Sold at Fifteen, Then Shut Out: A Walla Walla Nurseryman's Daughter Ends Up in the County Poor Farm
Sixty-five, penniless and 'bent and weary,' Alice Hess writes from the Spokane County poor farm asking whether the law can force her wealthy Whitney relatives — a nurseryman, a Big Bend doctor, a sitting legislator — to keep her alive.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Cast off by her parents, who are among the wealthy and best known residents of the Inland Empire, Mrs. Alice Hess is an inmate of the Spokane county poor farm at Spangle. She has written an appealing letter from that institution asking the county commissioners if something cannot be done to compel her relatives to care for her, rather than to permit her to remain as a county charge.
She is the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. W. G. Whitney of the Home nursery of Walla Walla, Wash. C. L. Whitney of Walla Walla, one of the leading nurserymen of the state, is her brother. Other brothers are Dr. M. J. Whitney of Davenport, Wash., one of the leading physicians of the Big Bend country; Grant Whitney of Payette, Idaho, and E. C. Whitney of Spokane, who was one of the representatives from this county in the last legislature.
It was a sensational and strange tale that Mrs. Hess told at the office of the Spokane county commissioners when she first applied there to be admitted to the poor farm. She was poorly clad and bent and weary, as she tearfully told her story.
She declared that years ago her father sold her for $250 to Mr. Hess, a pioneer farmer of the Walla Walla country. She says she was then but 15 years old. She declares that her husband treated her cruelly and she left him, and for many years she has been trying to support herself working for different people as a servant.
"Finally I grew too old and too worn out to work and a few months ago I made my way to my parents' home at Walla Walla. 'There is no home for you here,' father told me. 'You may sleep here tonight, but tomorrow you must go away and never come back,'" she says.
She remained there for one night, she told the commissioners, and then she came to Spokane and sought to be declared a common pauper and given a place in the county hospital. From there she has written a letter to the board in which she says generally:
"I am an inmate of the Spokane county hospital and am 65 years old. My parents, W. G. Whitney and wife, of the Home nursery of Walla Walla, have plenty of money and own $100,000 worth of property and have valuable real estate in Spokane county. Dr. M. J. Whitney of Davenport is my brother and Grant Whitney of Payette, Idaho, is my brother. They all have means. E. C. Whitney of Spokane is also my brother. He was in the last legislature from this county, but he is a poor man. Please tell me if there is any way I can compel them to furnish me support."
“"There is no home for you here," father told me. "You may sleep here tonight, but tomorrow you must go away and never come back."”
Washington closed its county poor farms generations ago, but the question Alice Hess put to the commissioners — whether a destitute person can legally force well-off relatives to support her — still surfaces in filial-responsibility laws and in every argument over who the social safety net is for. Her account, printed without any response from the Whitney family, is also a reminder of how little recourse a woman in 1903 had for a claim that she had been sold at fifteen.
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