Please donate to help us keep this website operating. Your donation will help further our mission to share information about County Home Cemetery on site alluschurches.com. Please keep in mind, that while the site supports church-related causes, this is a directory website; this is not a Cemetery. Your donation will also help humanitarian aid.

By helping us, you agree to terms and conditions page

Please add your review. Your comments help to get feedback and an honest opinion about the County Home Cemetery.
Thanks to the reviews, other people are able to learn of mistakes or read of the warmth and delight of your gratitude. Please keep your comments--whether praise or criticism--kind and appropriate. This is not the place to ask questions, or post contact information. Inappropriate language, off-topic or duplicate comments, names of individuals criticised, phone numbers, etc will be X'd out or removed, according to the moderator's notice and discretion. Thank you for your comments and participation!

• ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

  On January 4, 1866, Dozier B. Gammon sold 160 acres to the county and the Decatur County Poor Farm began. The poor were housed in the original homestead house built my Dozier Gammon and his sons. An area was set aside for a cemetery. There are now 18 matching markers in two rows, mostly from 1900 to 1910. They were made of concrete at the county home and hand-lettered. Very few are readable today. There are probably many unmarked graves. When the county farm was sold in 1975, a large ledger containing residents information (including burials) was burned. The last known burial (unmarked) was in 1939.
  
  An early burial policy of the County Poor Farm according to History of Decatur County by Himena Hoffman was: "When death came to an inmate, he was dressed in a three dollar robe and buried in a $10. Casket in the burial grounds on the farm, unless the family who had left him to end his days at the "Poor Farm" claimed the body and gave him burial elsewhere,"
  
  The location of the cemetery was slightly south of the large county farm house, then east to the top of the ridge. However, the county farm house was torn down not long after it was sold. The cemetery area is fenced with an opening but no gate. It is not mowed.
  
  There are few records left of the farm and the inmates. The Auditor's office, housed at the Decatur County Courthouse, has a few pages of the minutes of the "Poor Farm" committee. And, the Decatur County Museum has one list of inmates that were at one time living at the farm.
  

  Added August 26, 2016 by Malorie Irving