Poor Farm Geographies of Minnesota
This is a public research project by Jesse McClelland, an urban geographer and public scholar based in the Twin Cities. I began working on Minnesota’s poor farm legacies while at Macalester College from 2021 to 2023. Since February 2025, I have been collaborating with TREC students who are incarcerated at Faribault prison on “A Public Study of the Rice County Poor Farm.”
Thank you for your interest in this work! Please send comments and questions through the Contact page.
Top-left: The Ramsey County Almshouse residence, built in the late 1860s, was inherited by the Minnesota State Fairgrounds in 1885. This became the Administration Building and it was demolished in 1951. Photographer unknown, 1951. Courtesy of the Minnesota State Fair Archives.
Top-right: Fourth location of the Ramsey County Poor Farm in New Canada Township — now the Ramsey County Fairgrounds in Maplewood. From Hopkins’ “Atlas of St. Paul and Its Environs,” 1886.
Bottom-right: Threshing at the Hennepin County Poor Farm. Date and photographer unknown. Courtesy of the Hopkins Historical Society.
Bottom-left: The Hennepin County Poor Farm in the Village of West Minneapolis — now Hopkins. From Westby’s “Atlas of Hennepin County,” 1913.
Updates
November 2025
Poor farms made a rare appearance in the Minnesota Star Tribune on November 7 as part of the Curious Minnesota series. The Rochester-based journalist, Sean Baker, was inspired to write What was life like on Minnesota’s poor farms? after he received a tip from a reader in Goodhue County. Sean kindly interviewed me for the story, as well as the historian Megan Birk (U Tennessee-Knoxville) and drew on archives of the Goodhue County Historical Society.
November 2025
I made two public presentations about this project in one week!
On November 6, I spoke at a “Seed Talk” Gathering online, “Collaborations and Partnerships in Food-Based Community Engagement” (video link) with other writers representing the Gleanings From the Field book. Other speakers were Dan Trudeau and Bill Moseley from Macalester College, Sophie Hunt from St. Catherine University, Jennifer Tacheny from Sisters of St. Joseph Carondelet and Vanessa Preast from Grinnell College. Thank you to Adia Zeman Theis and others at Seed Coalition for producing this event.
On November 2, I was part of TREC’s Research Cluster Showcase at the Eastside Freedom Library in Saint Paul. Alongside TREC colleagues representing two other projects, I gave an overview of the work that my teammates and I are doing at the Faribault prison on the history of the Rice County Poor Farm. Prior clearance from the DOC allowed me to publicly acknowledge the contributions and insights of team members by name. We hope to begin circulating our written work next year.
April 2025
My chapter, “Pedagogy for a public geography of poor farms,” appears in the new anthology, Gleanings from the Field: Food Security, Resilience, and Experiential Learning, edited by Dan Trudeau, Bill Moseley and Paul Schadewald and published by Lever Press. This is my first formal piece of writing about poor farms. I wrote a short overview of the chapter. With pride in the work that my co-authors and I have done, I invite folks to check out all the chapters in this interdisciplinary (and open access) anthology!
March 2025
Great news! I am back at this.
I have never stopped thinking about poor farms since this project began, but I took a hiatus the last couple of years as I moved into job searching, more care-giving, and some teaching at Metropolitan State University here in Saint Paul. This Spring, I began a research collaboration with some of Metro’s students incarcerated at the Faribault prison. Our project is tentatively called A Public Study of the Rice County Poor Farm. From 1868 to 1955, Rice County operated a Poor Farm near the southwest corner of Faribault. In the 1990s, the prison was built at the southeast corner of Faribault on the former grounds of the Minnesota State Hospital.
My hard-working co-researchers there bring a very grounded approach to this place-based work and they are eager to make public contributions to local history. It feels exciting, challenging, and meaningful to be working alongside them. We have no end date for this project in sight, and that open-endedness is perhaps the most intriguing possibility in the work.
This turn began in November 2024, when I applied to facilitate a Research Cluster through Metro State University’s part of the Transformation and Reentry through Education and Community (TREC) network. Like the other six Research Clusters that TREC is supporting, the work is funded by a grant from the Mellon Foundation.
