My Old Confederate Home (28 page)

The next day John Leathers and William A. Milton met newspaper reporters to answer questions about the fire.

“Gray and Khaki to Share Camp,” the papers reported. Leathers said that insurance would pay to rebuild the Home, and he was attempting to acquire two barracks at Camp Zachary Taylor to house the men temporarily. “The old warriors and their new-found buddies of the First Division will be sharing camp life early next week,” he told reporters.
¹²

Leathers's announcement was premature on both counts.

Newspaper reporters interviewing the inmates reported that the old veterans had no desire to live among the young soldiers at Camp Taylor; they were anxious to get back together in Pewee Valley.
¹³

Within days, Leathers and Milton were forced to backtrack.

“The men seemed to apprehend they might be subjected to military rule,” Milton said. “While this is not at all likely, the Executive Committee felt the veterans should be kept where they want to remain.”
¹⁴

Leathers also discovered that the insurance proceeds would fall $15,000 short of returning the Home to its previous condition. He expressed the belief that persons “devoted to these few remnants of the South's once-proud armies will contribute privately to swell the fund for reconstructing the institution.”
¹⁵

The board of trustees met immediately to sort out insurance claims and organize a rebuilding program. It quickly became apparent that no significant private contributions would materialize, and the trustees were forced to use monies from the state's $5,000 monthly allotment to supplement rebuilding costs. Kentucky's UDC chapters pledged to provide new furnishings, but it was obvious to everyone that the new facility would be more institutional and less residential in appearance.
¹⁶

Construction continued through the spring and summer, as inmates crowded into undamaged infirmary rooms and took meals under giant mess tents erected on the Home grounds.

“We have had a few mild cases of sickness during the month,” Commandant Daughtry wrote in July, “probably caused by the heat and eating more new vegetables. Considering the conditions under which we are laboring, I think we are getting along remarkably well.”
¹⁷

In October 1920—eighteen years after the Home was dedicated and seven months after the fire that nearly destroyed it—the board of trustees announced that rebuilding was complete. Two wings of the infirmary had been repaired and new laundry and boiler buildings built. A kitchen and dining hall, with dormitory-like rooms above it, replaced the ruins of the old main building. Above the buildings stood a new 10,000-gallon water tank, this time built of steel and iron.
¹⁸

No crowds assembled, no bunting was raised, no bands played to mark completion of the rebuilt Home.

The fire had destroyed something of the essence of the Kentucky Confederate Home, something that the carpenters, masons, plumbers, and painters couldn't rebuild.

The original building—the old Villa Ridge Inn—had resisted entry into the twentieth century. Its wide verandahs, furnished with comfortable rocking chairs and wooden gliders, spoke of the sociability and leisure of nineteenth-century life. The hand-carved millwork and intricate trim were lost remnants of a time before the age of assembly lines and mass production. The old building had been a living museum of sorts, with a cannon shot marking the dawn, a flag ceremony ending the day, and living relics of America's Civil War on hand to talk about the days of '61 to '65.

The fire had destroyed all that.

Rebuilt following the fire in a coarse style favorable to the lowest bidder and subject to the same bureaucratic oversight as every other state-run prison or asylum, the Kentucky Confederate Home had, by the 1920s, become a twentieth-century warehouse for nineteenth-century artifacts.

And some supporters began to question whether the Home should continue to exist at all.

Chapter 14

The Reverend and the Rector

O
n a day several months before the fire at the Kentucky Confederate Home, the Reverend Dr. Alexander N. White entered the room in which the charges against him were to be read and discussed. Having spent twenty years in his wheelchair, the inmate could maneuver expertly, and he rolled to the edge of the carpet in front of the table where members of the executive committee and his accuser, Commandant Daughtry, sat.

Daughtry handed a copy of the charges against the inmate to board president William A. Milton, who read them to the gathering. The commandant's rage was palpable in the words he had put to paper.

“Charges will be preferred against you for the abuse of management on various occasions,” Daughtry had written. “Notably, when you charged that there was graft on the part of the management, which naturally includes the trustees as well as the inmates of the Home.”

White listened, unconcerned, an expression of righteous grace on his face. As a minister of the Gospel, Reverend White had preached that a soft answer turneth away wrath.

This day, however, he brought more than a soft answer.

White asked that two men be admitted to the room. The first was his personal attorney, Judge R. T. Crowe; the other was the commonwealth attorney of Oldham County, there to deliver an order from the County Court enjoining the board of trustees from suspending Dr. White from the Home.
¹

That night in his room at the Home, Dr. White slept the sleep of the blameless. He had won the first skirmish of a bitter war of accusations and allegations that would cost public support and threaten the continued existence of the Kentucky Confederate Home.

Even before the shock of the fire and the stress of reconstruction, Commandant Charles L. Daughtry's behavior was becoming noticeably erratic.

Daughtry had accepted the job of commandant, expecting it to be the capstone of his career. Instead, he found himself whipsawed daily by the needs of crabby old men, whiny employees, sour exemployees, and a board of trustees intent on involving itself in even the smallest decisions. In 1920 alone, Daughtry wrote a long, rambling letter to the trustees, explaining that he fired an infirmary nurse because she didn't act sufficiently grief-stricken at the death of Bennett Young; he also sent the board a list of inmates who were conspiring against him. Among other things, Daughtry resented the implied criticism of Charlotte Woodbury and her monthly list of “suggestions” from the Women's Advisory Committee. His frustration led him at times to lash out in rage at those around him and to engage in petty persecutions that might cost a veteran his place in the Home or an employee his job.
²

Daughtry's paranoia may have become self-fulfilling; there were plenty of individuals ready to gossip about his actions at the time of the fire.

Pewee Valley resident Mrs. H. J. Stone watched Daughtry confront longtime Matron Lela Henley on the night of the Home fire. Daughtry was almost gleeful that the loss of the Home would cost Henley her job. “He told her there was no place for her, there was no work for her, no room for her and no money to pay her,” Mrs. Stone reported. (William Milton later assured Mrs. Henley she was still on the payroll, but the upset woman packed up and left town rather than endure more verbal abuse from Daughtry.)
³

A newspaper reporter witnessed Daughtry's breakdown at City Hospital the morning after the fire. The commandant arrived midmorning, looking as if he had slept in his clothes. Seeing the inmates safe in hospital beds and knowing how close they had all come to perishing in the conflagration, Daughtry collapsed in deep, heaving sobs. Several of the decrepit old veterans left their beds to comfort the distraught commandant. It was understandable, perhaps, that an exhausted seventy-four-year-old man might become overly emotional in the aftermath of a near-disaster, but the public nature of his breakdown caused some to question his fitness for the job.
⁴

The trustees were aware of Daughtry's increasingly mercurial behavior, but they chose to ignore it until rumors reached John Leathers about Daughtry and Imogene Nall, his twenty-one-year-old bookkeeper. In the wake of the fire, Daughtry had taken rooms for the two of them at a guesthouse. Pewee Valley neighbors, having seen the couple together, were saying that the relationship involved more than the business of the Home.

Milton and Leathers wasted no time convening a private hearing of the executive committee on April 9, 1920.

“Various rumors have been afloat, in many cases amounting to scandal, which involves the fair name and reputation of the Confederate Home,” Leathers announced. He had asked several interested parties to make themselves available for testimony; they were waiting outside the boardroom.

“I have no personal knowledge whatever of any of these matters,” Leathers continued. “I cannot conceive anyone … could start charges of this sort through any malicious intent or idle gossip. They must be actuated by good motives.”

Six witnesses were called before the committee. Most of them described a spiteful commandant out of control, a pattern of petty persecutions and arbitrary withholding of meals and medicines. With their testimony completed, Leathers spoke again.

“We have not touched on the most important matter we came here to investigate,” he said: “[accusations against] Daughtry of living a double life here at the institution. This is the vital question at issue.”

None of the witnesses, however, could provide absolute, ironclad, firsthand evidence of impropriety between Daughtry and Nall.

“I think there are many other reasons why the man is not fitted to be Commandant of the institution, beside the charge that he is guilty of immoral conduct,” one witness said.

Leathers didn't see it that way; his focus was on Daughtry and Nall, and it was frustrating that no one had a speck of hard evidence.

“If anyone has a charge to make, now is the time to speak and come up to tell us what you know,” Leathers practically begged the group. “I want to get at the bottom of this.”

After a grueling afternoon of testimony and discussion, no one could bring honorable evidence, and Leathers was forced to close the hearing, leaving himself and the others in an awkward position. Because there was no direct evidence supporting rumors of Daughtry's impropriety with the young woman who worked for him, the committee would be forced to defend Daughtry against his accusers.
⁵

It was a position that would become increasingly uncomfortable.

Too many people were hearing too many stories about Daughtry's behavior toward inmates and employees for the matter to simply disappear.

During her visits to the Home, Charlotte Woodbury asked inmates about mistreatment. No one would say anything. Finally, an inmate she spent much time with in Pewee Valley called at the Woodbury residence. He spent the afternoon describing Daughtry's tyrannical actions.

“Why did you never tell me?” Woodbury asked the man. At that, Woodbury said, “He turned away and shook his head and his eyes filled with tears and said, ‘I was afraid I'd lose my Home.'”

“I will see that this thing is sifted to the bottom,” she promised.

Mrs. H. J. Stone was president of the reactivated Confederate Home chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and she visited the Home daily. She reported that the men “were afraid to make complaints, as those few who did were thrown out.” Also, she said, “employees were turned out if they made complaint.”

Mrs. Stone and her chapter members wrote the state UDC organization, telling women across the state “we are convinced that the present Commandant is unfit for the place.” (Five months after Mrs. Stone's letter was circulated by the UDC, Daughtry prohibited inmates of the Home from attending her chapter's annual memorial service at Pewee Valley's Confederate Cemetery.)
⁶

Oldham County attorney Judge R. T. Crowe was no fan of Daughtry's, either. Crowe had successfully defended the Reverend Alexander N. White against one of the commandant's vendettas and had made a point of getting to know White's fellow inmates and Home employees. He was blunt in his opinion to John Leathers: “I do believe that Colonel Daughtry is not temperamentally suited to be Commandant of the Home.”

Florence Barlow, the Home bookkeeper who had worked with Henry George and was turned out of the Home following Bennett Young's death, kept up a steady correspondence with inmates, veterans across the state, and Pewee Valley residents. She painted Daughtry as a despot and a bully, and she wasn't shy about accusing the commandant of impropriety with his young employee.
⁷

Daughtry was aware of the discontent swirling about him. He blamed a small group of disloyal employees and disgruntled inmates for spreading grievances. The ringleader, he believed, was wheelchair-bound Dr. Alexander N. White.

Alexander N. White had come to the Kentucky Confederate Home in 1903 after a ministerial career that, as he described it, “has not been an especially conspicuous one, yet it has not been an obscure one.”

Born in Mississippi in 1844, White left his family farm in 1861, enlisting in the Forty-second Mississippi Infantry. After the war, he attended seminary, married, and moved to Kentucky in 1875 as minister of a small Baptist church in Paris. Within a year his wife, Jennie, had left him and returned to Mississippi.

Heaviness in the heart of man maketh it stoop, but a good word maketh it glad. White threw himself into reading, more Bible study, and preaching. Called to the Baptist church of Carlisle, he was an enthusiastic minister who could parse a single Pauline sentence for hours from the pulpit. Thin and loose-limbed, his blue eyes blazing with the Holy Spirit, White had a clear sense of Christian right and wrong, and was never too reserved to rejoice with the saints and cry with the sinners.

He was a joiner, a tireless handshaker always on the lookout for another soul to bring to Jesus. He was a member of the local Commercial Club and the county United Confederate Veterans camp. (He avoided the secret societies, however, believing them to be clandestine organizations with un-Christian loyalties.)

The Reverend Dr. A. N. White was an exceptionally smart man; too smart, perhaps, for small-town Baptists who wanted their Gospel dispensed in easy-to-understand doses. Though inadvertent, White's scholarly condescension and evangelical pushiness could become irritating to plainer people.

He spent the last two decades of the nineteenth century preaching at and organizing a series of increasingly smaller Baptist churches in central Kentucky, a career not especially conspicuous, but not entirely obscure.

In 1896 a fall exacerbated an old war wound, and his left hip crumbled like chalk.

“When misfortune overtook me and I became physically incapacitated for earning the means of support,” he wrote, “I was compelled to ask for the protection and benefits of this Home.”

Bespectacled Salem Ford welcomed him to the Home on January 12, 1903, ten weeks after it opened. Ford arranged for the crippled preacher to receive a new wood-and-wicker rolling chair, and White—never one to be lost in the bitter smoke of regret—embarked on the next stage of his ministerial career.

By 1920 A. N. White had lived in the Kentucky Confederate Home for seventeen years, longer than any other inmate. White wrote the petition to retain Salem Ford, the Home's first superintendent, but Commandant Coleman considered the old preacher obstructive and impertinent (and one Home matron termed him “a meddler, a sneak and a hypocrite”). Commandant Henry George, however, enjoyed talking the Bible with White, and used him to organize religious activities in the new Duke Hall, with White scheduling visiting ministers, selecting hymnals, and inviting evangelists. (White desperately wanted to be named chaplain of the Home, but Bennett Young resisted the idea.)
⁸

Chaplain or not, White was doing the Lord's work among the old veterans of the Kentucky Confederate Home.

W. T. Calmes was a retired bachelor schoolteacher diagnosed with cancer shortly after arriving in the Home. He asked White to accompany him on trips to Louisville for treatment. Calmes had no close family, and White visited his sickroom daily, telling the invalid stories and helping Calmes with his final correspondence. At the end, Calmes greeted death holding White's hand and comforted by an assurance of everlasting life. The funeral of W. T. Calmes was one of dozens White preached in Duke Hall at the request of dying inmates.

White also wrote obituaries for his fellow inmates, providing dying men of little accomplishment the opportunity to look at their lives and organize their thoughts about what it all meant. In the obituaries he wrote, White would recount a veteran's war record on behalf of the Lost Cause, but it pleased him most to add that the subject “was no less loyal to his convictions as a soldier of Jesus Christ.”
⁹

Having outlasted three commandants and outlived three hundred inmates, White could be excused some officiousness. He could be high-handed with Home employees, and he had little patience for official ignorance or sloth. When caught in a transgression, he could affect the air of an injured innocent, a simple minister trying to do God's will.