My Old Confederate Home (10 page)

The mail brought the board more solid proposals, too—and plenty of them.

At their meeting on July 2, 1902, the board's executive committee opened bids on twenty-three properties in fifteen towns. (Promoters in Owensboro submitted proposals for seven properties; Louisville and Shelbyville, two each.) With proposals still rolling in, Bennett Young appointed a Committee on Visitation to inspect each of the properties and report to the board.
²⁸

By the end of July, with more than forty proposals in hand, the Committee on Visitation reported they wished to “respectfully call attention” to sites in Owensboro, Louisville, Frankfort, Bardstown, Harrodsburg, Hawesville, and Pewee Valley. The committee recommended that the full board physically examine each of the sites.
²⁹

Thursday, September 4, was a marathon travel and deliberation day for the board of trustees. Nine members boarded the train in Louisville at 6:00
A.M.
They met the remaining trustees in Owensboro and were touring the properties there by 8:00
A.M.
Back on the train an hour later, they made a brief stopover at Hawesville, then sped off for Frankfort. With barely enough time to walk the four blocks from the rail station to the proposed property and back, the fifteen men then caught the Harrodsburg train, then the shortline to Bardstown. Leaving Bardstown, they connected at Anchorage for the quick ride out to Pewee Valley and returned to a private dining room at the Galt House in Louisville that evening for a final vote.
³⁰

There was little need for discussion; they had talked on board the train. At that point, the board of trustees had about $10,000 in solid subscriptions, plus the Parr house (which, it was now understood, had a market value closer to $4,500, considerably less than its $7,000 assessed value). From those funds they were required to purchase at least thirty acres of land, build a facility suitable to house at least twenty-five veterans, and furnish the home to be ready for immediate occupancy. Though they might be able to raise more money during the coming year (or enter into some sort of loan arrangement), there was a consensus that the Home should be opened sooner rather than later.

The board agreed to take multiple ballots, with the site drawing the fewest votes to be eliminated before the next ballot.

Hawesville was eliminated first. A thirty-acre plot with house and outbuildings was offered for just $5,000 (and the town would pay $3,000 of that). But the land was swampy and the water supply uncertain.

The Owensboro offer was for a hundred level acres of tillable land, a large house, and outbuildings, all on high ground with a rail line running along the property line. But at $18,000 for the property alone, the cost was greater than the board's purse would allow. Owensboro was the second proposal to be cut.

Bardstown boosters offered two tracts of land, one of forty acres and the other of eighty. Each tract was offered at $6,000, but a citizens committee raised $4,300 to put toward the purchase price. The properties were attractive and the price was right, but building and furnishing a suitable home on the acreage might take a year or more. Bardstown lost on the next ballot.

Frankfort's bid was for eighty acres and the old Hendrix place, once a landmark home but now a creaking ghost's mansion overlooking the Kentucky River. The $15,000 price tag, coupled with the cost of renovating the old house, took Frankfort out of the running.

The final ballot came down to a choice between Pewee Valley and Harrodsburg.

The Cassell property in Harrodsburg included another landmark home, but this one was in good repair and large enough to house at least thirty residents. The property, home, and outbuildings had a price tag of $10,500, but the merchants of Harrodsburg pledged $3,000 for furnishings and improvements. Rail connections to Harrodsburg were spotty, but the town was close to the geographic center of Kentucky and almost equidistant to Lexington, Frankfort, and Louisville.

Pewee Valley, a little village of small businesses, modest houses, comfortable summer homes, and a population of about 450, was located just sixteen miles east of Louisville. Property owner Angus Neil Gordon was offering thirty-three acres and the Villa Ridge Inn, a bankrupt luxury resort hotel built years before. The old hotel had seventy-two guest rooms (all completely furnished), dining hall, kitchen, running water, steam heat, and gas lighting. Gordon wanted $8,000 in cash and Captain Parr's Louisville property.

The price was right; the trustees could divest themselves of the Parr property, pay Gordon, and still hold about $2,000 cash in hand. Pewee Valley was only thirty minutes by train from the busy Louisville railway hub, so it was accessible to visitors. Villa Ridge Inn could house up to 100 residents in a building meant for institutional use, and it was ready for immediate occupancy with just a bit of sprucing up.

The final ballot tallied six for Harrodsburg and nine for Pewee Valley. A committee was appointed to examine the title and complete the purchase.

But the long board meeting wasn't over yet. The trustees still had to select a superintendent, a salaried employee who would manage the Home and see to the care and control of its residents.

Ten men had presented themselves to the board for the position, among them board member and state senator William O. Coleman. Coleman had polished his share of apples on behalf of Bennett Young and the Kentucky Confederate Home. He had introduced legislation for the Home, served without pay on the board of trustees, nominated Young as board president, and made boilerplate motions as needed. He needed a steady income, and he wanted this job.

Most board members, however, favored Salem H. Ford, a Confederate veteran from Owensboro with a strong work ethic and none of Coleman's oiliness.

Young asked Coleman to leave the room for the vote. With one abstention, the remaining trustees voted in favor of Ford over Coleman, seven to six. Salem Ford would go to work immediately to transform Pewee Valley's Villa Ridge Inn into the new Kentucky Confederate Home. The board of trustees wanted to open the Home for occupancy in October, just one year following adoption of plans for the Home at the state convention.

After approving a statement that could be handed to a waiting
Courier-Journal
reporter, the weary board members finally adjourned their meeting and retired to their rooms in the Galt House.
³¹

Breakfast was still being served in the Galt House dining room the next morning when a storm of protest erupted in Pewee Valley. Affluent Louisvillians maintained elegant summer homes in Pewee Valley, and they weren't at all pleased with news that a public benevolent home would end up in their backyard.
³²

“We are proud of the old Confederates,” one resident said, “but the people of Pewee Valley believe that an institution of [this] kind must hurt the place.”

Judge P. B. Muir led the opposition, and his first step was a personal appeal to Governor Beckham. When he couldn't reach the governor, Muir threatened an injunction to halt the sale. The choice of Pewee Valley “will not be allowed to stand without every vigorous protest that can be made against it,” Muir vowed.

Harry Wiessinger, a Louisville investor and summer resident of Pewee Valley, sent a public telegram to the board withdrawing his $300 pledge to the Home.

A newspaper editor wrote, “The whole affair will become entangled in a miserable and damaging mess.”
³³

Most veterans, however, thought the protest was a petty one in view of progress made by the board of trustees. “Notwithstanding there is some objection,” one veteran wrote Fayette Hewitt in a note accompanying his $25 donation, “we must congratulate the committee in getting a place so well adapted for the home and ready for occupancy.”
³⁴

In the end, the tempest blew itself out. The board of trustees patiently explained the benefits of the Pewee Valley site to newspaper reporters; the governor supported the choice; and plans continued to have the Home operational by mid-October.
³⁵
A Richmond newspaper editor wrote the coda to the entire episode under the headline “Hard to Please,” saying that “while … a dozen other towns are tearing their hair out in their efforts to secure the Confederate Home, the citizens of Pewee Valley raise a terrible howl because they have gotten it.”
³⁶

Though Fayette Hewitt was receiving subscription payments every day, the Kentucky Confederate Home board of trustees was feeling the same cash pinch felt by every new homebuyer: purchase insurance, replace a balky water pump, commission another survey to satisfy the county clerk.

Cash ran so low at one point that Bennett Young was forced to sign a personal promissory note to take delivery of bed linens. Contributions of furniture, books, dishware, and wall hangings arrived daily, but cash was in short supply.

On October 2 the board announced another fundraising scheme: the sale of naming rights to rooms in the Home. For $50, anyone could name a room in the Home and decorate it as he or she wished. The offer had special appeal to the UDC chapters, and women from all over the state began showing up in Pewee Valley, bank drafts in hand, wanting to tour the Home and choose “their” rooms.

Despite this last-minute infusion of cash, the board was still scrambling to meet every contingency. Attorneys discovered an encumbrance on one tract of the Villa Ridge Inn property, and the ex-Confederates needed to ante up an extra $1,000 before they could gain clear title and turn the property over to the state.

The board of trustees didn't have an extra $1,000.

With hat in hand, Bennett Young and Harry P. McDonald called on Mrs. Basil Duke, president of the Louisville UDC chapter. The chapter was a wealthy one and had raised $1,000 to purchase furniture for the Home. Young and McDonald explained that they needed the money right away, fully expecting the compliant ladies to turn it over for the good of the Home.

Henrietta Morgan Duke was the sister of legendary general John Hunt Morgan and the wife of his equally legendary protégé Basil Duke. A disarmingly beautiful woman and a grand dame of Louisville society, she had the cunning and tenacity of a panther.
³⁷

Over tea, Henrietta Duke dictated her terms to the men: the chapter would provide the money in return for seats on a Home advisory board. The name of the Albert Sidney Johnston Chapter must appear on the deed conveyed to Governor Beckham. The chapter will receive naming rights to five rooms in the Home. And, by the way, the board will grant the chapter permission to hold a private reception at the Home shortly after the opening.

Young and McDonald were outranked, outflanked, and out of options. Young accepted the terms and the check for $1,000.

Within days, however, unexpected donations from the Lexington and Louisville UCV camps (along, perhaps, with a little buyer's remorse) allowed Young to return the bank draft to Mrs. Duke. The deal was off, he said. Mrs. Duke promptly sent the check back to Bennett Young, reiterating the terms of their agreement. Young eventually asked John Leathers to return the check by depositing it in the chapter's account.

Women of the Louisville UDC chapter seethed at Young's effrontery for reneging on their agreement, and they spread the story from chapter to chapter across the state. Bennett Young and his board of trustees would regret the consequences of the perceived indignity for years afterward.
³⁸

Meanwhile, ex-Confederates, Daughters, and their friends and families were preparing for a trip to Pewee Valley for the opening of the Kentucky Confederate Home.

A month before the opening of the Home, Fayette Hewitt, sitting at the oak desk in his office at State National Bank of Frankfort, sorted through the envelopes stacked in front of him. Most of the envelopes contained letters and money, expressions of compassion toward fellow Kentuckians, men who decades earlier had left their homes and families to fight for a cause that was lost before the first battle was joined.

Money and paper.

Hewitt recorded the contributions and read the letters.

“Dear General,” read the letter from A. W. Bascom, the stockman from Bath County who, a year before at the state reunion, expressed his reservations about the plan for the Home. “Enclosed find check for $300, a part of the money raised by me for the Confederate Home.” Despite his reservations, Bascom served on the Committee of Twenty-Five, and he had personally raised more than $400.

“I am somewhat disappointed that there has been no provision made under which a needy comrade together with his dear old wife can be provided for,” Bascom wrote. “Still, I hope that the managing board may in the near future be able and willing to devise some plan by which this oversight may be remedied.”
³⁹

There had been so many struggles during the previous year. Despite the petty fights, heated arguments, and money worries, Kentuckians were about to open a comfortable home for disabled and impoverished ex-Confederates.

“Trusting and believing that the good work so propitiously begun may be pursued until we can have a Home of which all of us will be proud, I remain your comrade and friend, A. W. Bascom.”

When it opened on October 23, 1902, the Kentucky Confederate Home would not be the home that every ex-Confederate had envisioned. But, working together, Kentuckians were poised to provide a respectable place for their comrades who needed it.

Chapter 5

The Governor and the Prisoner

A
board a special train approaching the Pewee Valley depot, thirty-three-year-old Governor John C. W. Beckham was as nervous as only a politician facing uncertain reelection could be. His formal campaign wouldn't begin until spring, but on this trip rode a hope that he would be more than an accidental governor.

Normally self-assured for a man his age, today he was nervous. He needed the respect and support of the Confederate veterans waiting for him in Pewee Valley.

Waiting with the rest of the welcoming party on the platform of the Pewee Valley Depot, seventy-eight-year-old Lorenzo D. Holloway had time to reflect on the new governor. Thirty-three years old and managing a whole state. Awfully young to be a governor. When Lorenzo Holloway was thirty-three years old, he hadn't managed much more than the books of a small stable. At thirty-three, Holloway hadn't yet been in prison with 10,000 men. And he hadn't yet seen good men die in droves.

As dawn broke over central Kentucky on Thursday, October 23, 1902, the sky transmuted from black to indigo to cerulean blue, here and there buffed by wisps of low-hanging wood smoke. September had been unseasonably warm, and autumn was late arriving. It was a blackberry autumn, and the trees had held their fire through October.

Sixteen miles east of Louisville and about that far south of the Ohio River, Pewee Valley was a quiet village of well-bred estate homes, unpretentious stone church buildings, white fences, coffee-colored dirt lanes, and a population of fewer than 500. Originally known as Smith's Station, residents adopted the current name in the 1850s for reasons lost to legend. The pewee is a bird, a woodland flycatcher that may once have made its home in the brushwood and broomsage of the area. Pewee Valley sits 300 feet higher than Louisville, a topographic feature that accounted for the elegant summer homes built there years before by wealthy Louisvillians who thought altitude and cooler summer evenings would make them less susceptible to the night vapors blamed for most summer illness.

Two side-by-side rail tracks—one for the steam trains connecting Louisville and Frankfort, another for interurban electric rail service—bisected the hamlet; a county road paralleled the tracks. Near the center of the village was a small commercial district, including a dry goods store, a meat market, a post office, a bank, a blacksmith shop, and the rail depot.

Six hundred yards up the county road from the rail depot, the former Villa Ridge Inn stood atop a gentle hill surrounded by newly raked grounds, awaiting its dedication as the new Kentucky Confederate Home.

As a rising sun painted Pewee Valley with its daytime colors, farm families from neighboring areas were clip-clopping up the county road in work wagons and buggies. The farmers were the first arrivals for a daylong celebration of bands, bunting, dignitaries, spectacle, and Lost Cause oratory.
¹

The board of trustees was desperate to open the Kentucky Confederate Home to residents as soon as possible. Bragging rights were at stake, of course, sectional pride for having financed, legislated, equipped, and opened a Home just twelve months after the meeting at which the board members set their hands to the task. (Ex-Confederates in Virginia, Texas, Georgia, Missouri, Maryland, and elsewhere spent years to do the job.) But financial considerations provided the most pressing reason for urgency. Until the state took formal possession of the Home and residents moved into it, no money would flow from the state's funding tap. Every month the Home remained unoccupied cost the trustees almost $300 in utilities and maintenance, an amount their minuscule reserve wouldn't cover for long.

Superintendent Salem H. Ford and his helpers and contractors had been working for weeks to prepare the former resort hotel for occupancy. The rooms of the old hotel needed scrubbing, sweeping, patching, repairing, painting. The building was sound and generally in good condition, but it hadn't been occupied for five years. Ford had to flush out water pipes, recharge gas cisterns, test each lamp, and replace pump gaskets, all the while dealing with loads of gifts, furnishings, and provisions that arrived daily.

There was much left undone, but by Thursday morning, October 23, 1902, the old Villa Ridge Inn was ready to reopen as the Kentucky Confederate Home.

Early-arriving farm families hitched their wagons to fences and trees surrounding the Home and roamed the grounds, determined to make a day of the celebration. Some spread blankets and baskets of food near a speakers' platform that had been built at the top of the looping driveway that led up the hill to the Home's entry. Long wooden picnic tables dotted the grounds.

At midmorning Salem Ford hoisted a U.S. flag and a Confederate flag to fly side by side from flagstaffs atop the four-story building. Red, white, and blue bunting was draped along the speakers' stand and the Home's gallery echoed the colors of the two national flags flying overhead.
²

By 11:00
A.M.
the broad lawn surrounding the Home was teeming with more than 4,000 people. “In keeping with the true spirit of Southern hospitality,” a visitor wrote, “ample provision had been made to feed all who had come.”

Churchwomen of Pewee Valley set out food and lemonade on the outdoor tables, while clubwomen from throughout the state distributed hampers of picnic fare. A detachment of cadets from the Kentucky Military Institute gathered in rank to rehearse their duty as honor guard for the dignitaries who would arrive later. The lively sound of popular tunes and patriotic marches rose from a brass band that wove through the crowd.

Every hour, it seemed, another thousand men and women from all parts of the state arrived by cart, carriage, trolley, train, and the occasional motorcar. The rail companies offered a discounted round trip fare to Pewee Valley for the day. The later arrivals were townspeople mainly, the shopkeepers, physicians, bankers, and small businessmen of Kentucky's increasingly influential middle class. They found seats at the outdoor tables or spread picnic blankets on the raked grounds. Families gathered with other families of the same town, until congregations of visitors from Kuttawa melded into the visitors from Carrollton and Hopkinsville and Prestonsburg and Somerset.

“When the crowds began to gather in numbers on the broad lawn and under the trees it was first feared there would not be enough to give all a plenty,” a reporter observed. But the women of Pewee Valley continued to produce hampers, steaming dishes draped with tea towels, and platters of sliced meats for the new arrivals.

The veterans—men of the Civil War generation, now in their sixties, seventies, or older—were scattered among the throng, and many were in the company of their wives, children, and grandchildren. Some wore old gray jackets or hats, remnants of uniforms that had been saved in trunks for decades. Others wore newer gray suits of a martial cut, the now-standardized uniform of the United Confederate Veterans organization. Here and there an old man would let out an excited yip as he recognized, then embraced, another old man. “[The veteran's] elastic step and joyous laugh belied his age as he met in happy reunion with his old comrades in arms,” noted one visitor.

Kentucky's major newspapers gave the dedication front-page play in the early editions, and by midday Pewee Valley was jammed with more than 10,000 visitors, the largest gathering of Kentucky ex-Confederates, sympathizers, family, and friends since the end of the Civil War.

A quarter mile away, Lorenzo D. Holloway waited on the platform of the Pewee Valley rail depot for the governor's train with Home superintendent Salem Ford. Holloway had been the first to register as a resident of the Home, and he would be among the first that day to size up Kentucky's Boy Governor.

Lorenzo Holloway was almost forty years old when he left his farm in Scott County and the horse ranch where he worked to join John Hunt Morgan's cavalry in the autumn of 1861. He was a well-read man, good with figures, and trusted by the younger men of Smith's Regiment, Fifth Kentucky Cavalry. In the summer of 1863, he was a captain and regimental quartermaster when Morgan's cavalry swept northward on the ill-fated Ohio raid. Holloway was captured and imprisoned with sixty-odd other officers—including Thomas Eastin, Basil Duke, and General Morgan himself—in the Ohio state penitentiary.

“I am becoming quite fond of my cell,” he wrote his mother in October 1863. “I can eat as much as I want and no limit to sleeping. Can keep warm, dry, clean, read my Bible, sing in a whisper and pray for myself, my family, friends and enemies.”
³

Conditions at the Ohio prison may have been
too
relaxed, a situation some prisoners exploited in November 1863. Aided by smuggled weapons (and a bribed guard or two), Morgan and a handful of officers escaped from the penitentiary. Humiliated Federal officers sent Holloway and the rest of the remaining prisoners to Fort Delaware.

Located on a small island at the mouth of Delaware Bay, Fort Delaware was a recommissioned Union fort intended to hold the thousands of Confederate prisoners captured at Gettysburg and Vicksburg. By the time Holloway and the other Ohio prisoners arrived, Fort Delaware was a hellhole.
⁴

The last years of the war produced a quantity of Confederate prisoners of war the Federal bureaucracy was simply unprepared to handle. Southern prisons (such as Andersonville) couldn't obtain the resources needed to feed, clothe, and house large numbers of Federal prisoners; Union prison officials couldn't get the resources in place quickly enough to care for the prisoners they were capturing. Fort Delaware was ill-equipped to handle the number of prisoners arriving there.

“I am very poor, bones nearly through,” Holloway wrote his sister several months after arriving at Fort Delaware, “but by my regular habits and the grace of God, my health is unimpaired.”

Thirty thousand prisoners were housed there; Holloway was fortunate to have a strong constitution. The death rate rose as high as 30 percent as overcrowded prisoners coped with smallpox, cholera, bad water, poor nutrition, and insect infestation, as well as sadistic guards.

Facing the winter of 1864–65 in prison, Holloway begged his sister to send him a few food items and a stout Kentucky comforter. “It may be the last act of kindness you may have to extend to an only and unfortunate brother,” he told her. “If I should have to winter on this island, I don't want to have to freeze and die of rheumatism or pneumonia.”

Thousands of younger men died of cold, hunger, or despair that winter in Fort Delaware; but forty-year-old Lorenzo Holloway survived. In May 1865 he was released from prison and returned to Kentucky.

Governor Beckham's special train arrived from Frankfort at the Pewee Valley depot near high noon. From the window of his private rail car, Beckham could see the welcoming committee jostle themselves into a rough receiving line on the platform.

Beckham had endured welcoming ceremonies at countless rail depots all over the state during the three years of his governorship. But in the year since President William McKinley was shot to death during a stop in Buffalo, these routine events carried more than a tinge of worry, particularly for a governor who had gained office only after his predecessor was gunned down.

But that was just one more layer of anxiety added to an already worrisome day. The young governor was facing his first real reelection campaign, and he needed the unqualified support of Kentucky's ex-Confederates.

The gunshots that killed William Goebel still echoed in Kentucky politics three years later. Kentucky's moderate Democrats—including Bennett Young, John Leathers, W. N. Haldeman, and others of the state UCV leadership—had bolted the Democratic Party to vote against Goebel in 1899, and they were lukewarm about Beckham. In a special election to fill Goebel's unexpired term, Beckham squeezed out a razor-thin margin of 3,700 votes (out of a half million votes cast), then set out to mend fences with the state's traditional Democrats. He slavishly supported Bennett Young's plan for the Kentucky Confederate Home and helped grease legislative skids in the General Assembly, all the while expressing his fealty to the Lost Cause—this despite rumors that Bennett Young was contemplating his own run for the governorship against Beckham.
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Kentucky's state UCV organization and local camps were avowedly apolitical, but the men of the Confederate generation were Democrats down to their bootlaces. Governor Beckham needed all their support, all their clout, and every one of their votes to keep his office in the upcoming election.
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Beckham and his mother appeared at the door of his rail car and stepped onto the platform of the Pewee Valley depot. Even from a quarter mile away, they could hear the noise of the growing crowd gathered on the grounds of the Kentucky Confederate Home. After a brief greeting by the chairman of the welcoming committee and an equally brief response, Beckham and his mother turned to the receiving line.

Lorenzo Holloway stood next to Superintendent Salem H. Ford on the depot platform, somewhere between a Pewee Valley town committeeman and several gussied-up ladies of the UDC, all waiting a turn for their handshake with the governor.