The People
They were indigent residents of the county, retirees with insufficient pensions, the physically infirm and the mentally ill.
What the residents all had in common were a lack of relative who could or would care for them, a lack of social or political power and a life in residence at the Stoddard County Home, more commonly called the Poor Farm.
There were then, even as now, limited resources given over to the care of those least among us, and the Stoddard County Home was a working farm. Residents provided labor as they were able and the fruits of those labors provided the bulk of their livelihood.
The Cemetery
Another thing they shared in common was an unceremonious, anonymous burial in a pasteboard box at a plot in the cemetery on the west of the farm. That plot. recorded in a ledger, might be marked with a wooden cross, long gone now, or might have not been marked at all.
There were actually more County Homes, dating back to as early as 1868, but this is the last one standing and interments into its cemetery began by at least 1880 and continued through 1967.
Through years of research we know that there are at least 200 people interred, and there are certainly more.
One man, J R Barnett, received a stone marker, but no one now remembers how that came to be. Most graves in the cemetery are recorded in ledgers that reference plots and rows in relation to trees that may or may not still even be there.
The Stamp
This is our first letterbox style geocache apart from one we adopted from LatonkaGal and I carved the stamp myself. It is a little rough and rugged, but I think that is fitting for the cache location. This little rugged cross stamp can stand for all of those missing markers for these once forgotten souls.
Nothing remains of them now save some names (and some that haven't even got their names recorded) and some dates, but if you spend some time with this memorial, you'll find that even in so sparse a collection, there are stories here of human lives. Lives of the least of these. Lives that mattered.