Poor Travelers Were Legally Kicked Out of Towns By “Warning Out”
If you can’t find a job in one city, it would make sense to move to another. Vagabonds would travel from one place to another looking for work. However, many townspeople in colonial New England didn’t like these outsiders…Especially if they failed to find a job. Each municipality only had so much money set aside for poor relief. And many townspeople didn’t want to spend those resources on an outsider. This started the concept of “Warning Out”. It was a process of literally exiling people from town, and forcing them to leave. An elected committee of “selectmen” were chosen to decide who was deserving of aid, and who was not. Warning Out was common in the 1600’s to 1700’s. But in 1817, the state of Vermont decided to make “warning out” illegal, and other states soon followed.