County Poor Farm Cemetery
Adams Township
Township 58, Range 30, Section 6
DeKalb County, Missouri
The county "Paupers' Home" was in operation from 1874 to 1905. Reportedly, there is one marker, "The DeKalb Co. Poor" in a poorly fenced area that we were unable to locate in 2011. To date, no record of burials has been located.
Prior to the year 1874, the poor and indigent class of DeKalb County were supported by private individuals at so much per pauper. In that year, however, a tract of land of eighty acres, three miles southeast of Maysville, in Adams Township, was purchased for a poor farm, the necessary buildings upon which were subsequently erected. The expense for maintaining paupers has never been very great, the county having been remarkably free from that unfortunate class. (History of Andrew and DeKalb Counties, Missouri, Goodspeed Publishing Co., 1888.)
East of Maysville about a half-mile stands a big house with many windows in it. It stands high up on the hill and can be seen from afar. About it are beauty and the grandeur of nature. About it is a big farm crowned with the farm conveniences of the times. That farm is the county poor farm. That finest of all impulses, the impulse to hold out the hand of tenderness and kindness to the afflicted of earth, found a proper lodgment here some years ago ; and while some counties permitted their helpless and their poor to suffer from a motley aggregation of bad farm conditions, to be harried by neglect and reduced by the sloth of their keepers, DeKalb County bade farewell to the rude methods of coarser days, moved out into modern light, and fitted up a farm and built a home for the poor, exhibiting all the physical elements of a real home. And the county farm stands out today as one of the institutional things of which the people are justly proud. (A History of Northwest Missouri, Walter Williams, The Lewis Publishing Co., 1914.)