Site of Wise County Poor Farm & Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Way out where Center Creek bends through Wise County, there stood something most folks didn't talk about much, and maybe that was the point. The Wise County Poor Farm.

Three hundred and twenty acres of hard Texas ground, put to work starting in 1885, and it kept on working all the way until 1962. Seventy-seven years of quiet, unglamorous purpose. The farm existed to support and employ dependent or needy citizens, and it served as the place where county convicts could work out their fines.

Not a comfortable story, but an honest one. Now the first superintendent of this 320-acre operation was a man named R. Suffert.

He managed all the land and all the activities. Every acre, every task. And his wife; she cooked, she washed, and she sewed.

Not just for the inmates. For the guards too. Day in, day out, that woman kept the whole enterprise fed and clothed and holding together.

The marker doesn't give her a first name, and that omission sits with you a little. At the bend of Center Creek, there was a cemetery. It's leveled now, gone flat, like the ground decided to forget.

Of all the people buried there, only a handful of names survived into the record. Steve Abbey. Sarah McCain.

Jim Wilson. Jim M. Goodner.

Bill Hodge. Two surnames with no first names attached: Rankin and Owens. And then four first names standing alone, nothing else to anchor them: Della, Edna, Ike, and Mariah.

That's it. That's the whole roll call. Names clipped short by time, or by the indifference of record-keeping, or both.

Think about that for a moment. Decades of lives lived out on that farm, and what we're left with is a partial list; some full names, some half-names, some just a single word that once belonged to a person. Della.

Mariah. Owens. It's the kind of accounting that says more about how the world saw these folks than anything else could.

In 1969, Wise County sold the buildings and twelve acres of the farm at auction. The rest faded. The cemetery was leveled.

And if not for this marker, even those few names might have gone with it. So here they are, carried a little further down the road: Della, Ike, Sarah McCain, and the rest, still on the record, still worth saying out loud.

What the marker says

Operated 1885-1962 to support and employ dependent or needy citizens and as place for county convicts to work out fines. First superintendent of the 320-acre farm, R. Suffert, managed all land and activities and his wife cooked, washed, and sewed for both inmates and guards. Of inmates buried in the now-leveled cemetery at bend of Center Creek, only names known are Steve Abbey, Sarah McCain, Jim Wilson, Jim M. Goodner, Bill Hodge; Rankin, Owens (surnames); Della, Edna, Ike, and Mariah. In 1969 county sold buildings and 12 acres of farm at auction. (1971)