My Old Confederate Home (13 page)

Still, Ford maintained an even temper and a calm demeanor.

In addition to the renovation and management challenges, there was the torrent of gifts that poured into the Home every day.

In testament to the statewide support of the Home and the old veterans who would live there, Kentucky residents sent gifts they felt would bring a bit of comfort or pleasure to the residents. Few days failed to bring an express wagon to the door of the Home, with a constant stream of drivers seeking to offload a carved easy chair, boxes of books, a tin of cupcakes, or some other precious item.

Growers in Madison County sent a hogshead of tobacco for use by the old soldiers; M. W. Oliver sent a large Bible; E. J. Elliott sent a box of games; and Mrs. Poyntz shipped a crate full of magazines and her husband's old summer clothing.
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“I had a … fern three feet across that I wanted to take down to the Confederate Home,” an Owingsville woman wrote her cousin. (In the end, she decided to send it by rail.) Women of the Paris County UDC shipped a huge crate “containing cakes, candies, literature, stationery, tobacco and a liberal donation of money” with the promise of similar shipments in future months. Governor Beckham and his mother sent an upright piano from their home in Bardstown to the Confederate Home's parlor, where it likely sat side by side with a pump organ donated by a Louisville music store.
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Every gift required a note of thanks.

“I am in receipt of five strong, handsome hammocks,” began one such expression of appreciation. “The hammocks have been swung in cool shady spots in our grove of wide-spreading oaks and beeches, and the ‘old boys' will take great pride in them.”
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Ford designated one of the downstairs parlors as a library, and two Louisville women solicited 3,000 books from printers, booksellers, local businesses, and friends to fill the shelves with reading matter.
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The Home library likely had a dictionary, and if the donor had been particularly generous, the dictionary would have been
Webster's International Dictionary of the English Language
, published just three years earlier. If one of the early-arriving residents happened into the library one day to riffle through the pages of that new dictionary, and if his finger happened to stop on page 381 (“ink–innerve”), he might have read the definition of the word “inmate” as it was commonly used in 1902: “One who lives in the same house or apartment with another, a fellow lodger; by extension, one who occupies or lodges in any place or dwelling.” Thus, by the usage of the day, ex-Confederates who lived voluntarily in the Kentucky Confederate Home were referred to as “inmates,” a word used a century later to denote
involuntary
residents of institutions such as prisons or asylums.

There was nothing involuntary about the first men who would be inmates of the Kentucky Confederate Home. They were eager to get to Pewee Valley.

In late September, a month before the Home's scheduled opening, board secretary Harry P. McDonald printed 200 copies of a onepage inmate application form and mailed several to each of the state's UCV camps. A few more copies were distributed to interested UDC chapters and to veterans who requested them directly from the board. McDonald's printed form was the first step of a four-step admissions process that involved application, review, notification, and processing.
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A veteran desiring to apply for a place in the Kentucky Confederate Home first had to give information about his residence and military service. (According to the law that established the Home, all residents had to prove their active military service for the Confederate States of America and their honorable discharge or parole at the termination of the war.) The questions asked of the applicant were not unlike the questions John Leathers had asked Billy Beasley years before when determining Beasley's worthiness for assistance: Where did you enlist? In what commands did you serve? Were you imprisoned? Wounded? Where were you discharged or paroled? Do you still have your papers? An applicant was required to swear that “he is unable by reason of bad health or mental or physical inability to support himself.” Further, “he says he is not addicted to the excessive use of intoxicating liquors” and agrees that he will abide by the rules and regulations of the Home.
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Applicants also had to provide a recommendation from two witnesses, men who were in a “position to know that the statements made in his application are true.” The witnesses were also required to attest to the applicant's moral worthiness, that “he is not addicted to excessive use of liquors” and that “he is a proper person for admission to said Kentucky Confederate Home.”

Finally, a physician must swear that he examined the applicant and that he “is not addicted to the use of intoxicating liquors to excess and that he is not insane.”

Completed applications came flowing back to Harry McDonald almost as fast as he could mail out the blanks. On October 24, 1902, the executive committee formally approved its first batch of fifteen completed admission applications: “It affords me great pleasure to inform you that your application for admission to the Kentucky Confederate Home was favorably passed upon by the executive committee. The Home is now open for your reception at any time you may desire to enter.”
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The committee sent form acceptance letters to sixty-three-year-old Peter B. Adams, a resident of Lexington and a veteran of John Morgan's Ohio raid, and to S. G. Shumate, a slow-talking native of Virginia now living in Middlesborough on the charity of his friends. Seventy-seven-year-old Benjamin Thomas received his acceptance letter at his son-in-law's home in Louisville, where he was living with his daughter and her three children. Confederate veteran Stanford P. Ashford was an Arkansan when he enlisted in the Confederate infantry there, but he had tramped around quite a bit since the war and was living in Jessamine County when he received his acceptance letter. S. O. Foster lost his arm in Tennessee in 1863, but had been earning a decent living in Paducah until a stroke paralyzed his remaining arm. He made arrangements to leave for Pewee Valley right away.

At least two, and perhaps as many as five, old veterans took up residence in the Home prior to its formal opening, arriving early to help Superintendent Ford prepare the property. The rest arrived as soon as they could settle their affairs and gather up sufficient train fare for Pewee Valley.

George A. Miller of Trimble County, one-time cavalryman John Lynn Smith, and paralyzed veteran Otway Norvell arrived on November 1. By November 4 eleven inmates were living in the Home.
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The next day, the executive committee voted to send letters of acceptance to twenty-three more applicants.

When the veterans launched their plan to create the Kentucky Confederate Home, no one was certain exactly how many ex-Confederates had need of such a place or would consent to live there. Even some proponents of a home felt it would be a difficult matter to practice charity upon ex-Confederate soldiers.
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On one hand, every UCV camp had a story of at least one comrade who was living in mean conditions on the charity of others. And Kentucky veterans had read of the number of indigent ex-Confederates who entered the Virginia, Texas, Arkansas, and Maryland homes. General Poyntz could say that Kentucky's camps had “many destitute Confederates,” and the editor of
The Lost Cause
could write that there were “a number of aged Confederates in the public charitable institutions”; but no one could actually say what that number was.
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On the other hand, their own Lost Cause rhetoric convinced them that a noble Johnny Reb would be loath to accept all but temporary charity. (“Haven't you got any more sense than to think I am a beggar?” an indignant veteran reportedly responded when his UCV camp comrades offered assistance.) The U.S. pension program for Union veterans had become a graft-ridden national embarrassment, further dampening, it was believed, any desire for public charity. (“It is rare to find a pensioner who, with no blush upon his face, will look you in the eye and declare himself a pensioner,” sputtered one ex-Confederate.)
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There was little the board of trustees could do but open the doors of the Kentucky Confederate Home and see who wanted in.

In early November Harry P. McDonald realized he had used up his supply of application forms. He placed a rush order to have more printed.

When a new inmate arrived at the Home, Salem Ford would take time off from whatever he was doing to greet the newcomer.

If the inmate was hungry, if he had missed a meal during his trip, or if the superintendent believed the new arrival had missed more than a few meals in prior weeks, Ford would walk the man to the kitchen for a plate of whatever food the cook could rustle up on short notice. Some men were in immediate need of a bath and new clothes, so Ford would dig around in the boxes of donated shirts, pants, and underdrawers to assemble a decent wardrobe. (Bennett Young observed that some men “were in such condition that they could not be admitted in the Home without the destruction of all their clothing.”)
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Eventually, Ford would lead every new arrival back to his office to read them the Home rules and have them sign the inmate register.

The board of trustees recognized the need for some ground rules for the comfortable operation of the Home, basic rules of conduct meant to allow every inmate the quiet enjoyment of his new residence while showing respect for the rights of others. Treasurer Fayette Hewitt was assigned to draft the rules, and he did what any other bureaucrat might do when faced with a blank page: he revised someone else's rules to fit the needs of the Kentucky Confederate Home. Sometime, somehow, someone had acquired a copy of the “Rules and Regulations of Residents and Employees at Fitch's Home for Soldiers,” and Hewitt set about editing those rules for the Kentucky Home. As a result, Salem Ford would read to every new inmate at the Kentucky Confederate Home a set of barely modified rules originally written for Union veterans living in a state-run veterans home in Connecticut.
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Section 2 of the printed rules required each inmate “to observe habits of order and cleanliness and good care with respect to his person, clothing and bed and bedding, and with respect to the building and premises, and a courteous demeanor to the other inmates.”

Section 4 protected the inmates from any political or religious proselytizing by officers or employees of the Home and allowed inmates to hold nonsectarian religious services in the Home and attend (or not) any other religious services outside the Home.

Sections 5 through 8 set rules for access to the Home. Inmates were prohibited from leaving the grounds without permission, and a roll call would be conducted each morning and evening to assure compliance (“All inmates shall answer to their names, unless absent from the Home, sick or excused”). The doors of the Home would be closed and all lights extinguished at nine o'clock each night; all inmates were expected to be in their rooms and in bed by that time.

It was Section 3—the rules regarding alcohol—that would prove hardest for some inmates to follow. Intoxication was prohibited, of course, but so was the possession of alcohol anywhere in the Home. Further, inmates were forbidden to visit “places, stores or houses where intoxicating liquors are sold.” Inmates who enjoyed a little taste of the spirits now and then would have to break the Home rules to get it.
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And for those inmates who broke the rules, Sections 10 through 13 spelled out the procedure for complaint, trial, and punishment—a lengthy process not unlike a military court-martial.

In his office, with the incoming inmate seated across from him, Superintendent Ford would carefully polish his spectacles and begin a slow, deliberate reading of the Home rules. At the end of each section he would look up from the printed page, squinting over the top of his spectacles, and ask the newcomer if he understood what had just been read.

Salem Ford used this time to size up the new man. Ford knew that most of the inmates came to the Home after years of living in rough circumstances, and like any good officer, he was taking responsibility for their well-being. By all accounts Ford was a patient listener, managing to convey sympathy without pity, concern without condescension, and the fact that he cared and would help.

Finally, when Ford was certain that the inmate knew what was expected of him, he would ask the man to sign the formal register, a bound ledger book that would be maintained throughout the operation of the Home.

Lorenzo D. Holloway's name is first in the register, written in a firm hand with rounded, well-formed letters typical of Spencerian script. Lee Beckham's handwriting is more cramped and jittery, and slightly left-leaning.

By Thanksgiving Day, November 27, 1902, forty-six more men had added their names in the register.
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“The Confederate Home at Pewee Valley did ample justice to King Gobbler on Thanksgiving Day,” a newspaper reported. That first holiday banquet was a day of particular abundance: plenty to eat, plenty of heat, plenty of elbow room at the table.
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Bennett Young and Andrew Sea visited the Home that afternoon, bringing a box of celebratory cigars for the old vets. After four years of planning, arguing, fundraising, meeting, arm-twisting, and optimism, Young could be justly proud of helping create this respectable place.

The bill enacting the Kentucky Confederate Home mandated a facility spacious enough to house a minimum of twenty-five needy ex-Confederates. In their announcement of its purchase, the board of trustees said that the Villa Ridge Inn property was ideally suited for fifty residents, although Bennett Young maintained that it might have to shelter up to a hundred in a pinch.

It wasn't until the end of the first month of operation, however, that the board of trustees realized just how badly they had miscalculated. Application forms were still flying off Harry McDonald's desk, and there seemed to be no way to turn off the flow. Bennett Young and his board of trustees, after a year of raising money and promoting the Home, couldn't begin turning down the indigent and invalid Confederate veterans for whom the Home had been conceived. By December 1, the executive committee had approved more than eighty applications for admission.