Michelle Willard, The Murfreesboro Post, July 22, 2013
Pearlie Rutherford, pictured here with an unnamed child, died of unknown causes in 1938 or 1939 at the Rutherford County Farm.
Depression hit in 1929, many were left homeless.
The luckiest were taken in by family members. Others yet found their way to the Rutherford County Farm, known also as the poorhouse.
“Back then there wasn’t any social security. There wasn’t anything. You just had to take your relatives in,” explained Lucille York, 86, a Murfreesboro resident who recalled those lean years and how her already large family took in her grandmother, her aunt and her cousin in the 1930s.
Her aunt Ann Davenport Rutherford and her cousin Pearlie would eventually make their way to the County Farm, where Pearlie found her final resting place in an unmarked grave in a paupers cemetery east of the current Community Care of Rutherford County on County Farm Road.
The Rutherford County Farm has provided a place for those in need for almost 200 years. It started as a self-sustaining farm where the poor and insane could find the care they needed has developed into the nursing home, Community Care of Rutherford County.
Years after the surrounding land was sold to a local farmer, the County Farm’s paupers cemetery was recently found and is in the process of being restored with hope of opening it to the public some time in the near future.
“It was forgotten. The county didn’t know it was theirs,” explained Mark King, administrator at Community Care of Rutherford County.
He has hope the dead can be commemorated with a marker, listing the names of those known to be buried there. But this is a hard task, since most graves were marked only with field stones and records are spotty.
A search through county’s death rolls by Rutherford County Archivist John Lodl produced some names.
CCRC Social Worker Pam Jackson said these names date from Jan. 1, 1914-Nov. 1, 1925, which is but a snapshot of the County Farm’s cemetery’s history, which was in use between 1891 and 1962.
“On that list there are 65 names,” she said. “The age is from an unknown female infant found by the railroad tracks in 1915 through a widowed black female named Annie Alsup who died on March 27, 1919, (who was) ‘about 100.’ … The list is very interesting. Very few birth dates were exact and very few have reference to a parent’s name.”
And the list keeps growing.
York was one of several Rutherford countians who have called in the past few weeks to make sure their relatives are properly commemorated.
“I just want to make sure she’s remembered,” York said about her cousin. So she called CCRC at 615-893-2624 and left a message for Jackson.
“Over the years I’ve wondered so much about where she was,” York said.
For the few months Ann and Pearlie lived at the County Farm, York and her mother would visit the pair, bring food and other things.
“I remember it was wintertime and they raised the window and set the milk out on the ledge. …” York said “They set the milk out there to keep it from spoiling.”
Not long after that trip, Pearlie got sicker and York’s mother attended the death bed until the young woman’s death. York said her mother may have been the only family member, other than Pearlie’s mother Ann, to attend her burial.
“A neighbor lady picked flowers from her yard for my mother to take out there,” York recalled. “They didn’t have any funeral, just buried them like dogs. And that’s why it’s always been so sad.”
York doesn’t remember exactly when or why her aunt Ann Davenport Rutherford and her cousin Pearlie came to live with the family in the Dilton community. But that relatives would rotate between their home and the homes of other families.
“They were living in Alabama and working in a cotton mill – both of them were working in a cotton mill – and my aunt got sick,” she said.
Both Ann and Pearlie had health problems. Ann had seizures and Pearlie was undiagnosed, but may have had multiple sclerosis or similar degenerative disease, York said.
York said that Pearlie was in and out of hospitals with tests run, but no diagnosis.
Then Ann and Pearlie came to Tennessee to live with York and her family on the farm where York’s father was a sharecropper. Eventually the family had to move into a smaller house and the pair were asked to move north, but the younger woman refused, instead moving to the County Farm for the remainder of her short life.
“Before Pearlie died she told her mother not to stay there,” York said. “So she came back to live with us.”