My Old Confederate Home (26 page)

As a young married woman, Charlotte Woodbury joined the heritage groups—the UDC and the DAR—and was invited to membership in several of the social clubs.
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But it was the work on behalf of Kentucky's children that most warmed her heart.

In 1906 she and eight others formed the Kentucky Child Labor Association (KCLA). Urban industrialization in Kentucky was drawing the children of poor families into factories for long hours at minuscule wages, and the KCLA was intended to expose the exploitation of children while lobbying for protective legislation. (Charlotte Woodbury nominated her father as acting president until the group's members could elect officers.)

Kentucky's rural children were at risk, too. Many parents lacked knowledge of basic nutrition and were condemning their children to scurvy, pellagra, beriberi, and other preventable diseases. Through the Kentucky Federation of Women's Clubs, Woodbury organized and ran the annual Baby Health Contest at the Kentucky State Fair. It proved an effective tool for getting healthful recipes and nutritional information into the hands of rural women who came to the fair in Louisville.
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She didn't neglect her heritage work, either. Charlotte Woodbury chartered Kentucky's first Children of the Confederacy chapter (and enlisted her father to serve on the board). Louisville Daughters elected her president of their chapter, and in 1911 she began the first of two terms as president of the statewide UDC organization. By 1917 Charlotte Woodbury had begun to make a name for herself with the national Democratic Party organization, and President Wilson appointed her to the Council of National Defense in 1917. News of the two-meal-a-day plan and reports of unsanitary conditions at the Kentucky Confederate Home drew her attention back to the veterans there.
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Charlotte Woodbury's brand of social activism echoed that of Bennett Young, and Young probably engineered her appointment to the Women's Advisory Committee in 1918. Woodbury was determined and headstrong in pursuit of a cause, but Young likely felt he could keep a tight rein on the daughter of his old friend Thomas Osborne.

As it turned out, Bennett Young never had a chance.

“As we look over the faces here today and see the changes that another year has wrought, candor compels us to admit that Death is moving with a busy and relentless hand,” Bennett Young told a group of veterans at their state reunion. “His assault is slow and gradual, but he is a foe that will prove invincible, and in the end is sure to triumph.”
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No one was more aware that the Confederate generation was passing away than America's best-known ex-Confederate.

By 1919 Bennett Henderson Young stood at the apex of the national United Confederate Veterans organization. After commanding Kentucky's state organization for a decade (and hosting two successful national reunions in Louisville), in 1910 he was elected commander of the Army of Tennessee Department, overseeing activities of UCV camps in seven states. Two years later he was elected commander-in-chief, head of a national organization consisting of 40,000 active Confederate veterans. Young won reelection for three more terms until his voluntary retirement in 1916. A grateful organization named him honorary commander-in-chief for life, the only UCV member to hold that title. He rarely missed a meeting of the Kentucky Confederate Home board of trustees, but he was America's premier Lost Cause orator, and he crisscrossed the country to speak at dedications, reunions, political rallies, and anniversary celebrations.
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At seventy-six years old, Bennett Young had every right to feel tired when he departed for a much-needed Florida vacation in January 1919. (“It is the only time in all of my life that I have ever felt real puny,” he wrote a friend shortly before his departure.) Staying in Jacksonville, where he and the Haldeman families were planning a real estate development, he realized just how puny he was feeling.
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“Take me back to Kentucky,” he told his wife. “The end is near. I want to die back in the old Bluegrass State.”

Bennett Young's final hours were as much a breathless adventure as the rest of his life.
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On February 22, 1919, when Young's Florida doctor refused him permission to travel, Young called for a taxi to drive him to the railroad station in Jacksonville. “It means no chance, General!” the doctor shouted after him as the cab roared off into the night. At the train station, Young and his wife were joined by friends and another doctor. They found a private stateroom on a northbound express and wired Young's daughter in Atlanta that the train would arrive in that city in several hours.

Meanwhile, newspapers in Kentucky and throughout the South began posting news of the famed veteran's death race to the Bluegrass State. Reporters waited with Young's daughter on the platform to see if Young was still alive when the train reached Atlanta.

He was, but barely. His grim-faced daughter boarded the private car, and the train sped off for Kentucky.

Telegrams sent during brief stops in Chattanooga and Knoxville provided details to Louisville newspapers and family friends of Young's last dash across the South. “I want to cross the river and bivouac with my gallant comrades who have gone before,” he was quoted as saying, but newspapers also warned their readers that Young's “life was ebbing away fast.”

When the train pulled into Louisville's Union Station after midnight, Young was still clinging to life. A private ambulance, with police escort, met him at the station and carried him to his home at 429 West Ormsby Avenue.

Bennett H. Young—Confederate raider, attorney, entrepreneur, writer, railroad man, historian, Sunday School superintendent, author, orator, and primary organizer of the Kentucky Confederate Home—died the following afternoon, on February 23, 1919.
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Published articles marking Bennett Young's death made mention of the Kentucky Confederate Home, of course, but only as a single square in the much larger patchwork quilt that was his life. On paper, the Home was governed by the consensus of an appointed board operating according to parliamentary procedure. In fact, Bennett Young had run the Kentucky Confederate Home for eighteen years. With equal parts compassion, pragmatism, and prudence—and demonstrating an incredible attention to detail—he had directed the lives and activities of inmates, employees, and trustees.

His death triggered some unexpected changes.

If Commandant Charles L. Daughtry anticipated that he would be asked to fill Young's slot as president of the board of trustees, he was disappointed. The trustees never even nominated him. Instead, Louisville attorney William A. Milton was elected president of the board, and Milton asked John Leathers to serve as board secretary.
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Even before Young's death, bookkeeper Florence Barlow had reached the end of her rope with Commandant Daughtry. She was slavishly dedicated to easygoing former commandant Henry George and the happiness of the inmates, but conflict with the more rigid and humorless Charles Daughtry grew to the point where Barlow angrily resigned (or was discharged) from the position she had held for almost fifteen years. Bennett Young had allowed her to keep her room in the Home until she could find other employment, but with Young's death all promises were left derelict. Over Leathers's and Milton's objections, Daughtry convinced the rest of the trustees to evict Barlow from the Home.
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Bitter at Daughtry in particular, the aging bookkeeper moved to a friend's Pewee Valley carriage house, where she could stay in touch with her beloved inmates.

Henry George died of a heart attack several months after Young passed away, but Daughtry still didn't bring his wife to live at the Home. Instead, he employed a particularly unqualified woman from Brandenburg, twenty-one-year-old Imogene Nall, as bookkeeper and special assistant, and he installed her in the rooms vacated by Barlow and George (“I think she will have a refining influence on some of the men,” Daughtry explained).
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Discipline problems among the inmates increased, and longtime employees seethed at the little farmer's high-handed manner, but Daughtry handled both with a firm hand. During his first two years at the Home, Daughtry recommended more inmate expulsions than Henry George had found necessary in twelve years. Meanwhile, long-serving resident physician Dr. Rowan B. Pryor left to enter private practice, and Daughtry also replaced several of the stewards and nurses. Home Matron Lela Henley expressed her objections to these changes in a manner that Daughtry privately considered insubordinate.
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In the wake of Bennett Young's death, the board of trustees seemed to become less involved in day-to-day management at the Home. Meeting minutes reflect a tentativeness regarding personnel decisions, a reluctance to question Commandant Daughtry.

Charlotte Woodbury and the Women's Advisory Committee, however, continued to conduct regular inspections of the Home and its inmates. The committee prepared its monthly lists of problems relating to nutrition, sanitation, and health care and held Daughtry accountable for resolving them. “I know I have made some mistakes,” Daughtry admitted to the board, “but I insist that the mistakes were of the head and not of the heart.”
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All these machinations were largely out of the public eye, however. The inmates failed to stir the interest of Kentuckians, who were then more interested in their returning doughboys than in Confederate veterans of a half-century before.

It would take a near tragedy to rekindle sympathy for the 180 inmates remaining at the Kentucky Confederate Home.

Chapter 13

The Trainer and the Undertaker

I
nmate George C. Wells of Scott County was no outdoorsman, but he had cleared enough land, fired enough forges, and boiled enough coffee over enough open campfires in his eighty-five years to recognize wood smoke when he smelled it.

It was supper time at the Kentucky Confederate Home on Thursday evening, March 25, 1920, and George Wells was clomping his way toward the dining hall about as fast as an old man with one leg could ambulate. Midway along the second-floor verandah, however, Wells stopped, sniffed the air, and tried to figure out where that smoke was coming from.

Downstairs in the almost-full dining hall, Commandant Daughtry paced between the tables, making sure each of his men was wearing his bib before he signaled the servers to bring out the evening meal of mutton, string beans, sliced tomatoes, and stewed peaches. Daughtry stopped at the back of the hall, lifted his nose in the air, caught a whiff of smoke, and likely thought to have a word with the cook about burning the cornbread. He turned to step toward the kitchen, but his attention was drawn to the one-legged veteran hopping across the lobby toward the open doors of the dining room.

Red-faced and out of breath, George Wells burst into the hall.

The goddam place is burning down and we'd best get ourselves out!

Frowning at the profanity, Commandant Daughtry turned on his toes and quick-marched toward the one-legged man.
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Gusty March winds. A forty-year-old frame structure built of lumber now dry as kindling. Wood-burning stoves and flammable fuel oil drums stacked in the basement. One hundred eighty old men—many bedridden—living in close quarters.

It was a recipe for disaster.

Fire protection was never a particularly high priority at the Kentucky Confederate Home; when the trustees discussed the matter, it was more often in terms of possible financial loss than loss of life. The executive committee kept fire insurance in place (as required by the state auditor) and reviewed the coverage from time to time. (Shortly after becoming secretary of the board of trustees in 1919, John Leathers recommended an additional $16,000 coverage be “placed on the Home in order to fully protect all our property.”)
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A legislative appropriation in 1903 paid to equip the main building with some fire control and rescue equipment, including two 1,000-gallon wheeled water-pumping wagons. The commandant was instructed to post a fire watch each night, and an inmate was assigned to walk the hallways from lights-out until dawn, but there were no regular fire drills or strict rules for fire safety.

During his tenure, Commandant Henry George organized a fire brigade, a team of inmates who were trained to use the pump wagons and respond to any fire emergency at the Home or the surrounding community. The fire brigade proved its worth in 1908 when chimney sparks touched off a fire on the Home's infirmary roof. Like well-drilled infantrymen, the old veterans ran for the fire shed. Within minutes they were pumping water onto the burning roof, and the fire was completely extinguished by the time Crestwood volunteer firemen arrived. It was “a blaze which for a time threatened destruction of the Home, but was gotten under control by hard work on the part of the inmates,” a newspaper reported.
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There was no fire brigade in 1917 when a small fire, probably caused by faulty wiring, broke out in one of the towers of the main building. Loungers on the lawn saw smoke and sounded the alarm. A hastily organized bucket brigade using water from a fourth-floor standpipe put down the fire before serious damage was done.
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Other institutions of the time weren't so lucky.

In 1915 fire consumed a four-story frame building in San Francisco, a Catholic girls' home, and only heroic action by the nuns saved thirty-six of the forty little girls who lived there.

A few years later, in Chicago, an unattended cookstove touched off a fire in an insane asylum, and flames swept through the dormitory before anyone could sound an alarm. Nineteen inmates died in their beds from burns and smoke inhalation.

A former resort hotel in Quebec, converted for use as a hospital, burned to the ground in 1916, despite its location less than two blocks from a metropolitan fire department. Fanned by a strong breeze, flames blew through the long hallways of the wood-frame building, cutting off patients in their rooms or trapping them in hallways. Recovery crews had difficulty separating the bodies of burned men from their twisted metal bedsprings, and hospital officials declared it fortunate that only twenty-five patients died in the hellish inferno.
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On March 25, 1920, hell came to visit the Kentucky Confederate Home.

Inmates later swore that a careless black handyman, out for a smoke on a rear porch in the northeast corner of the Home, started the fire. Whether it was the handyman or one of the inmates, it's likely that embers from a hand-rolled cigarette or a smoldering cigar butt or the live coal from a pipe bowl fell through the porch planks to the dry grass below. Lath latticework hid the dead grass from view, and the ember may have glowed there in the straw tufts for a while, fanned by a southerly breeze, as men walked overhead.

The supper bell rang shortly after 5:00
P.M.

When the grass finally ignited, it may have taken several minutes for the fire to touch off the lattice and burn its way up to the porch beams. Like seasoned firewood, the oak beams were dry, untreated, and ready to burn. Still hidden, the fire may have gnawed along the underside of several beams for a time, emitting little smoke, before poking upward to ignite the porch planks.

By the time one-legged George Wells, late to dinner and following his nose to the smoke smell, saw the fire, flames were burning across a fifteen-foot section of porch and were climbing the walls toward the upper floors.

A fire insurance map of the Home buildings and grounds, dating from about 1909, shows a facility equipped to protect itself from conflagration. Ten standpipes, each with fifty feet of two-inch hose attached, are spread throughout the main building and the infirmary, with fifteen Babcock chemical extinguishers mounted near the stairways of both buildings. Fire buckets, ladders, and two small pumpers are in the fire shed, along with two hose reels, each wound with a hundred feet of hose. The schematic shows a fire pump and hose next to a concrete water containment pool 150 feet to the rear of the Home and two 1,000-gallon water tanks in the attic of the main building. Big Kirker-Bender fire escapes—tall, sheet-metal escape slides like giant corkscrews—stand at either end of the building. Behind and between the main building and infirmary is an elevated wooden water tank, 50,000 gallons standing on legs eighty feet above the ground, with sufficient water and pressure to combat the fiercest blaze.

By 1920, however, most of the fire protection was gone.

The spiral escape slides still stood, but where there had been ten standpipes with outlets on each floor in 1909, many had been covered by paper, paneling, or plaster during periodic renovations in the years following. Most of the hoses were gone, too, borrowed for other purposes around the Home. If the chemical extinguishers were still in place, most were likely inoperable; there is no record of them being recharged, replaced, or serviced after 1915. Fire buckets were still stacked in a storage shed, but the wheeled pumpers were gone, cannibalized for parts or donated to the Crestwood Volunteer Fire Department. The concrete containment pool had cracked years before, and any water it held was green, sludgy, and full of debris. The attic and fourth floor of the main building had been sealed off for years, and it is unlikely that the storage tanks—if they still existed—were filled with water. There was no trained fire brigade; eighty-year-old inmates were too infirm to handle any equipment that remained. The nearest fire equipment was at the town of Crestwood, five miles away.

On Thursday evening, March 25, 1920, a hundred old men were crowding into the dining hall for supper. Fifty-nine more, incapacitated due to age or illness, lay in the infirmary waiting for someone to bring their evening meal. Outside, the southerly March wind was stiffening as sunset approached, whipping the flames that were beginning to burn through the porch roof.

Only the elevated wooden water tank, 50,000 gallons standing on legs eighty feet above the ground, promised any protection against a major fire.

“We was playing checkers when George Wells let out that unearthly yell,” Rufus Hawkins said. Hawkins, Jeb Jenkins, John Watkins, and others crowded around Wells to learn what the fuss was about.

Commandant Daughtry wasn't about to take the word of a panic-stricken old man that the building was afire, so he left the inmates in the dining hall and ran to see for himself. By then, flames were climbing the outside of the building, and wind was pushing flames into open windows on the second and third floors, setting curtains ablaze. After a quick look, Daughtry ran for his office on the south end of the main building.

The inmates in the dining hall, smelling smoke and beginning to grasp the situation, came to their feet and moved toward the doors. Like ants in a kicked-over mound, they scattered, some to look at the fire, some to the stairways upstairs, and others to doors leading outside.

Engineer Alexander S. McFarlan grabbed several of the dining servers and a half-dozen of the more able-bodied inmates, leading them outside to the old storage shed. He shouted orders to his makeshift crew, and in ten minutes they were spraying the fire with three hoses that McFarlan coupled to pipes on the big water tower.

McFarlan's fire brigade may have slowed progress of the fire outside the building, but the flames were already eating their way through the upper rooms. Dozens of inmates had left the dining hall to return to their rooms—some seeking a place of safety, others to rescue personal belongings—and the doors they opened allowed the wind to carry flames from room to room and down wide hallways. As smoke purled up the stairways, terrified old men ran aimlessly through doorways, in and out of the small upstairs rooms, slapping at hot cinders that fell on their shoulders, hair, and beards. Flame crawled across bedroom walls, feeding off layers of old paper. Strips of burning wallpaper fell to the floors, igniting hemp carpet runners.

Some of the inmates upstairs tried to fight the fire by swatting it with quilts, only to scatter fiery bits of cotton over the territory they were trying to save. Others grabbed for old photographs or special treasures, then tried to hightail it out of the burning building.
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Intending to make his escape down one of the spiral escape chutes, one inmate threw his overstuffed valise before him down the slide. The valise jammed the chute at the first corkscrew, rendering the slide useless for escape.
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From the northeast corner of the building where the fire started, the fire ate its way steadily southward through parlors, linen closets, and washrooms toward the commandant's office, where Charles L. Daughtry was frantically calling for help.

Smoke swirled around the ceiling of his office and flames drew nearer as Commandant Daughtry used the candlestick telephone on his desk to call for help.

Though Daughtry could ring his neighbors directly, calls outside Pewee Valley had to be placed through the local phone company's switchboard operator; the best operators remained calm and levelheaded in even the direst emergencies. (Several years before, Pewee Valley telephone operator Ida Ochsner, discovering a fire in her own building near the depot, remained at her second-floor switchboard, coolly calling fire departments and notifying neighbors, as smoke and flame boiled up the stairway toward her. Her job complete, Ida docked the plugs, groped her way to an open window, jumped onto a telephone pole, and slid down to safety.)
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From her window at the exchange, the Pewee Valley operator could see smoke and embers rising from the Home. Unperturbed, she connected Daughtry to the fire departments in Crestwood, Louisville, Middletown, and La Grange. The departments assured him that help was on the way.

Flames reached Daughtry's office near the south end of the building by 6:15, forcing him to evacuate. He tucked the inmate register and a few other papers under his arm, then left the building for the last time.

The Pewee Valley telephone operator continued to place calls to neighbors who might help fight the fire, to local churches, and to City Hospital in Louisville, warning them to expect casualties.

Most of the neighbors didn't need a phone call to alert them: the twilight sky glowed blood-red as a rooster's comb from flames that were punching through the roof of the main building. They arrived by the dozens with buckets to help fight the fire. Engineer McFarlan recruited some to replace the tired inmates on his hose crew; others assisted veterans who were still stumbling out of the burning building with their rescued possessions. Father E. C. McAllister, rector of St. James's Episcopal Church, saw the fire from the front steps of his church and ran to the Home, arriving out of breath to offer whatever comfort he could provide to the living or the dying.