Megan Birk, "The Fundamental Institution: Poverty, Social Welfare, and Agriculture in American Poor Farms" (U Illinois Press, 2022)
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What Kind of Institutions Did the Poor Get?
Before the civil war, a lot of counties handled their poor relief through sometimes direct aid or some kind of payment in kind. For those people who were too injured or sick or incapable of using that type of assistance to essentially self support or self sustain, there were boarding payments. The problem that counties ran into was that that was prohibitively expensive. And so they looked to a different solution: build out their own institution. That would save them on boarding costs and allow them to consolidate all that relief need in one place.
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