Conservative commentators often blame poverty on the poor themselves, describing them as unwilling to work, always in search of a handout. This view of poverty has an ancient pedigree that spans the globe. More than three hundred years ago, for example, the famous Russian sovereign, Peter the Great, channelling European predecessors, tried to stamp out begging, accusing the poor of self-mutilation in order to avoid work and receive alms instead.
Early Grinnell also had its poor and seems to have viewed the poor with no more sympathy than had Peter the Great. In this Christian citadel on the plains, officials exerted considerable effort to prevent individual charity, installing instead a system that required the able-bodied poor to work in exchange for assistance.
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| 1922 Photograph of John Marquis Campbell (1846-1933) (Grinnell Herald-Register, August 4, 2014) |
Today's post tells the story of poor relief in early Grinnell and how one man, John M. Campbell, bequeathed a sizable legacy to the city of Grinnell in aid of the "worthy poor."
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The pioneers who settled Grinnell in the nineteenth century were a hardy, hard-working lot whose experiences proved to them that people who work hard succeed. They expected, therefore, that everyone would work hard and live disciplined lives, and they took a dim view of those who did not. These values had a direct impact upon their understanding of charity.
In 1891, the Grinnell Herald [GH] reported on the creation in Grinnell of a local "Charity Organization Society" whose aim was to "diminish poverty and eradicate pauperism by fostering in all the spirit of industry, thrift and self control...." Its motto was "not alms but a friend." Condemning conventional charities for encouraging "indolence and fraud and bold-faced imposture," the writer bemoaned the fate of the "worthy poor [who] suffer in silence, unhelped by the boundless charity lavished all around them." Not unlike some critics of government aid today, the Herald worried that late nineteenth-century Grinnell had "children growing up with the debasing knowledge that money, food and clothing may be secured from charity or the public purse more easily than they can be earned." At the same time, the newspaper observed, "we have side by side with them families of the industrious, self-respecting poor, earning by hard and patient toil their living and scorning alms" (GH 11/24/1891).
A similar perspective emerges in a 1901 newspaper article reprinted from the Malcom Leader whose opinions the Grinnell paper heartily endorsed. "We believe," the paper asserted, "that all worthy people who are not able to support themselves should be furnished such plain substantial assistance as their condition requires, but such assistance should be limited to the necessities of life only, and only to those who are willing to, but unable to take care of themselves...We believe that the method of the board of supervisors has been in the past too lenient and indulgent and it has had the tendency to encourage pauperism, rather than to provide only for the worthy poor" (GH 9/17/1901).
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| Undated Photo of Adah May Hopkins (ancestrylibrary.com/family-tree/person/tree/159871606/person/122090233733/gallery) |
In her 1913 summary report Hopkins proudly announced that the number of persons receiving aid had decreased by 27 percent from the previous year, and that in March of that year only twelve families had received permanent relief:
These consisted of old persons living alone, widows with children, and sick or disabled bread-winners of families. An effort is being made to withhold all aid from families where there are able-bodied children capable of supporting themselves and parents, where offers of work have been refused, and where there is well-founded suspicion of immoral conditions in the home" (Grinnell Register [GR] 4/21/1913).
With the support of the city council in 1914 the League collaborated with the Streets Commissioner to hire the unemployed in exchange for room and board, a proposal which its authors thought would prove how large a per cent of the men coming in from the outside really wanted to work and how many were simply imposing upon the public (GH 2/6/1914). Reporting two weeks later on the results, the Herald told readers that "out of the thirty-three men who were offered the opportunity to work for their lodging, about one-third accepted..." (2/27/1914). As officials regularly repeated, the League intended "to develope [sic] dormant powers with the aim that every applicant for aid may become self-respecting, self-supporting, healthy in body and in mind..." (GR 10/22/1914).
This understanding of poverty and the poor prevailed in early twentieth-century Grinnell. Local churches, clubs, and civic organizations contributed to and cooperated with the Social Service League to police charity in Grinnell. The Commercial Club, the city council, and numerous individuals threw their support behind this effort to reform the poor. City-wide campaigns brought cash and donated clothing into the League's coffers, involving hundreds of townsfolk in the effort to unmask the undeserving and encourage the worthy poor. This view of the poor and charity informed the view of one Grinnell resident whose financial legacy continues to flow in today's Grinnell.
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Like most inhabitants of early Grinnell, John Marquis Campbell (1846-1933) was born elsewhere. The 1850 US Census found him, a four-year-old, in Hancock County, Virginia where he lived with his widowed mother and one-year-old brother, Thomas. His mother soon remarried, but what consequence that had for the boys is unclear. John's boyhood left no marks in the record until the Civil War broke out. West Virginia was recognized as a state of the Union in 1863 and Campbell was then living in New Cumberland, West Virginia. It was there that at age eighteen (March 1, 1864) he enlisted in the Union Army. As a private in Battery D of the 1st West Virginia Light Artillery, Campbell took part in several engagements in the Shenandoah Valley that spring. Only months after enlisting, he was captured June 21st by the Confederates at Mason's Corner and marched to Lynchburg, Virginia and then on to Andersonville Prison in Georgia where the young soldier spent five very difficult months.
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| John Ransom's Drawing of Andersonville Prison (https://loc.gov/pictures/resource/pga.02585/) |
Interviewed fifty years later about his experiences in Andersonville, Campbell proved reluctant to reveal details of his imprisonment, but did say that "when he first saw the interior of the [Andersonville] stockade, he did not see how any more [prisoners] could possibly be accommodated, it was so crowded" (GH 9/30/1930). Campbell arrived at Andersonville July 12, 1864, the day after the hanging of six "raiders" in the prison, so he missed that particular chapter in the gruesome history of Andersonville. But, like the rest of the 30,000 or so Andersonville captives, Campbell had to endure the horrors of living in the open with no shelter, little water, skimpy rations, and among disease and staggering levels of mortality.
John Lynch, a New Yorker who was captured and interned at Andersonville in early July 1864, almost the same time as Campbell, left behind a record of his experience.
On entering [Andersonville]..., the sights of misery, agony and torture we beheld filled us with horror; the forms that were once vigorous and active we now beheld living skeletons, lying on the hot sand, fully exposed to a scorching sun, and writhing in agony from the effects of burning fever, crying in their delirium, for relief...fully 80 percent of the prisoners had no protection whatever from sun or storm...all the time suffering keenly from the pangs of hunger, and compelled to drink...that which was not fit for washing purposes...I have seen hundreds..., suffering beyond description from fever, scurvy, diarrhoea, etc., crying feebly in God's name for some relief...From fifteen to sixty dead bodies were laid daily at the gate, awaiting the dead wagon into which they were thrown...then hauled out and tossed into a trench, two feet deep... (The Horrors of Andersonville Prison Pen. The Personal Experience of Henry Hernbaker, Jr. and John Lynch [Philadelphia: Merrihew and Sons, 1876], 8-9, 11).
Of the 45,000 men imprisoned at Andersonville roughly 13,000 died, among them about 175 Iowans (according to a list of the deceased published in 1866). Campbell was fortunate to have survived, but nothing in the record explains how Campbell escaped the dire fate of so many, nor does the record identify what illness or deprivation he may have endured. Extant documents recall only that on November 11, 1864 he was sent to Miller, Georgia and that two weeks later—November 24—he was "paroled" at Savannah, Georgia. By December 1 he had reported to hospital at Camp Parole, Maryland (Memorandum From Prisoner of War Records). A December 1, 1864 Muster Roll for his unit confirms that Campbell was paid for September and October and that Campbell was "exchanged at Savannah, Georgia or Charleston, S. C. (Nov or Dec 1864)" for Confederate prisoners (Muster Roll for Virginia [sic] First Regiment Light Artillery). The details of how he spent the last months of the war and how he made his way home remain unknown. Records of the Grand Army of the Republic, to which Campbell belonged, indicate that on June 24, 1865 he was mustered out at Wheeling, West Virginia after sixteen months of service (five of which he had passed in Andersonville). Campbell later filed for and received a pension for service in the Civil War, but apparently spoke little about his experiences after that.
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What Campbell did immediately after the war remains a mystery. We know only that the 1870 US Census found him in Mercer County, Illinois, living with and working for his mother's younger brother, Daniel Mayhew. Exactly when Campbell arrived in Illinois is unknown, but he had to have been there no later than 1868 when he purchased 160 acres of land in Jasper County, Iowa from John Travis and his wife. It may be that at the time of the purchase Campbell had only just arrived in Illinois, because the document, which was composed in Montgomery County, Illinois, omits to identify Campbell's place of residence ("John M. Campbell of the County of ________") (Jasper County, Iowa, Recorder, Book 43, Pages 542-543). How Campbell met Travis and why he decided to purchase land in Iowa rather than in Illinois where his uncle lived no record explains. Also unclear is where Campbell acquired the $1000 he paid Travis. He told the 1870 census official that he owned no land and had personal property worth only $450. His uncle, on the other hand, told the census-taker that his farmland was worth $9000 and his movables were worth another $2550, so we may wonder if Mayhew had perhaps staked Campbell to his first land purchase.
In late December 1870 Campbell married, taking as his wife Sarah Castor (1849-1929), who had been born in western Pennsylvania but had grown up in Mercer County, Illinois, just south of Muscatine, Iowa. Sarah was one of eight children born to Lewis and Ellen Castor. The 1860 US Census found the family in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania where Lewis made cabinets. Ten years later, however, Lewis was farming in Illinois and doing quite well. In 1860 he reported that his farm was worth $6300, movables adding another $1800 to the estate; in 1870 he told the census-taker that his property was worth almost $15,000. Consequently, by 1870 John Campbell had had at least a few years' experience farming in Illinois, and presumably had the backing of his well-off uncle and prosperous father-in-law. Moreover, the bridegroom himself now owned 160 acres of land in central Iowa.
Soon after the wedding, therefore, the young couple traveled to Iowa, settling on a farm in Mariposa Township, Jasper County, due west of Newburg. Life on the farm in the 1870s seems to have been good. The newlyweds worked hard and their farm prospered. Their family also grew, Sarah Campbell giving birth to three children in these years. David Lewis Campbell (1871-1948) was born soon after the family reached Iowa and his sister, Bessie Rebecca (1875-1951), was born on the farm four years later. A third child, Frank, died in infancy, although when he was born and died I did not discover.
As his family grew, so, too, did the size of the Campbell farm, as John continued to acquire farmland. In 1875 he paid $1125 to George Hiskey (1803-1883) and his wife to purchase eighty acres on the border with Hickory Grove township, due east of the original Campbell farmstead (Jasper County, Iowa, Recorder, Book 85, Page 613). In 1882 he bought another 160 acres, again on the township border, but north of the Hiskey farm. The price was quite a bit higher—$4250—but included a $1000 mortgage which Campbell was able to pay off within two years (ibid., Book 125, Page 598). Consequently, by the early 1880s Campbell owned 400 acres in Jasper County, land that he farmed profitably, to judge by the money he spent to purchase more land.
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| Karen Groves's Plat Map Showing Farms in John Campbell Trust |
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| Undated Photo of Thomas M. and Lunyett Campbell (ancestrylibrary.com/family-tree/172690427/person/172244165414/facts) |
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| 1908 Photo of Grinnell Savings Bank, 825 Fourth Ave., Grinnell (https://digital.grinnell.edu/islandora/object/grinnell%3A12974) |
Most Grinnell townsfolk of that era belonged to a church, but the Campbells seem not to have been especially ardent Christians. The 1895 Iowa census, which included a question inquiring about "Religious Belief," reported that John Campbell was "Indif[ferent]" to religion, and Campbell's 1915 Iowa Census card left blank the line that asked for church affiliation. I could not find John's name among the membership lists of any Grinnell church nor did I find any newspaper mentions of his association with a Grinnell church, all of which indicates that religion did not have much impact upon him. His 1933 funeral did take place in Grinnell's Methodist Church, but that seems to have happened without any earlier ties. Sarah Campbell reported in the 1895 census that she was a Baptist, and her obituary makes the same claim. But it was the Methodist minister, Rev. George Blagg, who presided at her 1929 funeral that took place at their Sixth Avenue home (rather than at church) and I could not find Sarah's name in the surviving Baptist church directories. Consequently, one must conclude that religion played little part in the Campbells' life in Grinnell.
By contrast, both John and Sarah Campbell actively participated in organizations that connected them to the Civil War. John was a long-time and faithful member of the Grand Army of the Republic (G.A.R.), and Sarah was active in its sister organization, the Woman's Relief Corps (W.R.C.). Grinnell newspapers regularly told readers of Campbell's attendance at G.A.R. encampments, and John sometimes served as officer in the Gordon Granger chapter of the G.A.R.: in 1902, for instance, he was junior vice commander (GH 12/12/1902) and he marched as G.A.R. post commander in the city's 1909 Memorial Day parade (GH 5/28/1909). When in 1922 Nina Wayne Grau (1884-1974) took photographs of Grinnell's surviving Civil War veterans, John Campbell was one of twenty-eight whose likeness she preserved and exhibited at Merchants National Bank (GH 3/28/1922). |
| Headline of Story in Grinnell Herald, March 28, 1922 |
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| Life vol. 48 (Jul-Dec 1906):242 |
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| Hudson Super Six (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson_Super_Six#Indie) |
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So far as the printed record can prove, the Campbells enjoyed a good life in Grinnell. Despite Grinnell's bank failures in the mid-1920s and the country's limp toward the Great Depression, John and Sarah Campbell had little of which to complain. Sarah's obituary described her as "loved and respected by those who knew her and she in turn was a good neighbor and friend." John's obituarist claimed that "everyone liked John Campbell" and described him as "a good citizen and a friendly, pleasant companion." Nevertheless, illness and mortality found them as the 1920s expired.
Autumn 1929 Sarah Campbell experienced a health crisis which brought gradual decline as autumn ceded its place to winter. When Sarah died at home in early December, Dr. Ralph Brooker (d. 1936) attributed death to "apoplexy," a term with a confusing and vague history. Since no autopsy was done on Sarah, it seems unlikely that Dr. Brooker found evidence of organ hemorrhage, the narrow meaning of apoplexy; more likely Sarah suffered a stroke in September when Brooker first saw her, and her condition deteriorated over the next few months until her early December death. John Campbell survived her, sharing their Sixth Avenue home with daughter Bessie.
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March 22, 1933 entry in St. Francis Hospital Register (Grinnell Historical Museum; my thanks to Ann Igoe for providing me with these scans) But John Campbell's health also was approaching its limit. As the St. Francis Hospital Register shows, on March 22, 1933 John entered St. Francis hospital where his doctor, John Padgham (1876-1948), ordered x-rays. By April 4th, Campbell was dead, Padgham reporting the cause of death to be carcinoma of the stomach, an illness that Padgham said had lasted for about a year. Surviving John Campbell were his two children: Bessie, who would have been about 58 when her father died, had never married and had no children; David Lewis Campbell was four years older, had married Mabel Knight in 1899, but also had no children. |
John Campbell composed his last will and testament in late January 1931, a little over a year after Sarah's death and about two years before his own demise. The spare document established the John M. and Sarah J. Campbell Trust, the income of which was to be paid to Bessie and David, "share and share alike," "so long as they both shall live, and thereafter to the survivor." Campbell named the Grinnell State Bank as trustee, empowered "to manage, control, sell and convey any real estate belonging to such Trust, and to invest and reinvest the funds belonging thereto." The two Campbell children received regular payouts from the fund—David until his death in 1948 and Bessie until her death in October 1951.
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| Last Will & Testament of John M. Campbell (Poweshiek County District Court Record 1909-1936, Vol. E, P. 499) |
After the death of my children, I direct that the net income from said Trust shall be used for the relief of the worthy poor in the City of Grinnell; and I direct that the Trustee of said Trust shall pay said net income to such persons at such times and in such amounts as shall be determined by the Mayor and City Council of the City of Grinnell...the Mayor and City Council shall give preference to those who may be in need of hospital care or medical attendance...no continuing pension shall be established in favor of anyone and...the funds shall be so applied and paid as to afford relief to those most in need...The names of those receiving assistance under this Trust shall never under any circumstances be published (Poweshiek County District Court Record, 1909-1936, Vol. E, p. 499).
Over the years since the death of Bessie Campbell, the John M. and Sarah J. Campbell Trust has distributed millions. Writing in 2014, Mary Schuchmann reported that in the preceding twenty-five years alone the trust had paid out almost $2.3 million (Grinnell Herald-Register, 6/30/2014); the total payout since the 1950s is probably in excess of $4 million.
Those in Grinnell who had been involved with the Social Service League must have been surprised at John Campbell's plan. The man's financial success gave little reason to think that he identified with or cared about the poor, worthy or otherwise. It is possible that he was the anonymous "benevolent citizen" who in 1919 gave $2500 over five years to pay medical bills of the "worthy poor" (GH 7/15/1919), but nothing else—religious or otherwise—survives to confirm his charitable impulse. Indeed, like other of Grinnell's pioneers, John Campbell braved a great deal to succeed on the Iowa plains and, so far as we know, he had no help in fashioning a large estate that generated a good income.
Perhaps in his last years John Campbell turned his mind's eye back to those dreadful months he spent in Andersonville prison in 1864. If any moment from his eighty-seven years etched in consciousness the wretched condition of those unable to help themselves, the gruesome existence of Union soldiers within Andersonville did. But if the shadows of his teenage encounter with mortality and dreadful want in Andersonville circulated within his adult brain, John Campbell told no one about it.
Meanwhile, official Grinnell set about policing charity so that only the helpless—widows, the disabled, the penurious—earned public compassion. Bruited about in the public square and on the pages of local newspapers, Grinnell's "worthy poor" occupied a prominent place in the consciousness of John Campbell's Grinnell. Here, where the well-off were plagued by deceptive impostors and able-bodied men unwilling to work, John Campbell could absorb a particular vision of charity that could be reliably extended only to the "worthy poor."
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NOTE: I owe special thanks to Phil Palmer, Sharon Mealey, Cheryl Neubert, Barb Lease and Ann Igoe. I am also indebted to Mary Schuchmann, Dorrie Lalonde, Barb Lease, and the late Karen Groves for having done the original research on John Campbell that appeared in several articles in the Grinnell Herald-Register some years ago.
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