My Old Confederate Home (23 page)

More than 250 inmates were living in the Home in 1907 (with several dozen more on temporary furlough at any one time), but with the opening of L. Z. Duke Hall the Home seemed less crowded. Though the hall provided no additional living space, the new building gave veterans more elbow room, a place for their religious services, holiday gatherings, and other assemblies.

Before the hall was built, occasional Protestant religious services were held in the main building, with a few old inmates standing in the lobby while a visiting preacher delivered his message from a perch on the stairway. But the 300-seat Duke Hall allowed for formal services (and more of them).

The Reverend Alexander N. White, Confederate veteran and itinerant Baptist minister, was accepted as an inmate of the Home shortly after it opened in 1902. The wheelchair-bound preacher guided his comrades down the path to salvation whether they wanted to travel it or not. He rarely missed an opportunity to share the Gospel with another inmate; he was a cheerful presence at sickbeds and a comforting figure at deathbeds. Time after time, Home management warned White for being too meddlesome, but enough of the inmates welcomed his religious ardor that the cheerful minister was undeterred.

With the opening of Duke Hall (and with Henry George's tacit approval), White took it upon himself to organize regular religious services, scheduling visiting ministers for Sunday afternoons, song services on Wednesdays, and revival evangelists whenever he could snag them.

“The veterans at the Home are having religious services of a superior quality every Sunday afternoon,” the
Confederate Home Messenger
reported. “Pastors as a rule give the best they have on these occasions.”
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Preachers with congregations in LaGrange, Middletown, and Prospect rotated regular Sunday service assignments at Pewee Valley. Dr. Peyton Hoge, however, had a hometown advantage. He had been called to the pulpit of Pewee Valley Presbyterian Church about the time the assembly hall was dedicated, and he signed up to preach at the Home on the third Sunday of each month. In 1908 Hoge and another Presbyterian minister held a weeklong revival in L. Z. Duke Hall that drew crowds of inmates and Pewee Valley residents. Other denominations also served residents of the Home. The rector at St. James Episcopal Church regularly administered communion to Anglican inmates or any others who desired to partake. Members of the nearby St. Aloysius Catholic Church arranged to transport Catholic inmates to Mass, and the Salvation Army announced its intention to hold band concerts and preaching on the Home's lawn.
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As religious activity flourished in the Home, problems with drunkenness and bad behavior seemed to decrease. The
Confederate Home Messenger
noted that several inmates had chosen to affiliate with local churches. “It is hoped that more will be impressed with their need of a Savior,” the paper added drily.
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L. Z. Duke Hall provided a venue well suited to the programs and entertainments that Henry George and Florence Barlow were more than happy to arrange, amusements that helped reduce some of the tensions and discipline problems that had festered during the Home's earliest years.

Suddenly, calendar pages had more entries and clocks seemed to run faster for idle inmates.

One of the first entertainments held in the hall was a lecture by Louisville attorney William B. Fleming, a state assembly member and acquaintance of Henry George. Fleming brought his electric stereopticon to the Home for a lantern show illustrating the rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte. “The rare and beautiful pictures which he presented are taken from fine paintings, statuary and points of interest in the life of Napoleon and Josephine,” an attendee reported.
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Music lover Andrew Broaddus, owner of a freight company, was invited to bring his Victor Talking Machine and a collection of recordings to the Home for a special concert. Commercial music recording was still in its infancy, and these Civil War veterans marveled at the voice of famed tenor Enrico Caruso wafting from the wooden box that sat onstage at Duke Hall. “But it was when the clear, beautiful notes of a cornet rang out ‘Dixie' that the veterans almost stood on their feet in rapture,” according to the
Confederate Home Messenger.
“They almost imagined themselves again on the field of battle.”
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Florence Barlow, too, was active in filling the calendar with amusements for the inmates; her bookkeeping responsibilities left plenty of time to line up lecturers and performers to appear in Duke Hall. Singers, ventriloquists, elocutionists, magicians, folklorists, bird callers, and dialecticians: all of them responded to Barlow's polite invitation to appear onstage at Duke Hall before an audience of Confederate veterans.

She wasn't shy about encouraging some of the Home's suppliers to provide entertainments for the inmates, either. The Ballard Flour Mills of Louisville arranged for a demonstration of motion pictures in front of a packed audience in Duke Hall, another display of twentieth-century technology that likely astounded the old vets.
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(Later, in 1909, the board of trustees contacted the electric railway company asking permission to tap its lines to obtain sufficient power to install a movie projector in Duke Hall.)

But the acts that excited the inmates most were the vaudeville acts.

“My Dear Miss Barlow,” vaudevillian Polk Miller wrote in the confident, expansive hand of a lifelong showman, “I write to tell you that the long cherished hope that I might go to Pewee Valley to entertain those dear old comrades in the Home is soon to be realized.”
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Miller was a Confederate veteran from Virginia, a banjo virtuoso and dialect storyteller. He and his “Old South Quartette” traveled the country nine months a year, booked into a circuit of vaudeville theaters a week at a time, usually playing three shows a day, six days a week. Second-tier acts like Miller's could prove their value to a city's theater manager (and assure future bookings) by generating local publicity. A free performance for “those dear old comrades in the Home” would be certain to add press clippings to his scrapbook.

Miller was no second-tier act to the veterans when he played to a standing-room-only audience of inmates, family, and friends at L. Z. Duke Hall in January 1911. “More veterans were present than ever before on any similar occasion,” according to Florence Barlow, to witness Polk Miller's two-hour show of yarns, jokes, and old-time music.
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Another favorite performer at the Home was “Captain Jack, the Poet Scout.” Jack Crawford was a bigger-than-life Western showman, a contemporary (and minor competitor) of Buffalo Bill Cody. The Poet Scout's performance consisted of a recitation of his cowboy poems, interspersed with stories of the Wild West and (largely fictional) incidents from his life. “Captain Jack gave the veterans one of the most unique and delightful entertainments they have had,” Florence Barlow reported.
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Inmates had the best seats—front and center—in L. Z. Duke Hall to see nationally known performers like Captain Jack, Polk Miller, and the Old Soldier Fiddlers. But these shows, and other entertainments arranged by Barlow and George, drew increasingly large numbers of Pewee Valley residents. Perhaps the greatest benefit of Lizzie Duke's gift of an assembly hall was the increasing involvement of neighbors in the daily life of the Home. Duke Hall served to open wide the institutional gates of the Kentucky Confederate Home to the residents of Pewee Valley.

In 1902, when trustees announced that the new Kentucky Confederate veterans' home would be established in Pewee Valley, local homeowners threw a fit. They threatened lawsuits to prevent having a state institution plopped in the midst of their quaint village.

At first, the Home was everything the quiet community feared: boisterous crowds jamming the area for ceremonial events, bad smells from an overworked sewage system, and drunken inmates passed out on local porches.

But five years later, by the time L. Z. Duke Hall was dedicated, those problems had largely disappeared. (It didn't hurt that the Home was a good economic neighbor, providing wages for up to twenty local residents and regular income for the coal distributor, the harness shop, the funeral home, and other local tradesmen.)
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Commandant George and Florence Barlow reached out to their Pewee Valley neighbors, inviting clubs and organizations to use Duke Hall for meetings, concerts, and dances. “The hall is at all times open to any one who will come to amuse or entertain the veterans,” Florence Barlow wrote in the
Confederate Home Messenger.

Mrs. Mary Craig Lawton, who kept a summer house near the Confederate Home, conducted drama classes for Pewee Valley youngsters. Barlow invited her to present the drama club's play for the community in L. Z. Duke Hall. Nannie Barbee, known for her dialect performances before clubs and organizations in Louisville, drew a large crowd of Pewee Valley residents for her impersonations when she came to Duke Hall for a show. Oldham County's Masonic lodge used the hall to stage its fundraising musicales. After cataloging the Home's donated books and shelving them in the hall balcony, Barlow opened a lending library for Pewee Valley residents. The young single women of Pewee Valley held their leap-year dance in Duke Hall, and local churches united to hold a common Sunday night prayer service there.
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Duke Hall thus became Pewee Valley's assembly room, theater, lecture hall, music room, movie house, party room, library, and chapel. At the same time, the Kentucky Confederate Home became an integral part of community life in Pewee Valley.

Children played on the Home's rolling lawn, and residents used the Home's drives and pathways to pass from one part of the village to another. The Home regularly loaned chairs, tables, and cookware to local organizations for their own events, and fire equipment from the Home often responded to fires in the surrounding community. Bennett Young and the Home's trustees voted money to help maintain streets in the township.

Despite the early fears of vocal Pewee Valley homeowners, the Home and its hundreds of old veterans eventually became, as one resident described it, “just part of our neighborhood.”
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As Duke Hall helped open the gates of the Home to the local community, so did it open the Home to the camps and chapters of Kentucky's UCV and UDC. To the delight and benefit of the inmates—men whose presence in the Home was due to their long ago military service—L. Z. Duke Hall became a sort of Lost Cause clubhouse.

At its annual meeting on the day the hall was dedicated in 1907, the Kentucky Division of the United Confederate Veterans voted to hold all future state reunions among the inmates on the grounds of the Kentucky Confederate Home.
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Reunion day came every autumn, when hundreds of veterans from UCV camps from around the state (along with their families and friends) descended on Pewee Valley for a day of reminiscing, tale-telling, food, music, a short business meeting, and plenty of Lost Cause oratory. Henry George saw to it that the Home looked its best: floors scrubbed, yard raked, and kitchen spick-and-span. Florence Barlow decorated Duke Hall with photos, flags, fresh greenery, and colorful bunting hung across the stage.

Other Confederate veterans' groups chose to meet in Duke Hall. The Orphan Brigade and Morgan's Men, as well as several other statewide veterans groups, held reunions at the Kentucky Confederate Home in the eight years after Duke Hall was completed.

At these events, the inmates were hosts as well as guests of honor. Dressed in fresh uniforms, they would meet arriving trains and escort visitors back to the Home. They welcomed guests and showed off the Home's grounds. Proud inmates posed for snapshots, bragged on the quality of food served in the kitchen, and told tall tales about the luxury and ease surrounding them. The old men of the Kentucky Confederate Home, lacking the society of relatives and friends, basked in the elegance of the respectable place in which they were fortunate enough to live.

“It was a happy thought to hold these reunions at the Home,” Barlow mused. “It increases the interest in the institution, and at the same time brings pleasure and joy to those who are gathered here.”
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Ex-Confederates who visited the Home began including their inmate comrades in activities outside the confines of the institution. Louisville's UCV camp paid for eighteen Orphan Brigade inmates to attend the brigade reunion there, and the state organization paid travel expenses for thirty inmates to attend the national UCV reunion in Little Rock in 1911.
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Confederate veteran and political boss John “Colonel Johnny” Whallen invited inmates and Home employees for an outing at White City, an amusement park on the banks of the Ohio River near Louisville. Colonel Johnny arranged for private railcars to transport 115 inmates from Pewee Valley to the park, where they were met by a band and jugs of lemonade. The inmates were given the freedom of the park, where they could get on the thrill rides, peek into the sideshows, and marvel at the dancing elephant.
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Bennett Young had managed to avoid giving a formal oversight role to the Daughters of the Confederacy, but Florence Barlow opened the gates of the Home to any chapter that wanted to honor the inmates. Barlow's duties in the Home allowed her enough free time to serve as an energetic president of the Confederate Home chapter of the UDC. Representing the Confederate Home chapter and the Home itself, she solicited other UDC chapters to hold celebrations at Christmas, Thanksgiving, Lee's birthday, and Fourth of July in the new hall.

At Christmastime the UDC women hung presents on Christmas trees in the infirmary and the main building, then distributed them to inmates on Christmas morning. “We all got a small present: apples, oranges, candy, some gloves, handkerchiefs,” inmate T. W. Duncan wrote his family. “I got a neck warmer. All the old fellows here were well pleased.”
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