Rio
Vista Farm
| Marker
Number: |
12342 |
| Marker
Title: |
Rio Vista Farm |
| Index
Entry: |
Rio Vista Farm |
| Address: |
800 Rio Vista Rd. |
| City: |
Socorro |
| County: |
El Paso |
| UTM
Zone: |
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| UTM
Easting: |
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| UTM
Northing: |
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| Subject
Codes: |
PF, FP, AG |
| Year
Marker Erected: |
2000 |
| Designations: |
na |
| Marker
Location: |
|
| Marker
Size: |
27" x 42" |
| Repairs
Completed: |
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| Marker
Text: |
El Paso County's second poor farm, known as
the El Paso Poor Farm, was established here in 1915. John
O'Shea, a wealthy farmer and businessman whose farm was nearby,
assumed operation of the farm. His wife, Agnes O'Shea, was in
charge of the residents. John O'Shea died in 1929, and the
couple's daughter, Helen O'Shea Keleher, came from her home in
San Antonio to operate the farm with her mother. The farm was
scheduled to be closed in 1929, but, with the troubled times of
the Depression era, its population grew. Renamed "Rio Vista
Farm," the poor farm hosted a variety of public welfare
programs beginning in the 1930s. It operated under the Texas
Transient Bureau and later the Federal Works Progress
Administration. A temporary base for a Civilian Conservation
Corps unit in 1936, the farm continued to shelter hundreds of
homeless and destitute adults and children. From 1951 to 1964,
the farm was used as a reception and processing center for the
Bracero Program, which brought Mexican laborers to work in the
lower valley of El Paso and other agricultural areas in the U.S.
New federal welfare programs and state law reduced the
population of the poor farm to four, and it was closed in 1964.
Unlike other Texas county poor farms, Rio Vista followed a
familial rather than institutional model, accepting neglected
and abandoned children in addition to the adult indigent
population. In later life, Helen O'Shea Keleher cited the fifty
years she spent with the more than four thousand orphans and
neglected children of the Rio Vista Poor Farm as her proudest
accomplishment. (2000) |
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