El Paso County's second poor farm was established here in 1915 as the El Paso Poor Farm. John O'Shea, a wealthy farmer and businessman whose farm was nearby, assumed operation of it, while his wife, Agnes O'Shea, oversaw the residents. After John O'Shea died in 1929, their daughter, Helen O'Shea Keleher, came from San Antonio to operate the farm with her mother. Although the farm had been scheduled to close in 1929, the hardships of the Depression era caused its population to grow. Renamed Rio Vista Farm, it began hosting a variety of public welfare programs in the 1930s, operating under the Texas Transient Bureau and later the Federal Works Progress Administration. It also served as a temporary base for a Civilian Conservation Corps unit in 1936 and continued to shelter hundreds of homeless and destitute adults and children. From 1951 to 1964, it functioned 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 to four, and it 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 indigent adults. In later life, Helen O'Shea Keleher called the fifty years she spent with more than four thousand orphans and neglected children there her proudest accomplishment.