State Hospital Cemetery and Poor Farm Cemetery Tour

Name: State Hospital Cemetery and Poor Farm Cemetery Tour
Start: 2025-10-18T11:00:00-05:00
Location: Mn Veterans Home Fergus Falls

Schedule

Sat, 18 Oct, 2025 at 11:00 am

UTC-05:00

Location

Mn Veterans Home Fergus Falls | Fergus Falls, MN

The Otter Tail County Historical Society is sponsoring a tour of the Fergus Falls State Hospital cemetery and Poor Farm cemetery on Saturday, October 18, 11am. The cost for the tour is $10. Park in the back lot of the Minnesota Veterans Home and look for Chris with his OTCHS banner. No motorized vehicles are allowed, and handicapped accessibility is limited.
Patient deaths were an inevitable part of operating a state asylum. If a patient had no next of kin or no one wanted him, officials had no choice but to bury them at the hospital cemetery at state expense. From the first burial in August 1890 to the last in 1968, some 3,200 people were laid to rest there. Many of the graves are unmarked, yet everyone has names, lives and stories. The tour will attempt to uncover bits and pieces of this history, to give names to those forgotten.
West of the hospital cemetery is the Otter Tail County Poor Farm cemetery. Before there was any kind of government safety net, counties were responsible for the poorest of the poor. In 1881, Otter Tail County started a poor farm two miles north of Fergus Falls. For those who died while at the Farm and had no one to claim them, a cemetery was established west of the Farm. From the early 1880s until the mid 1930s, over 150 people were buried at the Poor Farm cemetery. Volunteers from the organization A Paupers Grave, will be on hand to tell us about their efforts to locate and mark Poor Farm cemetery gravesites.
For more information on the tour, call OTCHS at 218-736-6038. Preregistration is not needed.