On Community
Recently, a reader of my “On Community” (2015) book, while expressing appreciation for that collection, remarked that “our local past sure has a lot of fascinating stories”—and of course, it does. In my view, we need to open ourselves to those other lives—an effort which also deepens our own experience, both as residents who belong in this distinctive place and as human beings who are, more than we realize, spiritually shaped by our awareness of others. Our problem with long-dead individuals, of course, is that their inner lives so often remain a mystery.
For almost 40 years, I have searched for people of the past whose struggles I can look into, and share with others, through the help of local records, and once in a while I am fortunate to find an insightful obituary or commentary that helps to pull everything together.
The story of Nettie Miller is a case in point. I first ran across her name in the old “Almshouse Register,” which lists those who were cared for at the McDonough County Poor Farm, as it was originally called. That facility, which took in those who needed help due to physical or mental problems and who had no family members to assist them, was established through the acquiring of 85 acres north of Macomb (at section eight, Macomb Township) in 1861 and the construction of a farmhouse on that property in 1862. The facility opened during 1863—in the middle of the Civil War. The Poor Farm concept, borrowed from other counties, meant that a supervisor and his family would live there, and they would then operate the farm and care for the ill or disabled residents, most of whom were elderly.
The register, now at the WIU Library Archives, lists the names and arrival dates of the “inmates,” as they were often called, and it also indicates the “Supposed Cause of Pauperism”— which included such problems as “insanity,” “blindness,” “consumption” (i.e., tuberculosis), “mental incapacity,” “paralysis,” and so on.
