My Old Confederate Home (27 page)

The intense heat of the fire forced the amateur firefighters away from the building as flames moved through the Home from north to south. Paint on the wood siding of the infirmary—forty feet south of the main building—bubbled in the heat.

Fifty-nine bedridden old men lay in the path of the inferno.

John T. Jones had seen his share of stable fires; he had worked around horses all his life. A native of Fayette County, he turned twenty-three years old in time to enlist in the Confederate army as a cavalryman in 1861. He served most of the war as a Morgan Man, returning to the saddle after a Federal bullet shattered his elbow, leaving him unable to extend his left arm completely for the rest of his life. After the war, Jones went to Bourbon County, earning his living as a horse trainer while he and his wife raised eight children.

The big ranches of Texas had a greater need for horse trainers than did postwar Kentucky, however, and Jones moved his family west. He—and later his sons—worked the stock farms of Texas, training native horses as cowboy mounts. Like R. J. Law up in Red River County, P. D. Self near Granbury, or Will Roberson out of Comanche, Confederate veteran John T. Jones spent the last years of the nineteenth century as an itinerant trainer, working a season or two at one ranch, then moving to another. His wife kept a house in Dallas, but when she died in 1904 Jones judged the range life too undependable for an old man and returned to the Bluegrass. He was admitted to the Kentucky Confederate Home in 1914.
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On the night of the fire, Jones was on the lawn of the Home when he heard that the infirmary building was in danger of catching fire. Like horses stabled in their stalls, fifty-nine men were trapped in small rooms, unable to make their own escape.

Jones had seen fire rage through a stable, the horses plunging and fighting for their freedom as the smoke rose and the flames neared—these were sights, sounds, and smells impossible to forget.

Eighty-two-year-old former horse trainer John T. Jones ran to the infirmary, intending to rescue as many of his fellow inmates as he could.

Official sunset that day came at 6:16, and by full dark the blaze could be seen for miles around. More residents arrived by the minute, and they could see in the dark that burning embers were floating high and northward on the wind, threatening to ignite neighboring properties. Someone called out that the nearby G. T. Blackley residence was aflame, and men with buckets ran toward that home.

Meanwhile, as inmates and volunteers carried the infirmary patients to safety, Father McAllister walked among the inmates and draped blankets over the shoulders of singed and shivering survivors. He sent some of his parishioners back to their homes to begin preparing food, and he asked a vestryman to open St. James to shelter the injured.

Trees surrounding the Home were bursting into flame from the heat, lighting the grounds like giant torches, as McFarlan directed his hose crew to throw water on the smoking north end of the infirmary building. The brass nozzles on the three hoses were growing too hot to hold, and the tall wooden legs of the big water tower were beginning to smoke.

At seven o'clock, help arrived in the form of local undertaker Milton A. Stoess.

Crestwood's Volunteer Fire Department was the invention of Milton A. Stoess: he organized the department, paid for most of the equipment, garaged the pumpers in a shed behind his house, and wore the Fire Chief's hat. Locals joked that the fire department was a way for Stoess to get first call on victims for his funeral parlor. The joke was funny because everyone in Crestwood knew how untrue it was.

Milton Stoess had grown up in the area, having been born on a Henry County farm in 1869, the son of German immigrant farmers. Near the turn of the century, having apprenticed with a Henry County undertaker, Stoess opened his own funeral parlor in Crestwood, a bustling railroad town five miles from Pewee Valley.

He looked the part of a small-town undertaker—tall, thin, narrow-faced. His frugality with words, which most took as a sign of his compassion and interest, was more likely the result of growing up in a German-speaking household. In time, Stoess acquired a fine funeral carriage, an ornate coffin wagon, a stable of good horses, a silvered lowering device, and plenty of chairs. He became a conscientious civic citizen, helping to organize a private water company, serving as an elder at the Christian Church, and founding the volunteer fire department.

One of the first regular customers of the M. A. Stoess Funeral Home was the Kentucky Confederate Home. Day or night, Stoess would retrieve the body of a deceased inmate for embalming and burial in the Confederate Cemetery or shipment home. Driving his hearse and dressed in black suit and boiled white shirt, Milton Stoess was the subject of some morbid humor when he visited the Home. So it was a surprise, in a night full of surprises, when the cadaverous undertaker arrived at the Home behind the wheel of a makeshift automobile chemical pumper in leather fire hat and denim overalls.

However he was dressed, Stoess and the Crestwood fire company were needed to fight the flames that had begun to lick and twist across the north wall of the infirmary building.

Along with the automobile chemical pumper, the Crestwood volunteer crew arrived with two thousand-gallon horse-drawn hand pumpers. After a hurried consultation, the taciturn fire chief deployed his volunteers and equipment. He sent one team of hand pumpers north to help with the fire at the Blackley home; the other he assigned to the perimeter of the Home grounds to douse grass fires and windblown embers. With a wary eye on the large water tank looming above him, he directed the crew of his chemical pumper toward the infirmary's north wing.

Welcome as the Crestwood equipment might be, the Kentucky Confederate Home desperately needed more resources if the place was to survive. As Stoess assigned his equipment to battle stations, a motorized fire company from Louisville was crawling over dark country roads toward Pewee Valley.

Fire Captain Fred Stephan of the Louisville Fire Department received Daughtry's alarm at 6:30
P.M.
From his station on Louisville's east side, Captain Stephan assembled a hose-and-chemical wagon, a ladder truck, and one of Louisville's massive new American LaFrance motor-driven, motor-pumping fire engines.
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Louisville had acquired its first motor-driven fire engine seven years before (though it would take another decade to retire the last of the fire horses), and in 1917 the fire department had bought the first of its three American LaFrance motor-pumper behemoths. The huge vehicle rode on wood-spoke wheels across an eighteen-foot wheelbase and carried a thousand feet of two-and-a-half-inch standard fire hose. Its motorized rotary pump could throw 1,400 gallons of water per minute, and it was a proven lifesaver for urban fires. But the narrow solid rubber tires and the contraption's sheer size and weight—more than two tons—slowed the powerful vehicle to a crawl when it left paved city streets.

Thirty minutes after the first call, the firefighters rolled through the town of St. Matthews, on the outskirts of Louisville and still not halfway to Pewee Valley. For the remainder of the run, Captain Stephan, his fire company of nine men, and the much-needed fire equipment would creep along on dark and rutted dirt roads at less than twenty miles per hour.

As best John T. Jones could tell, the infirmary was finally empty of patients. Some of the horse trainer's old comrades were still being carried to shelter at the Episcopal church or Pewee Valley's Masonic Hall; others were stretched out on canvas litters, stunned to insensibility by the disaster unfolding before them and beginning to wonder who failed to make it out safely. Pewee Valley women circulated among the veterans, offering a warm meal or shelter in their homes.

Hundreds of onlookers milled around the Home grounds as Charles Daughtry and his secretary, Imogene Nall, frantically jotted notes and names, trying to compile a list of inmates who had escaped the fire and those who hadn't.

By 7:30
P.M.
Milton Stoess had directed A. S. McFarlan to remove his small hoses from the tall water tower and connect them to working standpipes in the south and central wings of the infirmary. Crestwood's chemical pumper had, so far, managed to contain the fire to the north wing of the hospital, but flames jumped to the three-story laundry building behind the infirmary, and it appeared certain that that building would be lost.

There was still no sign of the Louisville fire equipment.

Volunteers were reporting to Stoess that the Blackley house was fully involved and the nearby Hudson residence was burning. Embers were igniting trees in the yard of writer Annie Fellows Johnson, endangering that house as well. A stiff wind still whipped the flames; glowing embers fell to the ground as far as three miles away.

The wooden legs of the large water tower, now surrounded by flame from the main building, infirmary, and laundry, began to blister and smoke.

At 7:45
P.M.
onlookers heard the far-off clang of a fire bell and a hand-cranked siren. The Louisville fire company—a crew of professional firefighters with state-of-the-art equipment—was passing through Berrytown, still more than a mile from the Home.

The Louisville fire engines roared at near the pumper's maximum speed toward the Home entrance. Stiffly upright, Captain Stephan sat almost eight feet off the ground in the open cab of the big American LaFrance engine, leading the three-engine caravan.

Firelight reflected red and gold off the shiny engines as they began to turn into the gate at the bottom of the hill, and a cheer arose from the crowd.

The crowd went silent in mid-cheer, however, as the giant American LaFrance motor pumper slid sideways off the gravel driveway during its turn, tipped, then rolled over into a drainage ditch, wheels up and spinning.

Still stunned by the sight of the disabled fire engine, onlookers reacted to Milton Stoess's shouted warning and turned to see the tall water tower, its legs ablaze, crash slowly down onto the infirmary building.

With no pressure, water coming from the fire hoses slowed to a trickle. Then there was no water at all.

John Leathers picked his way unsteadily across the charred ground of the Kentucky Confederate Home, stepping over pieces of debris and half-burned belongings as he surveyed the damage.

It was 10:30
P.M.
The moon was up, a thin sliver in the east, and smoldering tree trunks still popped and sizzled like bacon. Moonlight and ash turned the landscape the color of bone as, here and there, wisps of smoke rose from the ground like tiny white hairs on an old man's arm. Some firemen and volunteers hunted for hot spots in the debris; others coiled their hoses and returned their equipment to trucks. It had taken fifty men to right the once-shiny American LaFrance motor pumper and push the two-ton behemoth to the top of the hill; now it was trapped spoke-deep in mud, its red paint scratched and dirtied. A Louisville city work crew would try to dig it out come daylight.
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Leathers was tired. The hour was late; he was seventy-two years old and had long since lost the snap and dash he'd had to assist veterans like crippled Billy Beasley thirty-five years before. As then, however, he felt responsible for the care of his old comrades, so John Leathers, secretary of the Home's board of trustees and closest available member of the executive committee, had caught the evening electric car for Pewee Valley as soon as he heard news of the fire.

His first sight of the grounds told the old banker some of the bad news: the Kentucky Confederate Home was effectively destroyed. Of the main building—the elegant old Villa Ridge Inn, built in 1889 as a luxurious getaway for Kentucky's elite—nothing was left but a pile of char. The three-story laundry building, too, had burned to the ground, along with all its equipment. A small boiler house—no great loss, except for the pumps inside—was nothing but a pile of brick. Much of the three-story infirmary was blackened from smoke and soot-stain, and the roof was scorched from falling tree branches, but the greatest damage seemed limited to the north wing. The falling water tank had crushed an area that acted like a firebreak for the endangered hospital, buying enough time for Louisville's arriving hose crew to lay lines and draft water from a nearby pond. Thanks to McFarlan's inmate hose crew, Stoess's chemical pumper, the falling water tower, and the late-arriving Louisville firemen, two wings of the infirmary were relatively unscathed. Only Duke Hall was undamaged—water-soaked, but whole.

Leathers walked the grounds while Commandant Daughtry cross-checked lists for the names of veterans unaccounted for. Daughtry had formed the healthiest of the inmates into rows and ordered them to sit, cross-legged, on the soggy lawn. The men, some clutching a few salvaged possessions, watched bits of flame flicker through the rubble of what had been their home. Gusts of wind ruffled the singed beards and hair of the old veterans. Charlotte Woodbury had arrived from Louisville sometime during the evening. She and the president of the Confederate Home UDC chapter, Mrs. H. J. Stone, passed among the survivors, offering what comfort they could.

The Episcopal and Presbyterian churches were sheltering dozens of men; handfuls more were sleeping in private residences. Several inmates had already departed Pewee Valley with relatives who came to take them away, and more relatives had wired their intention to retrieve their kin. Twenty-six of the more feeble men were transported to Louisville's City Hospital in ambulances provided by the commander at Camp Zachary Taylor, and infirmary nurse Mary McAllen sent word to Daughtry that the inmates were resting comfortably.

By midnight Daughtry had compiled his list of survivors. He checked it twice before reporting to Leathers.

Not a man was missing. Every inmate was accounted for. No deaths. No serious injuries.

One hundred eighty old veterans had again beaten the odds in the roulette of war. Now, as during countless marches and on battlefields more than a half-century before, the old soldiers wondered:
Where will I sleep tonight? What will I eat? Where will I be tomorrow?