My Old Confederate Home (24 page)

Barlow enlisted other chapters to produce gala events for the residents. For a springtime Strawberry Festival, visiting UDC members set out thirty decorated tables on the Home's lawn and hung the trees with Japanese lanterns. Chapter members brought twenty-five cakes, twenty gallons of ice cream, and twenty-five gallons of fresh strawberries for the old men. A band and vocalist performed as the women delivered plate after plate of cake and berries to the inmates (“We were absolutely choked with strawberries,” one veteran said later).
²⁷

The Albert Sidney Johnston Chapter of the UDC hosted the inmates at the annual Jeffersonian Barbeque at the Kentucky State Fair. A hundred uniformed inmates a day, along with their chaperones, boarded private railcars for the trip to the fairgrounds for the two-day barbeque. Singly, the veterans had no problem roaming the grounds to visit the speakers' stands or the racecourse. As a group, however, the inmates drew so much attention from the crowd of 20,000 Kentuckians that the UDC women had to rope off a section of their booth to protect the old men from the throng of well-wishers and the curious. Amazed at their celebrity, the veterans pocketed gifts of tobacco, coins, and baked goods before boarding the trains for their return to Pewee Valley.
²⁸

An affable Henry George and the industrious Florence Barlow used L. Z. Duke Hall to throw open the institutional gates of the Kentucky Confederate Home. They wove the Home into the religious and social fabric of Pewee Valley village life; they knitted the daily lives of Home inmates into the larger communities of the state's Confederate veterans camps and UDC chapters.

And with the open doors came visitors—plenty of visitors.

In its earliest days, the Home was not so much a destination for visitors as a drop-off point for charitable donations. Inmates' family members and friends came to Pewee Valley, but visiting hours were limited to one day a week for four hours. An overcrowded and smelly institution filled with hundreds of crotchety old men held little attraction for casual tourists, anyway.

Improvements to the main building, construction of the new infirmary, the addition of modern utilities, and the opening of Duke Hall made the Kentucky Confederate Home a more attractive destination for Kentuckians who wanted to see how their tax monies were being spent. The Home attracted an increasing number of Sunday drivers and tourists as well as relatives and friends.

More inmates in the Home meant more callers, and a guest register kept in one of the main parlors recorded increasing numbers of visitors every year. In 1911 the board of trustees altered the rules of the Home to expand visiting hours to three days a week, six hours a day, but Commandant Henry George welcomed callers on any day at any time.

In 1911 the nation marked the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of its Civil War, and interest in the old veterans blossomed. The increasing use of motorcars (and road improvements) allowed tourists to visit the home for an afternoon, strolling the Home's parklike grounds or studying the wartime flags, firearms, swords, and photos that Florence Barlow had collected and mounted on the walls of Duke Hall. (Barlow arranged to have a series of picture postcards printed—twelve full-color views of the Home—and she sold them to tourists.)
²⁹

The Kentucky Confederate Home became a living museum of sorts, a twentieth-century repository of animate Lost Cause relics. Parents brought young children to shake the hands of men who had charged the valley of Stones River, ridden with Morgan's Raiders, or dug trenches in defense of Atlanta a half century before. Most inmates were thrilled to interact with tourists, to earn a few dimes posing for snapshots, to sell their wood carvings, or to recount their wartime exploits to a fresh audience. They thrived on the activity and attention.

In 1907 Bennett Young envisioned the Home's assembly hall as a chapel for the inmates' religious services; by 1915 L. Z. Duke Hall was a bustling community entertainment center for inmates, Pewee Valley residents, tourists, and Kentucky's ex-Confederate groups. Florence Barlow and Henry George did their best to keep a full schedule of activities in the hall, but one activity took precedence over all others: any other planned event was delayed, moved, or canceled to accommodate the funeral service of a Kentucky Confederate Home inmate.

Inmate John F. Hart reported to a friend in April 1908 that only four fellow inmates had passed away since the first of the year. “This is a remarkable showing,” he wrote, “when it is remembered that there are nearly three hundred inmates whose ages range from 58 to 93 years, and most of them are more or less enfeebled by the weight of time.”
³⁰

Despite improved medical care, better food, and a more cheerful environment, death was the inevitable outcome for every inmate. Ex-Confederates had pledged to “pay a decent respect to the remains and to the memory” of comrades who die, and Duke Hall became the Home's funeral parlor.

Local undertaker Milton A. Stoess supervised construction of a portable framework on which a coffin could rest during funeral services. The catafalque and black draperies were stored under the stage of Duke Hall, ready for use on short notice.

When T. J. Haynes, the inmate who carved and sold hardwood canes to Home visitors, died suddenly of heart failure in January 1910, his coffin lay in state on Stoess's bier, draped with a Confederate flag. Inmate comrades sat with him overnight in L. Z. Duke Hall until relatives could arrive from Fulton County and escort his body home for burial.

Death comes one at a time in small towns, and even Pewee Valley residents gathered at Duke Hall to mourn inmates who passed away at the Home. “Everyone in town went to the funerals,” one resident recalled. “We had seen these men at the Home and around town. It was just respectful that we went to their funerals.”
³¹

Sixty-seven-year-old inmate Robert G. McCorkle had been an active member of Anchorage Presbyterian Church before entering the Home, and as long as he was able, he rode the electric car to Anchorage on Sunday to attend services there. Before he passed away in December 1909, he asked that his funeral service be held in Duke Hall among his comrades. McCorkle's flag-draped coffin rested on the bier at the front of the hall beneath portraits of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, John Hunt Morgan, and Mrs. L. Z. Duke as the pastor from Anchorage Presbyterian Church conducted the funeral service. The choir from McCorkle's church stood in the balcony, and a hundred uniformed inmates sat downstairs in neat rows before McCorkle's remains while Pewee Valley neighbors and a crowd of mourners from Anchorage and Louisville filled the side and rear seats.
³²

At the end of the service, the old inmates of the Kentucky Confederate Home formed up in columns outside Duke Hall and accompanied McCorkle's casket as they marched silently for a mile up Maple Street to the Confederate Cemetery. They remained silent and bareheaded in double line at the cemetery, breaking only after the closing prayer for a dipper of water, a bit of rest, and a high spirited cakewalk down Maple Street to the Home.

The years following the opening of L. Z. Duke Hall were the Home's apple-pie years.

Henry George and Florence Barlow delighted in providing for the happiness of the men under their care. The Home was full to the point of being crowded, but the religious services, special entertainments, community events, and direct involvement with activities of the UCV and the UDC made it seem less so. For a while, the Home met the highest expectations of the men and women who organized it, built it, and operated it.

“I don't know what I would have done if it had not been for this Home,” the Travelin' Tree Man wrote to his sister. “'Tis a Godsend to me.”
³³

The Tree Man was admitted to the Home in December 1913.

The seventy-nine-year-old veteran's real name, the one recorded in the family Bible, was Taliaferro Walton Duncan. He signed his papers as “T. W. Duncan” and never used his first name, pronounced “Tolliver” in the Southern manner. Family and friends called him “Tol.” For more than thirty years before arriving in Pewee Valley, he walked the lanes, avenues, paths, and pig trails from farmhouse to farmhouse, zigzagging across northern Kentucky to sell his fruit trees. People in twelve counties knew him as the Travelin' Tree Man.

From March to September the Tree Man called on country farms and cabins, taking orders for the apple, cherry, peach, pear, persimmon, and pawpaw varieties best suited to that part of the state. He took a small deposit and arranged for later delivery from a big Ohio grower. At planting time, Tol Duncan would arrive with the trees, shovel in hand and full of advice about spacing, pruning, watering, and controlling disease and rodents. The Travelin' Tree Man never married, never kept a regular house. He lived outdoors mostly, on the road or off the kindness of his customers.

By the time he came to the Home, the Travelin' Tree Man was worn out by a lifetime of labor without much money to show for it. “I am real weak. I give out doing nothing,” he wrote in one of his first letters from Pewee Valley. But the rest of the letters he wrote to relatives during the year he lived there marvel at the unexpected luxuries.

“We old fellows here do not know when it is cold,” he wrote during his first winter. “We don't have to go outdoors for anything. House is kept warm all the time with heaters.”

He described the thrill of being fitted with his new Home uniform: “If I had to buy it, it would cost me about $14. I am real proud of it. I know it will last me a long time.”

“I wish you could be here to see the beautiful roses and the other flowers that are blooming now,” Tol Duncan told his sister. “This Home is an earthly Paradise.”

Tol Duncan and the other inmates of the Confederate Home would enjoy that earthly paradise until tighter budgets and a looming world conflict once again closed the gates of the Home to the outside world.

Chapter 12

The Farmer and the Daughter

A
t the February 1919 meeting of the board of trustees, for the first time in the history of the Kentucky Confederate Home, three women representing the United Daughters of the Confederacy—Mrs. John L. Woodbury of Louisville, Mrs. Russell Mann of Paris, and Mrs. George R. Mastin of Lexington—sat with Home trustees at the boardroom table. If some trustees expected the officers of their new Ladies Advisory Committee to make trivial recommendations that could be easily sloughed off, Charlotte Osborne Woodbury would set them straight with her first report.

Midway through the meeting, Mrs. Woodbury was asked to speak.

After a sweet expression of gratitude for the privilege of attending the meeting, she reported that her committee had inspected the Home on several occasions in the previous month and found everything in perfect order, except for … just a few minor things.

“There was a shortage of linens,” she said. The Kentucky UDC chapters have been notified, she added, and they were holding linen showers for the Home. New linens were already on their way to Pewee Valley.
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With new linen tended to, Woodbury added that there were “interior decorations and other necessary things” that needed maintenance, and she produced a list for new commandant Charles L. Daughtry. Unused to taking orders from women, Daughtry accepted the list without a word. To show how appreciative the women were for the honor of serving the board, Mrs. Woodbury continued, the Daughters would gladly inspect the Home every month. The women would compile monthly lists of problems relating to nutrition, sanitation, and health care, then notify the commandant so he might correct them.

Before relinquishing the floor, Charlotte Woodbury sweetly asked the board secretary to correct the minutes of the meeting. Board members were referring to her committee as the
“Ladies
Advisory Committee” when it had actually been voted into existence as the
“Women's
Advisory Committee.”
²

“I have been forced to suspend painting and other repairs on the building,” Commandant Henry George reported to the board of trustees on July 31, 1915.

The Kentucky Confederate Home was a very different facility in 1915 than it was when it opened in 1902. In addition to the original old resort hotel, by 1915 there were also the sixty-room infirmary, Duke Hall, a three-story laundry building, several small outbuildings, and a cottage used to segregate inmates with tuberculosis. Someplace always needed painting, papering, patching, or plastering, and now there was not enough money to pay for repairs and maintenance.

By 1915 the Kentucky Confederate Home was experiencing a cash squeeze.

The Home had always operated at full capacity. Whatever it took—doubling or tripling men in rooms, building an infirmary, encouraging longer furloughs—there was always room for another needy ex-Confederate. More veterans entered the Home each year than left it—until 1914.

“You will observe there were six deaths more during the year than were admitted,” Henry George told the trustees at the end of that year. The inmate population was beginning its inevitable decline.
³

By 1914 the Kentucky Confederate Home supported a hefty overhead. More than half the cost of operating the Home—about $26,000—was spent on salaries, fuel, lighting, and other items of fixed expense necessary to keep the facility operating.

Aside from special appropriations, the Home depended for its income on the mandated annual payment: $175 per inmate residing in the Home. Fewer inmates meant less income. If the number of inmates continued to decline (which it certainly would) and the board of trustees was unable to slash the overhead expense, there would be less money available for food, clothing, drugs, laundry, repairs, and maintenance.

At first the trustees took no drastic action—perhaps waiting to see if the downward trend would continue—but they instructed Commandant Henry George to defer all but necessary repairs. They hired an engineer to look after the facility, a skilled and patient man from Anchorage named Alexander S. McFarlan; but McFarlan had his hands full making sure the heating, lighting, and water systems were operable. There was little time left over for renovation or maintenance.
⁴

Bennett Young went to Frankfort to work his lobbying magic on the legislators once more. He informed them that the inmate population had turned the corner and was now decreasing, and asked that the sum of $42,000 per annum (or $3,500 per month) be appropriated regardless of the number of inmates. This amount was based on an average of the amount expended by the Home for the past three years.
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Young's proposal was extraordinary. Every other state-run institution in Kentucky—from prison to asylum—received funding based on its resident population; Young was asking the legislature to fund the Kentucky Confederate Home as its population dwindled to its last, single inmate.

Young was well aware of what he was requesting. The amount he was seeking, he said, was “absolutely essential to the very existence of the Home.”

The Senate passed the appropriation bill just in time, for the Kentucky UDC chapters had been closing their purses to the Home and turning their attention elsewhere.

For fifty years, Kentuckians could refer among themselves to “The War” knowing it was understood that they were talking about the War Between the States. But by 1916, with fighting in Europe and the possibility of American involvement, public attention shifted from America's past armed conflict to the coming war “Over There.”

Kentucky women of the United Daughters of the Confederacy preserved a memory of wartime: human loss, economic hardship, terrifying vulnerability. The Paducah chapter endorsed an appeal by the National Peace Association, urging President Woodrow Wilson to cooperate with other neutral nations to end the conflict in Europe. Wilson promised peace even as America prepared for global war.
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As American involvement became inevitable, UDC chapters turned their attention and efforts to war relief and overseas charities.
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“Our work has been principally for the Red Cross,” the Springfield chapter president reported in 1917. In Williamsburg, members met weekly, “making hospital garments and knitting the various supplies and articles needed for our fighting men.” Another chapter collected and packed 1,359 garments—sweaters, socks, mufflers, wristlets, and bedshirts—for Belgian relief, “filling nine large packing cases.” The same chapter contributed $1,300 to the local Red Cross chapter in one month alone, at the same time buying $250 in Liberty Bonds.
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“Much interest of individual members of the Kentucky Confederate Home chapter has been drawn into the work for the worldwide war,” Florence Barlow reported.
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In the spirit of patriotism, she could hardly refuse when a Red Cross unit asked to take over L. Z. Duke Hall to roll bandages, make surgical dressings, and assemble first-aid kits. “We have felt it would be out of place in these strenuous times to give entertainments for any purpose other than war relief,” she said.
¹⁰

The inmates would enjoy no more vaudeville shows, strawberry festivals, or musicales in Duke Hall for the duration.

During the Civil War, commissary officers called it “chasing the pig.” It happened time after time during the war: two opposing armies, hundreds of thousands of men facing each other across a valley, waiting to go into battle. There were only so many hogs in the vicinity suitable for butchering into bacon and chops. The commissary officer who did the best job of “chasing the pig” had the better-fed army, and a better-fed army often meant greater success on the battlefield.

In 1917 the U.S. Army was chasing the pig with greenbacks, buying pork, flour, sugar, coffee, and other staples on the open market to feed hundreds of thousands of doughboys bivouacked at Camp Zachary Taylor in Louisville and nearby Camp Henry Knox. The Kentucky Confederate Home's grocery purveyor charged 16 cents a pound for bacon in 1913; by 1917 Army quartermasters had bid the price up to 30 cents a pound. A barrel of sugar that cost $17 in 1913 was going for $33 in 1917. Flour, laundry soap, brooms, and quinine tablets: all now double in price. After fifty years, the old Confederates were once again competing with the U.S. Army for provisions.
¹¹

A year earlier, Bennett Young lobbied for—and won—a fixed annual appropriation for the Home. Now, prices were rising faster than the inmates were dying. Young, John Leathers, William Milton, and Andrew Sea met in executive session at Leathers's Louisville office on August 29, 1917. Soaring grocery prices, along with higher overhead expense and decreased UDC support, were squeezing the Home in a financial vise, and the trustees had to find a way to ease the pressure.

They cut employee and management salaries by 10 percent. The executive committee voted to notify the state auditor that they would be selling off some dead trees on the property to a lumberman for $80, and they directed Commandant George to move all inmates out of the fourth floor of the main building, then cut off all light, heat, and access to that area. They authorized a contract for $1,000 to retrofit the furnace and reduce the amount of coal necessary to heat the buildings.

The committee's final action of the day, however, was more dramatic and more personal. “It was moved and carried that on the 9th of September only two meals per day be served for the present.”
¹²

The ex-Confederates had lost the pig chase.

The public first became aware of the two-meals-a-day plan a month later, when ex-Confederates and Daughters in Lexington called “an indignation meeting” to protest the reduction in rations. The Lexington Daughters painted a word picture of old men starving to death by the wagonload and threatened to appeal to legislators in Frankfort; a representative of the UCV camp announced their intention to ask for Bennett Young's resignation from the Home's board.
¹³

Newspapers demanded answers: “If the old soldiers of Lexington know anything against the management, let them speak up. If those in charge have anything to say, let them say it. Let there be no hiding behind rhetorical statements.”
¹⁴

Sensing a dogfight, a
Louisville Herald
reporter phoned the Home and spoke to an unidentified inmate. The inmate acknowledged that the dining hall had cut back to two meals a day. The reporter then pressed to find whether the reduction in rations was causing a hardship. “I can't say as to that,” the inmate hedged.
¹⁵

Newspaper editors questioned the wisdom of the menu reduction. They accepted the financial difficulties that confronted the institution, but if “the food is inadequate to meet the demands of the body, some means should be found to effect a change immediately.”
¹⁶

Young did what any good attorney with an unpopular case might do: he piled up the facts that helped his case, then wrapped them in the flag. He and the board of trustees released a twenty-page statement to newspaper editors, complete with charts and affidavits, justifying the change.

The statement included a list of twenty-five “articles essential to living in the Home” and a comparison of the current prices and prices five years before. A two-meals-a-day menu was accompanied by the rhetorical question: “Do fifty percent of the people of this state … fare any better day by day than these aged soldiers?” The statement listed the European countries with “meatless days” and the American states observing “wheatless days,” then asserted, “The Confederate Home has none.” Dr. Rowan Pryor and four other physicians on his medical advisory board opined that the inmates were not being hurt by the reduction in rations.

Finally, Young added patriotism to his argument. “The old soldier inmates of the Home would do their bit in helping win the present world war by cutting out one meal a day,” he said. “They would comply as far as possible with the appeal being made by President Wilson and Food Administrator Hoover for the conservation of foodstuffs for the duration of the war.”
¹⁷

Young had a point: the inmates of the Home—with their two meals a day, gas lighting, steam heat, telephone, and indoor bathrooms—were probably living better than many other Kentuckians. Almost overnight, public interest turned back to the war, and the issue died away.
¹⁸

The death of Henry George's wife dragged away his ebullient spirit like a creature carrying off its kill. Martha Galloway George, his wife of forty-five years and the mother of his three children, died of breast cancer in 1916.

Henry George spent ten years as commandant of the Kentucky Confederate Home, the longest continuous employment he had ever enjoyed. He earned $1,200 a year, a comfortable salary for the time, and he and Martha made their home in a suite of rooms in the Home. He had his own table in the dining room for meals, and the Home matron made sure their rooms were clean and their laundry was done to perfection.