The forgotten graves at Eastmanville's old poor farm

Walk the mowed trails at the Eastmanville Farm park, out past the open fields, and you reach a small fenced clearing on a rise of ground. A stone there carries a plaque and a list of names. Most of the people buried around it have no marker of their own — only three headstones still stand — and for most of a century, nobody came at all.

This was the burying ground for the Ottawa County Poor Farm. In 1866 the county bought the land at Eastmanville for $6,000 and turned it into what an earlier era bluntly called a poor farm: a place that took in people who were old, sick, penniless, or struggling with their minds, and had nowhere else to go. They worked the fields when they could. When they died with no family to claim them, they were buried here.

The records are thin on purpose and thin by neglect. Burials from the first decades went largely unwritten, but 64 are documented between 1897 and 1931. Then, for reasons never fully explained, neighbors began objecting to the burials, and around 1931 they stopped. The little cemetery slid into the woods. For about 70 years it sat overgrown and unvisited, the names sinking out of memory.

What pulled it back was one man’s family tie. Eldon Kramer, a descendant of someone buried there, joined a group of local volunteers led by Marjie Viveen, and together they cleared the brush, raised a fence, and set the memorial stone. In 2010 the cemetery was rededicated — the first formal attention these graves had drawn in generations.

The county park around it keeps the rest of the old farm’s story in the open: barns, trails, wildflowers. But the quiet part is up the hill, where a fence keeps watch over people the county once kept, finally named again.