The Home Farm

The steeple of Nashoba’s parish church was imposing, but it was not a white needle pointing at the sky. It was a domed tower with a bell chamber and a clock.

Behind the church on the road to Acton stood the parsonage of the Reverend Horatio Biddle. From the front door, Horatio and his wife, Ingeborg, could look down the whole length of the burial ground to the place where the chestnut tree marked the edge of the graveyard. Across Quarry Pond Road, hidden by the gigantic canopy of leaves, was the home of Horatio’s fractious parishioner Josiah Gideon. In front of the church stretched the rough grass of the town green, and beyond the green stood another building painful to the sight of Horatio Biddle. Josiah Gideon called it the Nashoba Home Farm, which was only his fancy name for the old Nashoba poorhouse, so long a depository for bastard and orphaned children, the aged and infirm, the feebleminded and insane.

The Nashoba Home Farm was not the only almshouse supervised by Josiah Gideon. He had been appointed by the Massachusetts State Board of Charities to inspect all the almshouses in Middlesex County. Therefore, he spent three days a week touring the countryside, interviewing caretakers, examining infirmaries, laundries, and kitchens, and taking note of provisions for heat and light, fresh air and exercise, washing and bathing.

As a Christian clergyman, Josiah had been drawn to this work by observing that the greatest need for human courage came at the time of greatest weakness—in old age or desperate poverty. Thank God, things were no longer as inhumane as they had once been, back in the bad old days when town charges were auctioned off “at public venue” to the lowest bidder and exploited for their labor. No longer might their dead bodies be handed over for dissection to medical schools in order to further “the advancement of medical science.” No, things were no longer as bad as that. Most of the almshouses inspected by Josiah were run by competent superintendents and matrons. The others aroused his furious pity and relentless nagging.

In Nashoba, Josiah’s fiery eye had cowed the overseers of the poor into financing a model home for the indigent. The result was a handsome addition to the old workhouse and a new barn equipped with livestock and outfitted with all the tools and machinery necessary to a thriving agricultural enterprise. There were horse rakes and plows, a mowing machine, a cultivator, a mechanical seeder, a spring-tooth harrow, a dozen sap buckets, and a plentiful supply of hand tools.

Compared to the Boston House of Industry, the entire establishment was small. But Josiah had vowed that the inmates of the Home Farm would turn a profit from the wasted fields and common grazing land belonging to the town. In addition, they would put the sugar bush to use and cut a swath through the town forest, a wilderness like some far uncharted corner of the globe.

It had not been easy. The board of selectmen had balked at the expense. Josiah had received a formal letter: “The board would by no means favor an unnecessary expenditure in building ornamental palaces, either for criminals or paupers, nor do they wish even to make such a house attractive to the idle.”

Josiah Gideon cared nothing for official letters. At the next meeting of the selectmen, he had ranted and raved, and prevailed.