the case of prisons. The respectable aged and infirm pauper is shut up with the worn out strumpet, whose very presence is pollution, and no care is had, in many cases for the innocence of childhood."
Succeeding reports of the State Board show that the march of progress in respect to county homes has been painfully slow until 1919. Conditions strikingly similar to those narrated in the report of 1870 exist in some of the county homes today.
"Poor Relief in North Carolina”, a bulletin prepared by Mr. Koy M. Brown, former director of the Division of Institutional Supervision, and issued by the State Board of Charities and Public Welfare in 1925, is the result of an exhaustive survey of the situation in the State. The bulletin is available to all who care to go into the subject.
Buildings and Inmates
"Until quite recently the most common type of county home was a group of two-room cottages. A number of these remain. Usually these cottages are of wood — small frame buildings, often with a chimney in the middle, providing an open fireplace in each of the two rooms. Occasionally the cottages are of brick. More rarely we find a county home coming down from a still earlier period with log cottages. The tendency, as has been suggested, is away from the two-room cottage type of institution. The newer home consists of a single building, or a group of connected buildings, usually of brick. In the latest of these, the quarters of the inmates are one-story." — (From Poor Relief Bulletin, page 10.)
Since 1919, twenty-seven counties: Alamance, Burke, Caldwell, Caswell, Chatham, Cherokee, Clay, Durham, Guilford, Halifax, Jackson, Johnston, Nash, Northampton, Onslow, Person, Polk, Randolph, Robeson, Rowan, Rutherford, Sampson, Stanly, Vance, Watauga, Wayne, and Wilson, have built new county homes. Only two of these, Caswell and Sampson, have been built during the last two years, while three others were completed in the latter part of 1924. In April, 1926, plans were approved for a new county home in Martin County. The building is now under construction. Plans have also been approved for the Franklin County Home. Other counties are considering building. An estimate based upon the most recent reports show that there are 1,800 inmates in the county homes of the State. Seven counties do not maintain county homes and one other county has recently abandoned its home, boarding the four inmates in an adjoining county. A few other counties have followed this plan. Information gathered for the bulletin showed that twenty-nine county homes had an average daily number of inmates of less than ten. More recent reports show that eighteen county homes out of sixty-four reporting, had an average daily number of inmates of less than ten. Among the inmates of the county homes are still found a large number of the feeble-minded and insane, those in need of hospital treatment and in some cases children under sixteen are still placed in county homes.
Many counties could care for their county home inmates much better and at much less expense by maintaining county homes in cooperation with one or more other counties. In 1923 the General Assembly of North Carolina passed a bill entitled "An Act to Enable Any Two or More Counties to Establish a District Hospital Home in Lieu of Separate County Homes." Although this was a public law it was in some way placed among the public local laws, chapter 611, and was for this reason not included in Volume III of Consolidated Statutes. It has been lost to the public in this way and should be re-enacted.
Supervision
Most of the counties of the State have not secured the better qualified persons for county home superintendents, because the salaries paid are too low to attract the type of persons needed. Thirty-one counties out of sixty-four pay their superintendents in actual money less than one hundred dollars per month. One county pays two hundred dollars per month for the services of the superintendent and his wife. Ten counties pay less than six hundred dollars per year.
Section 5017 of Consolidated Statutes provides that the county superintendent of public welfare shall have, under control of the county commissioners, the care and supervision of the poor and the administration of the poor fund. Few counties have seen fit to entrust this phase of the work to the superintendents, but where they have the results have been gratifying in financial as well as in other ways.
Hospitalization of County Homes
In 1921 Yance County maintained as a county home "some old wooden buildings situated on a farm a few miles from the county seat." Today the county has a modernly constructed brick building, known as the Yance County Hospital. The building was carefully planned to house about twenty-five inmates and when completed had cost the county only $30,000.
The regular population of the home has been reduced from twenty-five to seven. This has been accomplished by placing many of the applicants for admission to the county home in the home of some relative or neighbor and paying small sums for support. This is a sort of outdoor poor relief which may prove successful under proper supervision. It is usually cheaper and the individuals concerned are in many cases much happier. As Mrs. "W. B. Waddill, Superintendent of Public Welfare for Yance County, has said, "many paupers are the derelicts, the incapable, or the incapacitated, and very little can be done for them except to make them comfortable and happy, for this class of society possesses practically no constructive possibility."
It is through the use of this plan that half of the county home has been converted into a hospital with a well equipped operating room. A trained nurse is superintendent of the hospital-home.
A number of county homes have provided hospital wards in the county home, no others have so satisfactorily adopted the home to the needs of the county.
Outdoor Poor Relief
Out of seventy-five counties reporting on outdoor relief, sixty-three report a total of $149,480 paid to an average of 2,500 persons per month in 1924, the majority of them receiving less than five dollars per month. The dangers of unsupervised poor lists are apparent, and since outdoor poor relief was discussed in the last biennial report and in the Poor Relief Bulletin already mentioned, there will be no further discussion of the subject here.
Pages 30-33 of the Biennial Report of the State Board of Charities and Public Welfare to the General Assembly of North Carolina, published in 1926
The 150-page report is available online through the Internet Archive, with the section on Poor Homes and supplemental income payments to the poor begins here: archive.org/details/biennialreportof1926nort/page/30/mode/2up
