HELENA — After more than 100 years, an unmarked graveyard for those whom some call Helena’s forgotten is no longer unmarked.
A plaque, unveiled on May 20, marks the Poor Farm cemetery—the final resting place for more than 380 people.
Marian Davidson reports - watch the video here:
“You tend to remember the people who were important, Tommy Cruse and Sam Hauser, all the movers and shakers in Helena history, but you tend to forget the ones that weren’t so lucky,” said Jon Axline, Montana Department of Transportation historian.
Some of those who weren’t so lucky are buried in the two-acre plot now in the middle of a residential subdivision off Benton Avenue in Helena.
Today, it looks like an empty field, but from the end of the 1800s into the early 1900s, it was used as the former Lewis & Clark County Hospital cemetery.
The Lewis & Clark County Hospital—also called the Poor Farm—opened on the site of the present-day Florence Crittenton Cooney campus in the late 1800s. It housed people like the elderly who had no one to care for them, people who were disabled and unable to work, and orphaned and abandoned children.
“It didn’t make them bad people to be in the Poor Farm,” said Pam Attardo, Helena and Lewis & Clark County historic preservation officer. “It’s just sometimes luck runs out and you don’t have anyone to turn to.”
From 1891 to 1916, at least 381 men, women and children were buried in the Poor Farm cemetery. Historians say record-keeping was scant, so beyond names, little is known about the people buried in the cemetery.
Much of the research into whose final resting place the cemetery is was done by the late Helena historian Charlene Spalding. And some historians believe there may even be more than the recorded 381 buried in the two-acre plot.
“A lot of them were the people that built Helena, literally by hand, and just ran into some bad luck and ended up here, forgotten,” Axline said.
Wooden crosses may have marked the graves at one time, but the cemetery and the people in it were almost lost to time.
“It was one of those instances where it was kind of like an urban legend,” Axline said.
In 2022, the site was scanned with ground-penetrating radar, which found a pattern indicative of graves.
In 2023, cadaver dogs searched the site and alerted to the scent of human remains.
Finally, the cemetery was included in the Lewis & Clark County Hospital Historic District, which is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
On May 20, a plaque was unveiled marking the cemetery and explaining what it is.
“Nobody wants to be forgotten and have no trace on earth of them being here,” Attardo said. “I think it’s important to acknowledge these folks.”
