Mad Ecologies tells the story of the Johnson County Historic Poor Farm (JCHPF), 160 acres located on the outskirts of a small midwestern town in the United States, a location now listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The JCHPF operated between 1855 and 1953 as a county institution to manage poor and disabled persons, two populations whose lives were shaped by national rhetorics of dependency and their capacity to work. Now, the farm is a site where visitors are invited to engage in restoration efforts, including learning about the farm’s history. Through visual, written, and oral narratives, visitors contemplate how the conditions of care for those at the JCHPF then compare to systems today. Historical storytelling at the JCHPF is crucial to the mission of community healing, but at this site, it is less clear how to evaluate the connection between them. What then is the role of the historical critic in deepening interpretive context within community engaged work?

Drawing from research in process, this talk engages queer crip methods (Cartwright, 2020) of reading archives of rural deviance, and takes a deep dive into some of the key institutions and record management of poverty and disability over the poor farm’s lifecycle. These include state entities of legislating and financing; medical research and institutionalization; and charity organizations and social reform movements. These archives underscore the need to evaluate “care” within a broader cultural formation of 19th century dependency rhetorics and the orientations of critical disability history.