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org [Music] [Music] welcome to Common Ground I'm producer director Scott kudon in this episode producer director Randy Cadwell joins dedicated volunteers who are working to preserve the otter tale County Poor Farm Cemetery before there was any sort of government social safety net uh Social Security was instituted in August 1935 who was responsible for the poorest of the poor while the state of Minnesota placed that burden on individual counties in January 1881 Otto County purchased 160 acres in Fergus Falls Township 2 miles north of Fergus Falls and what we still call the jwi Lake Road and on that site a large two-story Square House was built with a full basement and a steam heating plant and as a working farm there were smaller other outbuildings were constructed for poultry and stock apparent about 30 cows a day were milk there was also a grain and a horse barn the first Resident was a man named Otto shaffield who arrived on the farm in November 26 1881 and there were typically you know about 20 residents at the poor farm at any given time so each Township took care of its own people the people sent to the poor farm were provided with clothes and shoes and in the early 1900s it cost townships $20 a person a month that they sent that money went into a County uh into a county administered Poor Farm fund and the people hired to manage the poor farm had a salary along with room and board the farm was as self- sustaining as possible the county did not provide any assistance except in cases of extended extensive repairs or building additions Poor Farm closed in 1938 of course people died on the poor farm and they had to have a cemetery and we are now going to cross the threshold into the PO Farm Cemetery to talk to Bob reapy and Vern Barker who have been the champions in bringing this poor farm Cemetery again I don't want to say back to life but to uh to Spruce it up I was uh doing a project at a cemetery up by perm rural perm in St Joseph's Catholic Cemetery as I was doing that I came across the a stone that was out there that said Mrs Sten and she had a couple of her children were buried beside her but there was no husband I thought that was a little strange so I started researching to see who this Mr styken was and lo and behold I I found out through the Fergus paper that he was buried at the Fergus Falls otter tale County Port Farm Cemetery I had never heard of it before I I had no idea what a poor farm Cemetery was going to look like so I started doing research on that 2011 I I heard that it was located not far from the state hospital cemeter cery so I started following the property line going back and forth looking for a cemetery and I couldn't find one finally I found a stone that was planted over in that corner in Weeds this tall and all of this was Weeds why they picked this piece of property as the cemetery is because it it is the furthest away from the farm once they closed the cemetery down in 1936 farmer bought it picked up all the metal stakes and started farming it and it was farmed until the 1970s and you would have thought somewhere along the line people would say hey wait a minute that's supposed to be a cemetery why are you farming that took until the 70s for a guy that had worked at the hospital to let the county know that there's a cemetery out here and they should shouldn't be farming it so the the farmer quit farming and it grew back into weeds and that's the way I found it first thing we cut everything down and then we started looking in the record books uh death records uh newspapers I started going through newspaper by newspaper Page by Page and trying to find obituaries well back then especially these people if there was an obituary in the newspaper chances are it was only a sentence or two so and so passed away and is buried at the poor farm so we gathered a list of all all those people and then started uh going through Census records a lot of lot of them you know had uh husband and wife and no kids they're 70 75 80 years old so I jotted those names down where they were located we were going to find how the how the was laid out took a hunch right away and said it's probably going to be down in that end since it is the furest away so I used coat hangers started messing around with them within the first first day we found 26 Graves all the way along the that end side by side all the way down these are nothing but uh regular metal coat hangers which are hard to find nowadays it's mostly all plastic but they're bent in the L shape I put them in my hand and hold them just loose put my elbows to my side and point these wires straight out if I'm walking over a male grave these wires are going to cross just like this and then once I get off the body they'll go back to normal now you can tell exactly how how tall the body is just by the amount of distance from start to finish you can even get down to 12 in baby if you go across the body that's a female the wires are going to go out and then once you get off the body and then they come back to normal so we used these wires and went back and forth all the way along until we ended up in the back of the cemetery and we found a row in the back row away from everybody else so we jotted it down plotted it out I had no idea what we were involved with here we ended up with 176 Graves one full line which you'd think that's all they would do is go up to the next one and go one full line again and but they didn't go that way it was kind of weird the way it was set up so we were having trouble figuring out okay who's buried where fortunately we started to notice some stuff that uh was logical every one of these rows except one all ended at the end of a certain year some rows lasted for four years some lasted for two years and then they'd come back and start another new roll well we didn't know for sure that true but as we put the bodies in the spots then we realized hey this is the end of a year and then they went back and started the new one so that's we knew where to look my goal is to have 176 people identified and located in this Cemetery to give them a little notice that that they haven't been forgotten it's been my my old dve for the last 10 years I got in involved one day I was a nice summer day and I had heard that there was a state hospital Cemetery but I never could exactly locate it and so I decided to explore around and I came through the woods and actually wound up over at the state hospital Cemetery kind of wandering around I like history and while I was visiting there I looked over this direction which is a little bit to the west and I saw a flag and I figured something else is over this direction uh I'm going to go over there and see what that is and when I came in here uh I I saw the cemetery and figured well that's an interesting thing I'm going to try and find out a little bit more information about it so I visited it a couple of times that summer and I eventually ran into a fellow here at the cemetery who was walking as dog and he kind of filled me in on some of the details and mentioned Bob's name I said well I'm going to have to meet this Bob uh I'd like to see what the story behind this is and how it came about it was an accident actually is how I how I came across it when I got involved they had the stones in the ground they were all blank and I kept hearing we're going to get these marked by so and so we're going to get these marked by so and so and I finally talked Bob into letting me look at some of these records and I said we got to quit talking about this if we're going to do it we're going to do it so I kind of took the bull by the horns dug into the research at the Historical Society at the county offices here I visited the Historical Society in St Paul to look up death certificates back in those years and even to this day some of that information is questionable as far as spellings of names and exact dates and things I figur if we're going to etch it in stone I want it to be right I don't want to have to change it after the fact because it's not an easy or inexpensive thing to do so I came up with some questions for Bob I said hey this doesn't seem to match you know is this accurate we looked for more newspaper clippings it's an ongoing process or 5 46 he sent me a list of names for today for us to lift a new group of markers I spent four or five hours just digging through it to say yeah I agree this one is probably accurate enough that we can process it and there was a few of them that I kind of pulled out from the list saying we're not quite sure of this yet the spelling is off or the date of death is is way off so it's quite a process and maybe I'm putting more effort into it than it's necessary but it seems to be the right thing to do this is the the layout of the cemetery so the first burial is in the corner right here and they went in rows by what year that they died so it's all chronological order when they ran out of room they started another row and another row and according to Bob's Theory the row ended here because this area was like a horseshoe Loop where when they came to from the poor farm for a burial the horses could bring the wagon in this Loop remove the body and then go back out there so they didn't continue all the way down to the end um on those those rows and and here this one here you see continues down farther but this is the road map that we use to figure out where each person is um the number that they are in their position and um there's a lot of sheets and things that we put together Bob's got tons of them and minor are a little more organized perhaps but it's it's still kind of a mystery to get the right name in the right spot but that's the goal Bob is kind of in charge of the flower gardens except for the one around the flag pole uh we replaced the flag pole this year it had been broken off a couple of times and re cemented in the ground it kept getting shorter and shorter and shorter and I purchased a new flag pole and there was some gladiola bulbs that were planted around that so I'm kind of in charge of the gladiolas cuz those are one of the favorites uh Bob has just planted a huge group of daffodils uh in the back and some more flowers back in the corner the shrubs that are all the way around the Border was originally put in he was hoping it would become like a hedge or a a fence line essentially we have some aesthetic work to do on our trellis uh I intend to um realign it straighten it up uh repaint it next year the cross behind me um Bob painted last year the sign over in the corner I had new metal letters made for it so it's an ongoing thing there's a lot of lot of interesting characters unfortunately 95% of it is sad this is number 13 it's Lulu Harris it's not a real name but that's what she went by one of her four different names she ran to Bordello here in Fergus Falls not too far from here when it was legal or not illegal and she uh she was she was murdered and the person who killed her is way in the back end this marker right here for Adam gelmo a lady from the Twin Cities contacted us when she realized that he was buried at the poor farm cemetery and she is um a second great great granddaughter of this particular fellow um she went through her ancestry and created a family trees so she was able to identify him uh he has a um a brother that's four spaces down but this lady came from the Twin Cities we laid this Stone as with a ceremony with her and her husband out placed it uh in his honor and it's really a fun thing when we find someone who has a relative that's buried here if we have their identification and we can actually lay the marker for them uh most people who are interested in ancestry like to make sure their ancestors have markers and in this case we were able to fill the bill for her which was a great uh great feeling most of the stones came from the state hospital Cemetery that were originally mistakes they had put the names and stuff on them and the gal who was in charge of that information decided that they were inaccurate so they couldn't use them and they actually wanted to get rid of the stones so Bob came up with a a plan to bring the stones from there over here and we would use the backside that was the mistake from the from the hospital and so some of them have other names on the on the bottom we're going to use the top side recycling they call it it's cheap for two yep he placed all the markers in the ground his original intention was I think to have them actually finished here in the ground that's a very expensive very timec consuming project when you have to do it by hand I decided to contact the local monument company Fergus Falls monument and spoke to them about it and I said would would you consider helping us with this project to get these markers done we have just completed this last season putting an additional 60 back in the ground that are completed today we're lifting another group of 40 that we're planning to um have the monument company they've been gracious enough to come out with one of their boom trucks Park right next to the pile of the stones lift it up and set it on the truck which is a whole lot easier than hauling each one into a U-Haul truck [Music] the problem that we have now is okay we we found 176 bodies down there but we've only matched up about 15 50 we still don't know the the rest of them mtis is home it's an ongoing project that probably will never get done in my [Music] lifetime so I'm Da Johnson and this is vibrant farm and we are in Guthrie Minnesota we produce mainly shoots micr greens and a lot of lettuce we produce for Harmony and the harmony Deli as well and then we also do farmers markets every week throughout the summer when that's open and then also some Caterers and uh restaurants as a young mom I love being in the garden and then I decided that I wanted to continue that and try to figure out what I could grow inside when we had our first Frost I brought some micro greens to different restaurants in bidi and I had three orders immediately for that next week so we made this uh garage uh finished it up and we made it into our grow room and so I'm able to grow year round in here it's completely has the water and heat source and this is my planting Central and I have all my dirt in here for planting it makes it very easy just to scoop it in and load it up so today we're going to be planting uh peases which is probably one of the biggest sellers so I like to soak the water up just to get it to be slightly moist I don't like the powder flying everywhere not probably good for us to breathe in and so I just like to mix it up just a little bit and then I just lay it right in there I do several at a time like during the market I do probably easily 10 trays of peas shoots every week but during the winter it slows down since we don't have the farmers markets then these pea seeds have been soaking for 12 hours and I drained and rinsed them off so you just probably want just about a a single layer of of seeds then we'll get the watering holes and just give it a nice good drink this potting mix actually absorbs a lot of water and if I don't do this they'll be it'll be too dry and they would not germinate properly so then I like to put the tray another tray on top because I've had them grow down through the holes before and and Fus together and and so then it go like that and then I have another tray I'll put on top is a really handy dandy tile so after I get those all moistened and they're really germinated well I will stack them under here and I have several of these are all stacked and they're just all waiting just to germinate and then these have been germinated for a good U probably 7 days and so they're going to be for Harvest or Market I have to water them every day they are like babies be cared for but not too much water otherwise then they'll drown but these ones are kind of fun cuz they put them on Firestone pizzas all summer long they do that at the GRE at Green scene at the Farmers Market on Thursday thday okay so then I just grab tray and see there's water underneath there and The Roots so they're drinking water and I find that it's a healthier system for them to grow so I have everything prepped before I get started I have a knife that I've had since the beginning it's going on 5 years now I have my scale and I use my clam shells I have a a pad absorber that absorbs the condensation and that increases the shelf life of all the greens we just seal it up and we have labels so that everyone knows when everything has been harvested about an hour I go and take it and deliver all the shoots I grow micr greens inside until that presents some challenges so the challenges are you have to have make sure you have good air circulation in the room if it's an enclosed room if the humidity is too high you could could have fungal issues uh bugs if if bugs start coming in and start breeding really quickly that could destroy a whole crop some things that people don't think about when they're looking at the shoots is how much nutrition is in them there's actually 40 times more nutrients density in the broccoli micr greens than in actual fettes and sunflower greens are one of the highest in protein in Greens that you could ever get or the broccoli how much vitamin uh C is in the in broccoli micr greens it's just kind it has grown and along with my family my kids are very involved right now they help me a lot and I would not be here uh if I did not have them working with me they help me plant when I'm not feeling good but I just really appreciate my husband being there right beside me even though he has his two jobs that he does but he's willing to help me so our hope for the future at vibrant Farm is just to be a part of our community and providing food for our community it's been really humbling to be able to work with Harmony and to provide greens for the community I know there's a lot of great Growers out there that can provide these things but for me to be able to do that for the community has been an incredible honor thank you for watching join us again on Common Ground if you have an idea for common ground in north central Minnesota email us at Legacy at lptv.org or call 218 333314 to watch commong ground online visit lptv.org and click local [Music] shows to order episodes or segments of Common Ground call 218 333 3020 production funding of common ground is made possible in part by First National Bank buiji continuing their second century of service to the Community member FDIC closed captioning is made possible by buiji Regional Airport serving the region with daily flights to Minneapolis St Paul International Airport more information available at bigi airport.

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