York Town News
Touring the Town Farm
By Virginia L. Woodwell
For more than a century, the Town Farm served as home to some of York's poorest residents. Today, residents are considering the best plan for the land where the farm once stood. About 15 residents and local officials took part in a site walk of the property with former selectman and local historian Ron Nowell on Sunday. Pictured here, Nowell, in the yellow jacket, is joined by newly-elected chairwoman of the Historic District Commission Elizabeth Woodbury, holding the map, and others interested in preserving the land. Also pictured is a map detailing the Town Farm and abutting acres offered to the town as a donation by local resident and developer Duane Jellison.
Photo by Virginia Woodwell
YORK VILLAGE - If the Board of Selectmen is still called the "overseers of the poor," it's for a reason deeply rooted in history.
This week, interest in that particular slice of history got a big boost as former selectman and local historian Ron Nowell conducted a public walk, this past Sunday, Jan. 21, on land off Long Sands Road that was once home to the York Town Farm, also known as "the poor farm."
Some 15 people participated. Sparking the group's interest was a Jan. 8 decision by the selectmen not to sell the Town Farm land but to encourage, instead, public input into a plan to preserve it, with a vote on that plan to be placed on the ballot in November.
Had selectmen not reversed themselves, three parcels of the land, as authorized by voters last May, would have been sold for house lots to help defray the costs of a proposed new municipal center. The reversal came after a hearing revealed the extent to which members of the public objected to the loss of York Village open space, of the community gardens long located there and of the site's historical significance.
Nowell has been conducting research on the history of the land and the Historic District Commission (HDC) is considering a proposal - advanced by him and now gathering widespread support - to have the spot officially designated an historic site.
Participating in Sunday's walk were Selectmen Chairman David Marshall, Elizabeth Woodbury, newly-elected chair of the York Historic District Commission, several other members of that board and a number of nearby residents.
On the walk, Nowell revealed that the town-owned land - once much more extensive but now consisting of several contiguous parcels totaling about 12 acres in the region where Long Sands Road and Ridge Road meet - plus another 17 acres, also contiguous, now being offered as a donation to the town by York developer Duane Jellison, has a documented history that goes back to 1675 when it was deeded to one of York's earliest Congregational ministers, Shubael Dummer. Dummer was a victim of the Indian massacre in 1692.
The land was sold in 1713, Nowell reported, and bought by the town in 1837. Thereafter, from 1838 until 1969, it was the Town Farm, and served, as did town farms in most towns throughout Maine and the rest of the country, to house the town's poorest residents at public expense - working farms where those who could do so contributed to production, but where others, too, were often housed, most especially the elderly but also, sometimes, the insane, and, frequently, transients.
York's first building for the farm, Nowell said, lasted 50 years but was torn down in 1889 and 1890 to make way for a new one, and one built by York's preeminent architect and builder of the day, Edward B. Blaisdell, who designed many of York's first large homes. The new 1890 Town Farm home was itself substantial, 2½ stories high, and it represented, Nowell emphasized, "a huge investment for York taxpayers," since it included both the tearing-down of the old structure and the building and refurnishing of the new, inside and out.
The number of farm occupants there, Nowell said, averaged between 10 and 18, and it sometimes included non-violent criminals, plus single men whose working wages would be paid to the town, and babies born on the premises.
"But most," said Nowell, noting the high percentage of resident elderly, "went there to die."
Indeed, he explained, town farms disappeared when they became elderly homes only, with all the liabilities involved therein, and at a time when other, sometimes cheaper, alternatives for dealing with the poor and social outcasts were becoming available.
The York Town Farm closed in 1969, Nowell said, when a resident moved to Eliot and the town found it cheaper to pay her to take the remaining four residents with her than to continue keeping the farm open. Its facilities were razed in the spring of 1970.
Sunday's walk revealed virtually no traces of the old buildings, which stood behind where the community gardens are now situated, although, Nowell said, they used the same entrance road for access. It's uncertain whether a few timbers there were from the farm's barn or another source.
The only tangible evidence of the farm's presence is in the form of several scarcely-marked graves, which were visited early in the walk. Situated in a small triangle of public property very close to the junction of Long Sands Road and Ridge Road, the graves were marked by small slabs of natural stone, untreated and planted upright but barely visible beneath the inch or two of snow underfoot. Buried there were Town Farm residents, Nowell said.
Loose stones used as fill on the embankment leading up to the graveyard, Nowell said, were testimony to the fact that the Town Farm had also served as a gravel pit. There is, he added, another burial site on the Town Farm property, but its location is not known.
Thereafter, the walk returned to the gardens to follow a trail made by four-wheelers that wound through thick stands of sumac, brambles, vines and invasive honeysuckle down to an ash swamp and the meandering Little River, partially ice-covered and barely five feet across. At various stages on the walk, the backs of homes on Ridge Road were visible in the distance to the west, as were those on Ferncroft Road visible to the east.
At its furthest extent, the walk reached the edge of the property offered by Jellison, where, Nowell said, there was a pond, created by a man-made dam and three or four acres in size, just out of sight.
An area of five or six acres there now grown wild was known as Teeney Field, he added, named for a George or John Teeney who owned it, and Little River there was also, for a time, also known as Teeney Brook. A particular grass used for horse bedding and still present, Nowell noted, was harvested in this region.
Although little physical evidence of the Town Farm remains on site, the huge amount of related written documentation available Nowell termed as unbelievable: lists of people and animals present, detailed reports on such issues as the number of meals served, eggs sold and half-pints of cream collected, plus annual reports written by superintendents, along with maps, voting records and deeds.
Nowell will be presenting a thick compilation of this documentation to the HDC prior to its next meeting on Feb. 7. According to Woodbury, the commission will then decide whether to recommend establishing the land in question as an historic site.
While an individual may advance such a proposition, or it may come in petition form with 200 signatures, which have already been collected, say proponents, Nowell said that HDC sponsorship would be most appropriate in this case, since the land involved is public land and the HDC is a public agency.
Should the HDC decide to serve as sponsor, it's expected that it would then team up with the Old York Historical Society, a private entity with experience at writing the grants needed to finance further research that will be required.
Other proposals for use of portions the former Town Farm land and the Jellison acreage include the creation of a park, walking trails, fields and parking for the high school. The York Land Trust is among the parties volunteering to contribute to plans for public use of the land and, according to Executive Director Doreen MacGillis, trust member Carol Donnelly has agreed to serve as a liaison on any board evolving to meet that need.
