poorhouse

Older adults were generally considered a “burden on the local taxes,” and many were either sent to poorhouses or auctioned off as farm labor.

Their names were lost, and not much about their lives was known beyond the barest facts: an old age spent in the poorhouse, a problem with cavities.

When Marla Carter visits her mother-in-law at a nursing home in Owensboro, Kentucky, the scene feels more 19th-century poorhouse than modern-day America.

When Marla Carter visits her mother-in-law at a nursing home in Owensboro, Kentucky, the scene feels more 19th-century poorhouse than modern-day America.

Because no matter what distance I travel from childhood, I still feel one foot in the poorhouse.