By: Lydia Crawley
The Parsons Advocate
Restoration work has been progressing at the site of the old County Farm Cemetery at Camp Kidd. Utilizing grant funding from the State, the Tucker County Commission has completed restoration of the site and erected an iron fence around where over 50 possible graves were lain as part of the old County Farm where Camp Kidd is now. Tucker County Commission Administrator Shelia DeVilder spoke to the Parsons Advocate about the project. “They were somewhat aware that there was a cemetery down there, but because nobody talked about it or done anything about it for years and years and years, it was all but forgotten,” DeVilder said.
DeVilder said the site was overgrown and in need of repair when the County took over ownership of the Camp. “So when the Tucker County Commission took it over and they started cleaning things up and started clearing to start doing some of the renovations they had planned like camping and whatever – it was badly overgrown and in need of some work,” DeVilder said. “So when they started clearing it, the indentations, they noticed there were indentations and then it came to light that, ‘oh, I bet that’s the cemetery.’”
Once the workers began clearing away brush and trimming the area, indentations of graves appeared, according to DeVilder. “They started looking and finding and yes, that was where they had buried the people that had passed away from the Poor Farm,” DeVilder said.
The 174 acre Poor Farm existed where Camp Kidd now exists, according to DeVilder. “The Poor Farm I think was just the main building, like the area that housed where the main lodge is now and there were some barns and some other things because it started out as a farm way back in the 1800’s,” DeVilder said.
The Poor Farm was started as a place for widows and orphans to be housed, as well as the poor, according to DeVilder. “The family that had the farm gave it to the County to house people because back then I guess when the husbands died, the wives and the children they would put them in the Poor Farm because women didn’t own property,” DeVilder said. “It was given to the next male relative. I don’t know that much about it.”
Men who were poor and indigent were also sent to the Poor Farm, according to DeVilder. “There were some men as well that apparently weren’t property owners, didn’t have anything,” DeVilder said.
According to DeVilder, there are likely graves of men, women and children at the site. “I think it was mostly women and children, but there were some elderly men because some of the death certificates of some of the people that we think are possibly buried there,” DeVilder said. “We found on Ancestry or down in the County Clerk’s Office we did find some records of some deaths.”
The individuals located by the County include: 49 year old Lizzie Remington who died March 2, 1930, 72 year old Scott Miles who died March 5, 1930, 92 year old Nathaniel Duckworth who died February 10, 1930, 86 year old William Bayles who died May 20, 1930, 73 year old Jacob T. Keller who died January 23, 1923 and 76 or 77 year old William David Goff who died October 9, 1910. To date, these are the only individuals that have been identified to be buried at the site, though the exact location of their graves is unknown, according to DeVilder.
The County Commission, through grant funding, had a Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) study of the site conducted to determine how many graves were at the site. The study revealed in total, DeVilder said 54 graves located at the site with 28 well defined graves, 15 probable and an additional 11 possible sites. “There were 28 well defined, 15 probable and 11 possible,” DeVilder said. “Some were small, so there were all sizes.”
Future plans for the site, according to DeVilder, include landscaping, a bench and a storyboard to memorialize the lives of those buried at the site. “I think there’s plans to do some type of a memorial that says here are the people just as a remembrance and maybe some kind of bench and maybe they will do some sort of landscaping,” DeVilder said.
The Tucker County Farm, also known as the Poor Farm was established on April 9, 1981 when the County bought a 174 acre farm in the St. George District along the Cheat owned by S.E. Parsons and his wife A.E. Parsons, according to a 2020 article by Local Historian Belva Dilly. According to Dilly, it operated as a Poor Farm until the late 1930’s at which time it became part of a Works Projects Administration project under FDR. The Farm then transferred to the Board of Trustees of County 4-H Camps on May 12, 1953, according to Dilly and was deeded to the Tucker County Parks and Recreation Board, Inc. on August 3, 1990 with the stipulation that should the TCPRB cease to exist, the land would revert to the Tucker County Commission. According to DeVilder, the Tucker County Commission regained ownership around 2021 in order to properly maintain the property.
The Commission has recently erected an iron fence around the site that includes a repurposed gate from the Old Jail. The funding for the cemetery project, GPR and fencing was completed with State historic grant funding.
