Ella Graves left $17,500 in a fund when she died.
BALTIMORE, Vt. (AP) – Debbie Griswold first heard of Ella Graves soon after she moved to town in 1977. She owed money to the Springfield Hospital after an unexpected trip to the emergency room with a sick child.
She waited for a bill from the hospital, but one didn’t arrive.
“About six months later, I get a notice in the mail saying Ella Graves had paid the hospital bill,” said Griswold. “I said, “Who is Ella Graves, and how did she do that?’ I was floored.”
Ella Graves was a native of tiny Baltimore who when she died in 1918 left $17,500 as a fund that is used now to pay residents’ hospital bills. Almost a century after Graves’ death, the fund is still paying bills for the residents of the town where she was born in 1850.
People in town say almost everyone has used the fund at one time or another.
“There’s still some people who’ve got too much pride to use it,” said John Thomas, a Baltimore native who is the town’s only dairy farmer. “But most of us say you might as well.”
Even by Vermont standards, Baltimore is a small place. It has just 250 residents and seven miles of road, all dirt. Karen Hammond, the assistant town clerk, said the town has 500 dogs, thanks to the existence of two kennels. The whole town is 3,000 acres, and it has one working dairy farm, where Thomas milks 28 cows.
People in town are used to explaining that they’re not from Maryland.
“People don’t know there’s a Baltimore, Vermont,” said Hammond.
According to the town history, Ella Graves was born on a farm in Baltimore in 1850, attended the town school, taught for a while, and then worked in a hat factory in Foxboro, Mass. She died in Wisconsin.
When she left the money, Graves stipulated that the money be used for the poor and indigent of Baltimore. But Baltimore doesn’t have any indigent people, said Thomas, so in the 1960s, after the fund had languished unused for decades, selectmen – including Thomas – had the wording changed so the money would be available for anyone who used medical services.
Town residents can send their medical bills to the selectboard, which divides up that year’s interest from the fund and pays a portion of each.
“If you have three people submit bills, whatever is available for that month is divided by three,” said Griswold, the town lister. “It doesn’t make any difference who you are, how much the bill is for, what it’s for as long as it’s medical.”
At current rates, the fund only generates about $1,000 a year, so it wouldn’t be worth moving to Baltimore just for the benefit of the fund.
Nobody advertises the existence of the fund, although it’s mentioned in the town report every year.
“I don’t think to tell people, but people seem to find out,” said Town Clerk Judy Thomas, John Thomas’ sister-in-law.
Most Vermont towns have funds of one sort or another, some with specific goals and others without.
In fact, in the early 1900s Vermont made an effort to encourage natives who had done well out of state to establish such funds in their home towns, said Gregory Sanford, the Vermont archivist.
“Often a successful person now living in Chicago might come back and put money into the library or a municipal building,” Sanford said. “Each town was sort of responsible for contacting expatriots.”
Maine has local funds for town cemeteries, although the state municipal association said there were few other local funds.
But Vermont has many. Most of the public libraries in Vermont are the result of legacies, trusts, foundations, and gifts similar to that of Ella Graves, said Paul Gillies, a Montpelier lawyer and historian.
And then there were the private funds for the care of the poor, such as the one established by Graves, in an era long before federal welfare programs were established.
“That was considered to be part of what a town did: to look after the poor this way by having some fund of money,” said Michael Sherman of Montpelier, who recently published a history of Vermont. “It was a good idea coming from ideas of Christian charity.”
Griswold had been worrying about her unpaid hospital bill. After she found out the Ella Graves Fund had taken care of it, she set out to learn more about Graves. She learned which farmhouse Graves started life in, and she now reflects on the kind of person Graves must have been to leave money for townspeople to use years down the road.
“She was gorgeous,” she noted, remarking on Graves’ portrait, which hangs in the Baltimore town clerk’s office.
Griswold appreciates what Graves did, but she doesn’t have any plans to do the same thing.
“I’m the lister, and I’ve been an auditor, and I clean the school,” Griswold said. “There’s only just so much you can do, and I’ve never had much money to just leave to people.”
AP-ES-04-10-04 1301EDT
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