My Old Confederate Home (32 page)

Gin Herdt was twelve years old in 1933, her scabby-knee-and-bare-feet years about to end. One of the veterans—eighty-six-year-old Tennessee-born Charles Morris, perhaps, who served in the Twelfth Kentucky Cavalry seventy years before—gave the little girl a quarter for singing a favorite song. She ran to the drugstore, using the coin to buy her first lipstick.

The children wouldn't have noticed on December 26, 1933, when State Examiner Nat B. Sewell, in the strongest official language yet, urged that the Kentucky Confederate Home be closed and the property be sold or leased to raise revenues for the state.
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Six Kentucky Confederate veterans remained in the Home.

In March 1934 a state representative introduced a bill calling for the abolishment of the Kentucky Confederate Home. According to the bill, inmates remaining in the Home on July 1, 1934, would be transferred to the care of the Pewee Valley Sanitarium and Hospital, which would receive $2.00 a day per inmate for their care. The grounds and buildings would be turned over to the state's Department of Public Property for final disposal.
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The Daughters made a halfhearted effort to block the legislation, but even the most devoted among them realized that the handwriting was on the wall. As the board of trustees instructed McFarlan to begin closing out the books and inventorying items, Pewee Valley residents began to daydream about what might become of the grounds on which the elegant Villa Ridge Inn once stood.

Recalling Charlotte Woodbury's earlier suggestion, many in the village favored a proposal that the Home be converted “into an orthopedic hospital for the care and treatment of crippled children.” Ebullient new president Franklin D. Roosevelt, crippled by polio, encouraged the hope that children disabled by disease or defect might be made to walk again, and neighbors of the Home noted that “the spacious grounds would provide plenty of outdoor recreation for the juvenile patients.”
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Others suggested that Pewee Valley secure Federal Public Works Administration monies and dedicate the land as a state park. Still others desired that the property become a permanent Confederate memorial park.
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Those pastoral dreams crashed into bureaucratic reality on April 16, 1934, when a delegation arrived in town to evaluate the property's fitness as an overflow facility for the Lakeland Asylum. Pewee Valley residents' vision of brave little children frolicking over the grounds was replaced overnight by the prospect of having hundreds of violent, drooling lunatics housed in their midst. Frank E. Gatchel, chairman of the Pewee Valley town board, called for mass meetings, and howls of protest could be heard as far as Frankfort.
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Rather disingenuously, Governor Laffoon pronounced that he “hoped to dispose of the property as advantageously as possible to the state, without doing any injustice to the community of Pewee Valley.” First, however, the ex-Confederates must be moved.
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With the death of ninety-one-year-old Ike Humphrey, five Kentucky Confederate veterans remained in the Home.

Members of the board of trustees conferred by phone with Kentucky attorney general Bailey Wooton on matters related to the July 1 closure.

Men and women from all over the state were showing up at the Home's door asking for the return of items they had donated over the years. Confederate-era flags, firearms, and furniture—some quite valuable—decorated the public rooms of the Home, and the board had no reliable record of the original donor. Retain the items for disposition by the Kentucky Department of Public Property, Wooton instructed. Birdie Parr Marshall and her attorney arrived in Pewee Valley with a court order demanding the portrait of Captain Daniel G. Parr commissioned by the Parr family thirty years before. The portrait was hanging in Duke Hall, and the boat captain's daughter wanted it back. Give it to her, the attorney general said.
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The board also dealt with the matter of the donation jar, a sum of $131 in cash that had accumulated over the years from small gifts given by visitors. Wooton told the board that they were free to hand the money over to Charlotte Woodbury and the Confederate Home chapter of the UDC for improvements to the Confederate Cemetery at Pewee Valley.
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As July 1 approached, Commandant McFarlan completed his inventory of every book, every painting, every piece of furniture, every appliance, every frying pan—everything in the Kentucky Confederate Home. Facing unemployment himself, McFarlan did his best to buoy the spirits of the five remaining inmates; he made final arrangements to release the employees and move the old men on Friday, June 29.

A week before the move, Attorney General Wooton phoned Charles F. Leathers, and Leathers phoned McFarlan at the Home. There had been a hitch. The law abolishing the Home had never been published and was therefore not yet legally in force. Hold everything.

For three weeks Commandant McFarlan, his wife, and the five remaining inmates rattled around the empty rooms, among the crates and draped furniture of the Kentucky Confederate Home, entertaining one another with stories they had shared a hundred times.

McFarlan received the final word on July 18.

The next morning Mrs. McFarlan cooked breakfast for her husband and the ex-Confederates. After breakfast, Commandant McFarlan answered the knock at the door; two attendants dressed in white entered the foyer.

Two ambulances were parked in the driveway. The attendants escorted five old men—two on cots, one in a rolling chair, and all five dressed in fresh gray uniforms—out the door of the Kentucky Confederate Home and into the big cars that would take them to their new quarters.

After the ambulances had driven away, the engineer went back inside to make a final memo entry in his logbook: “Commandant A. S. McFarlan continued to operate the Home until after breakfast on Thursday, July 19, 1934, when the veterans, Geo. Crystal, W. R. Hardin, Chas. K. Morris, Wm. Southerland and A. N. White were removed to the Pewee Valley Sanitarium, and the building then became vacant.”
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During its thirty-two years of operation the Kentucky Confederate Home served as a respectable dwelling place for almost a thousand veterans of America's Civil War. Now it was time for the Home to enter its own respectable place in Kentucky history.

Epilogue

T
hree of the five ex-Confederates who moved to the Pewee Valley Sanitarium in July 1934 passed away before the end of the year: Charles K. Morris, George Crystal, and William Sutherland died of causes not unusual for men of their advanced age. Though bedridden, William R. Hardin thrived for another two years until an April morning in 1936 when the nurse was unable to waken him.
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The Reverend Dr. Alexander. N. White, still wheelchair bound and losing his sight, was occasionally reprimanded by the management of the sanitarium for the enthusiasm with which he shared the Gospel message with other patients.

Shortly after the last inmates vacated the Home, the Kentucky Board of Public Property authorized letting bids for the property and buildings, but no agency expressed sufficient interest and the buildings remained vacant. Former commandant Alexander McFarlan was hired to maintain the property, and in 1937 the buildings temporarily housed hundreds of families left homeless by Ohio River flooding. McFarlan eventually left Pewee Valley to join his children in Lexington, and the buildings quickly fell into disrepair. Hoboes found residence there; scavengers removed carpets and lumber.
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With the inmates gone and the property out of their control, there was no further need for the Home's trustees. Governor A. B. “Happy” Chandler called a special legislative session to streamline state government, and the Reorganization Act of 1936 abolished the Kentucky Confederate Home board of trustees along with two dozen other state boards and commissions.
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A newspaper reporter, researching a Sunday supplement travel piece on the community, visited Pewee Valley in 1936 and met the two men he called “The Last Confederates.”

The Reverend Dr. White, ninety-two years old and totally blind, was still rolling around Pewee Valley, still with a full head of white hair, full mustache, and narrow goatee, and the reporter was taken with the old man's quiet dignity and faith. “A man of education, calmly poised, he awaits philosophically and with patience the last ‘Taps'—and with inspired confidence the last reveille.”

George Booze was back in Pewee Valley, too, having lost his burial money in the bank failures. Booze had left the Home before it closed to live with his son in Corbin; now he was living at the sanitarium with White. “Life is not over yet for George A. Booze,” the reporter wrote of the ninety-one-year-old Confederate veteran. “He tells his stories with crackling humor—and there's always someone to listen to them.”
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White lived another two years before succumbing to heart disease. He was the last Confederate veteran, and the last resident of the Kentucky Confederate Home, to be buried in the Confederate Cemetery at Pewee Valley. George Booze died in 1939; his body was shipped back to Corbin. He was likely the last ex-Confederate to have lived in the Home.

In 1937 Pewee Valley residents again held mass protest meetings when the state announced plans to house a hundred women convicts on the grounds of the former Kentucky Confederate Home. Their protests managed to derail the plan, and the Home buildings continued to disintegrate.
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The Rural Education Association, the same organization that owned and operated the Pewee Valley Sanitarium and Hospital, struck a deal to buy the Home property for $8,750 in 1938. The association planned a community for underprivileged youth, including schoolrooms, a dormitory, and a working farm. They razed the ramshackle buildings, but plans failed to materialize, and the property was eventually resold for residential development.
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When a Louisville dentist and his wife acquired nineteen acres of the property in the late 1940s, they built an estate incorporating parts of the foundation and walls of the Home's old laundry building. The couple named their estate Confederate Hill.
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The same financial and chronological imperatives that ended the active life of the Kentucky Confederate Home were affecting the other Confederate soldiers' homes.

The Maryland, Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina, and Florida homes all closed in the 1930s with the death of the their last inmates or with the final handful of ex-Confederates packed off to another institution. Virginia's home closed in 1941 when its last veteran passed away; the Louisiana home closed shortly after.

South Carolina opened its home to widows and daughters of Confederate veterans and the home operated until 1957, four years short of the centennial of America's Civil War.

Beauvoir, in Biloxi, Mississippi, ended its life as a veteran's home in 1947, but remains open today for tours after reconstruction in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Following the death of its final remaining Confederate widow, the Oklahoma Confederate Home building in Ardmore was turned over to the U.S. Veterans Administration, and veterans of other wars now walk the hallways there.
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With the Kentucky veterans long gone, their Pewee Valley cemetery became overgrown. The work of clearing brush, pulling stumps, leveling sunken graves, and resetting headstones was too much for the dozen clubwomen of the Confederate Home Chapter (renamed the Pewee Valley Chapter) of the UDC. Oldham County sheriff Buford Renaker—the grandson of a Confederate veteran—pitched in, often detailing county prisoners to work on the property.

True Daughter Charlotte Woodbury still had some political clout in Frankfort, and in 1957 she prevailed on Governor Chandler to direct state monies toward restoring the cemetery. A coordinated effort between the state, the Kentucky Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the Kentucky Sons of Confederate Veterans, and the Morgan's Men heritage association resulted in a rededication of the Confederate Cemetery at Pewee Valley on Confederate Memorial Day, June 3, 1957.
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A thousand Kentuckians attended the ceremony, and Governor Chandler gave a dedicatory address honoring the men and women of the Confederate generation. But the event was a minor echo of the day in 1902 when Bennett Young turned over the keys of the Kentucky Confederate Home to Governor J. W. C. Beckham and the Commonwealth of Kentucky.

Visit Pewee Valley today and it's easy to imagine how it must have appeared a century ago. I drove there on one of those perfect pre-Derby spring afternoons that Kentucky is famous for, where the sky is the bright blue of wildflowers and fat marshmallow clouds clump and bump their way along overhead.

Sixteen miles east of Louisville (and about that far south of the Ohio River), Pewee Valley hasn't yet been overrun by the residential and commercial development inching its way eastward from the larger city. Pewee Valley is much as it was at the beginning of the twentieth century: a quiet village of well-bred estate homes in the Queen Anne and Colonial Revival styles, unpretentious stone church buildings, and polite residential lanes more suited for strolling than driving. It's a not-quite-country, not-quite-city type of place where a favorite great-aunt might have lived, the kindly old maiden aunt you always wanted to spend more time with.

I was visiting the Confederate veteran burial section of the Pewee Valley Cemetery—310 identical gray-white stones in perfect rank—when I met Susan, the great-granddaughter of John T. Jones, Company C, First Battalion, Kentucky Mounted Rifles. Susan was from Arkansas, traveling through Kentucky on business, and she had taken the afternoon off to find out more about her long-dead Confederate ancestor. We introduced ourselves, and she did what a lot of family historians do: pull out a couple of three-ring binders crammed with documents, letters, photocopies, and notes about hundreds of people who were long dead by the time she was born.

She had inherited a stack of papers from a distant cousin, papers that described John T. Jones's admission to and life in the Kentucky Confederate Home, and she showed them to me. I recognized on the documents the signatures and names of people who, in prior months, had become familiar to me: Henry George. Florence Barlow. Milton Sea. Bennett Young.

After the Civil War, Susan's great-grandfather had married, raised a family, and spent the last years of the nineteenth century as an itinerant horse trainer in Texas. In 1914, at age seventy-six, with his children gone and his wife dead, John T. Jones entered the Kentucky Confederate Home. Apart from a short furlough or two, he lived in the Home until his death there in 1922. There were few family memories of Jones's final years, and Susan had come to Pewee Valley to learn more about the Kentucky Confederate Home.

“Is the Home still here?” she asked as we stood next to the veteran's grave marker.

No, I told her. Much of it burned to the ground in 1920, but it continued to operate until 1934. The property was sold off a few years later. I asked if she wanted to see where it stood, and she followed me in her car back to the highway.

We left the cemetery and drove a mile north on Maple Avenue, a tree-shaded residential lane spotted here and there with justbudding dogwood, rosebud, and crimson rambler. I drove slowly up the street, knowing (although Susan didn't) that this was the road down which a dozen uniformed Confederate veterans marched when they accompanied the casket of her great-grandfather to a final salute and a last rest in the Pewee Valley cemetery.

Susan and I looped into a gravel drive that winds up a short slope to St. James Episcopal Church. We got out of our cars, and I directed her to the historical marker standing at the corner of Maple Avenue and State Highway 42 near the center of Pewee Valley.
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Susan stared for a while at the little hill across the highway as I told her what the Home looked like when her great-grandfather lived there: the elegant four-story main building that had once been a fashionable resort hotel; the wide carriageway that wound up to the front of the main building; an assembly hall hung with portraits of Robert E. Lee and his generals; a gleaming white infirmary building; an electric commuter rail line that ran back into Louisville; comfortable chairs on the wide porches; and the twelve-foot-long guidon, a gift from Virginia Parr Sale, that flew from a flagpole at the very top of the cupola roof.

I described to her a cloudless October morning in 1902: ten thousand men and women from all sections of Kentucky crowding the hill across from us for the dedication of the Kentucky Confederate Home. Starting just after dawn, they arrived by train, trolley, carriage, cart, and wagon to open the Home with bands, buntings, celebration, and oration. It was the largest gathering of Kentucky Confederates since Lee surrendered at Appomattox thirty-seven years before.

Among the orators that day was W. T. Ellis, former Confederate cavalryman and popular U.S. congressman from Owensboro. The crowd interrupted Ellis time after time with thunderous applause during his hour-long Lost Cause oration, but he earned the greatest roars of approval when he spoke of the debt his audience owed men of the Confederate generation. “The young men Kentucky gave to the Confederate army,” he said, “rendered their state some service and are … entitled to a respectable place in its history.”

After a while, Susan turned and began asking the same questions I'd asked when I saw the historical marker for the first time: Who built the Home? Was it a poorhouse? Were the people who lived here forced to come here? What was it like to live there? Were they all disabled? Crippled? Homeless? How did they spend their days? Were they taken care of? What happened to the last remaining residents?

Finally, Susan—a woman who had traveled a thousand miles to Pewee Valley, Kentucky, to find out more about a long-dead greatgrandfather—asked the question she wanted to ask all along:

“Was he happy here?”

I didn't know.

But I could tell her I was sure that by the end of his life John T. Jones—and all the others who lived at the Kentucky Confederate Home—had found a respectable place.