My Old Confederate Home (21 page)

On March 14, 1906, the Confederate Home board of trustees voted unanimously to accept Coleman's resignation and to offer the position of commandant to state senator Henry George at an annual salary of $1,200 (and free lodging in the Home).
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Henry George's appointment may have been an expression of gratitude for legislative work performed on behalf of the Home; but George was a boyishly good-natured man in his fifties and a welcome replacement for the ill-humored Coleman. “His selection will prove a popular one throughout the state,” a newspaper editor predicted.
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Henry George, equipped with a natural enthusiasm and politician's gregariousness, shared Bennett Young's belief that “some kind of amusement is essential to the happiness of the inmates” at the Kentucky Confederate Home.

Florence Barlow and Mrs. L. Z. Duke would help Henry George provide those amusements.

Florence Barlow was a career businesswoman at a time when few women had professional occupations outside the home; she was a socially active single woman at a time when most spinsters felt themselves lucky to be keeping house for a brother's family. But above all, she was a true Daughter of the Confederacy.
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Born in Lexington in 1854, Florence Dudley Barlow was the daughter and granddaughter of inventors, a father-son team of creative and gifted craftsmen. The elder Barlow is said to have invented the first steam locomotive and demonstrated it (with passenger car attached) in Lexington in 1826. By the 1840s father and son had created and patented a mechanical planetarium, a massive clockworks contraption that demonstrated relative movements of the planets of the solar system and all the known moons. The inventors built a foundry in Lexington, and their families lived well off the proceeds of planetariums sold to universities and collectors.

In the years before the Civil War, Florence's father, Milton, turned his attention to weaponry. In 1855 Milton patented a forty-foot-long breech-loading rifled cannon designed to lob an explosive shell further, and with greater accuracy, than any cannon in existence. Using a Federal grant as seed money, he was well on his way to constructing the prototype when Union troops arrived in Lexington in 1861 to confiscate the weapon.

Concerned that Milton Barlow's designs might be used by the Confederacy, Federal soldiers entered his shop to seize the drawings, molds, castings, tools, and every piece of machinery. When Barlow resisted, he was imprisoned. Seven-year-old Florence Barlow's first memory of war was watching her father led away in manacles by armed men in blue uniforms. Her memory of that event, she told an acquaintance fifty years later, was “as vivid as if it happened yesterday.”
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Milton Barlow eventually escaped from the Federal jail and, with no opportunity to tell his family good-bye, rode southward to join General Abraham Buford. Commissioned a captain in the Confederate army, he spent the war in a staff position as Chief of Ordnance.

Impoverished after the war, the family moved to Madison, Kentucky, where the former inventor and foundry owner found work as a miller. As a child, Florence Barlow had enjoyed pretty dresses and needlepoint and art lessons; in Madison she earned money teaching wealthy women how to paint decorative china.

“I determined to cultivate gumption,” she said later, “and bring into use all the intelligence I could command.”

Gumption led Florence in 1890 to Middlesborough, then a southeastern Kentucky coal mining boomtown. She had heard of fortunes being made in land speculation and, with no experience, traveled there alone to open a real estate office. She was the only woman in the business; within a week every banker, attorney, surveyor, and insurance man in town was sending referrals to her.

Her gumption had given Barlow her start, but she was a quick study, and her natural intelligence allowed her to capitalize on her sales successes. An officer of a large building and loan association arrived in Middlesborough, looking to establish an agency there. Barlow wanted to represent the company, but had to admit she knew little about how the business worked. She asked for a stack of company literature and an appointment for later that day.

“After I had read the matter put into my hands and heard him talk ‘building loan' for an hour,” she said, “I was able to talk ‘building loan' intelligently.”

The company appointed her its agent, and she papered the town with posters reading “$200,000 to Loan by Miss Barlow!” Business boomed.

The real estate and building loan boom stalled when a fire leveled the town. As soon as the telegraph station reopened, Florence Barlow was wiring building materials firms all over the country, seeking to be appointed their commissioned sales agent in Middlesborough.

On the fly, she learned a new career as the town rebuilt. “I did splendidly,” she said, “selling thousands of brick, mantels and grates, many carloads of sand, and a number of iron fronts.”

Though she was dealing with contractors and workmen at their job sites, she never failed to wear feminine attire. “I never forgot I was a lady bred and born, and others always remembered it.”

Barlow left Middlesborough with a healthy bank balance just before bust followed boom in 1893. She had learned to cultivate important people with her personal charm, self-confidence, winsome manner, and a sincere interest in their business. It wasn't long before she was employed as business manager of the
Lexington Observer.

Barlow's return to Lexington, her childhood home, rekindled memories of the war years. Her father was dead, never having recovered his creative spirit, and she found herself curious about the events that had so affected her family.

“The war was very little talked about,” she wrote an acquaintance after Milton Barlow's death. “Then it was too late for me to get much valuable and interesting information from him, to my great sorrow.”
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She began corresponding with prominent Kentucky veterans, men with whom her father might have served, asking about their experiences in war and their knowledge of her father. In short order, a comrade of her father's, General Basil W. Duke, employed her in Louisville to help him edit and operate
The Southern Magazine
, a literary journal.

Through Basil Duke (and as a result of her self-promotional correspondence), Florence Barlow became known to Kentucky's influential ex-Confederates as a woman who could meet business challenges. Bennett Young retained her when he needed someone to scout out public speaking opportunities; John Leathers referred her to the principals of a New York life insurance company, who hired her to open and operate their Kentucky offices.

By the turn of the century Barlow was employed by Henrietta Morgan Duke as associate editor and business manager of
The Lost Cause
, a regional news magazine for Kentucky UDC members. She subsequently purchased the magazine and edited it for four years, further cementing her relations with ex-Confederates and their loved ones. Barlow had only recently sold
The Lost Cause
in 1905 when she met Mrs. L. Z. Duke of New York City at the Louisville depot for the ride to Pewee Valley.

A coach carried Florence Barlow and Mrs. L. Z. Duke the short distance from the Pewee Valley depot to the Kentucky Confederate Home. Bennett Young, new commandant Henry George, and a contingent of uniformed inmates greeted the two women at the door.

Mrs. Duke's tour of the Home and her overnight stay would doubtless have included a walk around the grounds and several meals in the dining hall. She likely visited the new infirmary and perhaps joined in a song or two by the parlor piano. But what made this visit different from others was the immediate and genuine affection that blossomed between the inmates and the petite New York socialite with the soft Kentucky accent.

Later accounts likened it to love at first sight.

Mrs. Duke demonstrated the elegance of society in her manner and dress, but there was a Kentucky naturalness about her that invited familiarity. Without a trace of coquetry, she had a directness that flattered the men and reminded them of their rooster days. In her presence, the old inmates became like smitten boys lining up to carry her schoolbooks or share their dessert with her. And the feelings were reciprocated.

She shared her tragic personal history with the men of the Home: the death of her beloved older brother on the battlefield at Shiloh, an early marriage to a wealthy industrialist that took her away from Kentucky, the death of her infant child, and the sudden loss of her husband while the grief-stricken couple was recuperating in Europe. She could not compare her trials to those of the valorous ex-Confederates, she said, but she tried to meet adversity like a true daughter of the Southland. She was a grandniece of gallant Confederate general John B. Hood, and she was an active member of the New York chapter of the UDC.
¹⁶

At an appropriate moment before her departure from Pewee Valley, when Mrs. Duke asked how she might help brighten the lives of the veterans, Young and Barlow described the need for an assembly hall, a place that might contribute more to the inmates' pleasure than anything else she could do. Soon after Mrs. Duke's visit, on September 6, 1906, Young announced to his board of trustees a donation of $2,200 from Mrs. L. Z. Duke of New York. The money—the largest single cash gift in the history of the Home—would be used to erect the L. Z. Duke Hall on the grounds of the Kentucky Confederate Home.
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In exchange for the money to build his assembly hall, Bennett Young was willing to validate the phony personal history of the socialite from New York.

According to best evidence, Mrs. L. Z. Duke was actually Sarah Elizabeth Howe from eastern Kentucky. Daughter of a dirt-poor subscription schoolteacher, she was a convicted prostitute and had owned several brothels in Dallas, Texas.
¹⁸

“Lizzie” Howe was born in 1844 in Greenup County, Kentucky, the youngest of six children. The family moved to Missouri in the 1850s. Lizzie was barely sixteen years old when she married Missouri farmer Joshua Thomas, according to a legal document filed years later by an abandoned daughter of the young couple. After two or three more marriages she appeared in 1874 in Dallas, Texas, using the name Lizzie Handley, and purchased property for a bordello.

Settled barely two decades earlier, Dallas in the 1870s was still a rough-and-tumble town on the edge of the western frontier. Prairie farmers, cotton growers, and loggers came to Dallas to bank some of their money and spend the rest on entertainment. Lizzie Handley's entertainment business boomed. Within a decade she owned two ornate residences, each located on prime property in the booming town and each operating with up to fifteen women “boarders.” (For tax purposes the properties were listed as residences, but Lizzie and her girls could be frank with the census-taker. When asked their occupation, they all answered, “prostitute.” Newspapers had no compunction about referring to Lizzie as “proprietress of a bawdy house.”)

From time to time, when Lizzie was charged with running a “disorderly house,” she closed her doors for a few days, paid her fine, then put her girls back to work. Lizzie lived well, and she plowed her profits into the purchase of more Dallas real estate.

Among the sporting men of Dallas, Lizzie was a charmer. The nature of her business required her to treat men well, to feed their self-confidence while managing them like smitten schoolboys. Her free and generous nature so captivated at least one city official that he made her arrest records disappear. On Christmas Day she would deliver boxes of cigars to prisoners in the city jail (for which the prisoners desired “to return their heartfelt thanks,” according to one newspaper).

By the 1890s, however, Dallas was striving for respectability. The arrival of major rail lines and schemes to open the Trinity River for navigation to the Gulf of Mexico convinced city boosters that the Texas town could become a metropolis and a polite home for wealthy families. A corps of fire-breathing local ministers, the Salvation Army, and other social reformers joined forces to clean up the “Reservation,” the name given several square blocks of open bars, pool halls, sporting clubs, and Lizzie Handley's bordellos. Her residences suffered several fires of suspicious origin. The state legislature and Dallas city government passed strict new laws meting out harsher penalties to owners of disorderly houses, and reform minded judges were throwing the book at any such proprietors who were brought before the bar.

Lizzie Handley—now calling herself Lizzie Duke—began selling off her Dallas properties and then departed for an extended vacation in Europe. By 1891 she had liquidated Dallas real estate worth more than $120,000 and had resettled in New York in the guise of a wealthy widow and investor.

A resident of Manhattan in 1900, she was calling herself “Elizabeth Z. Duke” and had shaved ten years off her age. She began trading in (apparently legitimate) residential properties and making short-term business loans as she completed the sale of her Dallas holdings.
¹⁹
Though she no longer delivered cigars to men in jail, she became active in the Woman's Society for the Prevention of Crime, and—as L. Zebbeon Duke—applied for membership in the New York City chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

When Sarah Elizabeth Howe, daughter of a dirt-poor Greenup County schoolteacher, returned to Kentucky to visit the Kentucky Confederate Home, it was as Mrs. L. Z. Duke, wealthy New York socialite.
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Bennett Young wasted no time banking Mrs. Duke's $2,200 contribution and commissioning an architect to design the assembly hall. The building was completed well before the planned dedication of the hall in October 1907, a date chosen to coincide with the statewide reunion of UCV camps and the fifth anniversary of the opening of the Kentucky Confederate Home.

In designing the hall, the architect didn't stray far from Young's original desire for a house of worship; the assembly hall resembled a country church building. It was a large, open, rectangular building with a stage and proscenium on one end and a slightly canted balcony overhanging wide front doors on the other. The walls on the long sides were lined with tall windows; balcony windows and four small dormers added more interior light. A Federal-style covered front porch provided shelter for those entering through the main doors. The modern building was piped for running water and wired for electricity, and it could seat a crowd of 300.