The Fremont County Farm & Hospital

3250 E. Main Street, Cañon City, Colorado

To those who knew it better, it was degradingly called "The Poor Farm." To those who lived there, it was home.

By design, the Fremont County Farm and Hospital was a way-station for the sick, neglected and the injured, and a home for those who were too young or too old to care for themselves.

Jesse Rader had a small farm on Four Mile Creek that he sold to the county in October of 1865 for $1,925. The county kept a section of the farmhouse and built a new Fremont County Hospital in 1876 to replace the one on the other side of town that had burned to the ground. That burned hospital was known as "The Pest House," a place that no one visited willingly. It was a deplorable canvas-roofed hospital that had twenty small cots and was little more than a warehouse for those unable to afford medical attention, regular hospitalization, or suffered from communicable diseases such as smallpox or scarlet fever. When that building burned, there were few mourners.

It was in 1900 that the county appointed its first superintendent to oversee the management of the County Farm and Hospital. With forty beds, it was everything that The Pest House was not. Persons of every age - from newborns to one person aged ninety-seven years - were guests at the farm. Transients injured while jumping from moving train cars were frequently temporary guests, as were the temporarily unemployed who worked the dairy farm or orchard out back to earn their board. Some stayed overnight, others for years.

To the young, the innocent, and those uninitiated to the ways of the world, the County Farm became home by way of parental neglect, abuse, abandonment, or simply because they had nowhere else to go. The first resident of record was "Minnie Silby, age 10. No friends or parents." One young nine-year-old boy became a years-long resident because he was "too young to earn a living." Still other children came because of death or illness of both parents. Some were sent to an orphanage in Denver, while others simply ran away.

History teaches us that the best years of our lives are our childhood years. We can only imagine the sense of fear, uncertainty and lack of personal security these children must have felt in their younger days, feelings that followed them well into adulthood.

Initially, for the first few years, those who stayed here were referred to as inmates. By the late 1920s that terminology changed when the hospital was updated to rival the best hospitals in southern Colorado. Suddenly, inmates became patients, and the older residents needing long-term care became guests, especially after pensions began paying as much as $95 a month for board.

In time, conditions changed and the world changed, and our definition of social services changed with it. The County Farm and Hospital closed in 1973, after ninety-seven years of dedicated service to the poor, sick, homeless, neglected, abused and aged.

The two- and three-story Queen Anne-style buildings at the complex were dismantled in 1996, and the giant cottonwood trees were reduced to firewood. Nothing remains today of the Fremont County Farm and Hospital. However, the land may still be caring for those less fortunate. Camps along Four Mile Creek on the site today have been known to still be a refuge for homeless people, so be aware that they may be in the area watching you and quite possibly may approach you.

Please view the two photographs in the image gallery. One is of the Fremont County Farm & Hospital taken 1922, and the other is from 2011.

A special thanks to mr.volkswagen for the container that I've had rolling around in the back seat of my truck for almost two years now. It's finally been put back into use.