Back in 1895, Mother Place was just Mrs. Martha Place, a widow who looked exactly like every widow looked in rural Iowa—gray dress, gray bun, gray outlook on life. She lived on a little patch of land near Mitchellville, and kept to herself, which everyone said was respectable until it suddenly wasn’t.
A young woman handing her baby over to Mother Place
Her business was simple, if you didn’t think too hard about it. Women from Des Moines or nearby towns would arrive, holding bundles they didn’t want to hold anymore. They’d hand them to Mrs. Place—and she’d take them in exchange for a few crumpled bills and the promise they’d be “well cared for.” Nobody used words like “adoption” or “surrender.” It was more like handing over a problem that couldn’t be fixed.
To the neighbors, it all looked perfectly ordinary. They’d see her hanging laundry, waving from her porch, or tending her garden. Maybe a baby’s cry drifted through the open window now and then, but it wasn’t anything you asked about. In 1895, if someone said they were running a “baby farm,” that was just what it was called. Nobody stopped to ask why it sounded so terrible.
Then came the smell.
People noticed it first in the summer—something sour and chemical, like spoiled milk or burning cloth. One farmer’s wife said it made her stomach turn every time the wind shifted. Another swore she saw smoke curling up from the Place yard at odd hours. When she asked, Mrs. Place said she was burning old rags. Nobody thought much of it. Not until the smell didn’t go away.
People suspected Mother Place was burning more
than trash behind her house. Maybe even babies.
By autumn, the sheriff’s deputy came to take a look. He knocked on the door, hat in hand, trying not to seem nosy. Mrs. Place said she was burning spoiled milk and cloths from the babies. “You wouldn’t want disease spreading, would you?” she asked. He nodded, apologized for bothering her, and left.
That should have been the end of it. Except it wasn’t.
A few weeks later, the house was empty. Locked up tight, curtains drawn, livestock gone. Someone saw her taking the train toward Illinois. Inside the house, neighbors found dishes on the table, a half-packed trunk, and a cradle tipped on its side like someone left in a hurry. There were no babies.
The Des Moines Leader ran a short piece—“Baby Farmer Flees: Mitchellville Woman Under Suspicion.” Six paragraphs. No photographs. It mentioned “unpleasant rumors” and “foul odors,” then shrugged. “No evidence of wrongdoing has been found.” Then everyone moved on.
Except not everyone did.
Over the next few months, stories surfaced. A young woman from Des Moines said she’d paid Mrs. Place ten dollars to take her newborn. When she returned to visit, the woman wouldn’t let her in. A mother from Newton asked about her baby and her letter was returned, marked “no longer at this address.” At least five infants had been “adopted” out through her home that year. None were found again.
Nobody could prove anything. Nobody wanted to. Baby farming existed in the shadows—the devil’s bargain made between desperate mothers and women who saw profit in that desperation. In Iowa, like everywhere else, the shame of an unwed pregnancy was worse than the fear of what might happen next.
By the time reporters got curious, it was too late. Some said Martha Place had resurfaced in Kansas, running another “lying-in home.” Others thought she’d died on the road, penniless. The house in Mitchellville stood empty for years, until someone finally tore it down.
In 1923, a Des Moines Tribune reporter revisited the case. He found that no one in Mitchellville wanted to talk. “They still call it the Baby Farm House,” he wrote. “No one will live there long.” That was all.
Today, there’s nothing left of it. The state has a way of burying its ghosts under good soil and pretending they were never there.
No comments:
Post a Comment