"To Board & Nurse a Stranger": Poverty, Disability, and Community in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts

In 1786, Betty Trifle, a woman the townspeople described as "furiously insane," arrived in Uxbridge, MA. Lacking family, property, town settlement, and the "wherewithall to support herself," the Uxbridge selectmen arranged for Trifle to be boarded with local residents Nathan and Nancy Tyler. For the next twenty-three years, the Tylers and other townspeople housed, clothed, fed, and nursed Trifle—sending receipts for their expenses and labor to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which issued them annual disbursements.

Trifle's experience of poverty and disability was not unusual in eighteenth-century Massachusetts nor was the town-provided but state-funded care she received. Drawing on nearly two thousand requests for reimbursement from townspeople and selectmen to the Massachusetts General Court between 1786 and 1799, this paper recovers the extensive system of boarding sick and disabled "strangers," or people without settlement rights, in the homes of town residents—a method of poor reliefthat historians have almost entirely overlooked.

Accounts of the intimate caregiving and receiving relationships between boarders and hosts—which often continued for years and bridged racial, ethnic, and social divides—suggest that the bounds of eighteenth-century Massachusetts communities were flexible and capacious in ways that scholars have not fully recognized. At the same time, the labor associated with nursing ailing nonresidents laid bare the hierarchies of gender, race, class, and ability within these communities, corroborating scholarship on the gendered and racialized dynamics of care. Lodging arrangements that bound strangers and residents together depended on the unrecognized and uncompensated work of women.