My Old Confederate Home

by Rusty Williams

  Women of the Louisville UDC chapter seethed at Young's effrontery for reneging on their agreement, and they spread the story from chapter to chapter across the state. Bennett Young and his board of trustees would regret the consequences of the perceived indignity for years afterward.38

  Meanwhile, ex-Confederates, Daughters, and their friends and families were preparing for a trip to Pewee Valley for the opening of the Kentucky Confederate Home.

  A month before the opening of the Home, Fayette Hewitt, sitting at the oak desk in his office at State National Bank of Frankfort, sorted through the envelopes stacked in front of him. Most of the envelopes contained letters and money, expressions of compassion toward fellow Kentuckians, men who decades earlier had left their homes and families to fight for a cause that was lost before the first battle was joined.

  Money and paper.

  Hewitt recorded the contributions and read the letters.

  “Dear General,” read the letter from A. W. Bascom, the stockman from Bath County who, a year before at the state reunion, expressed his reservations about the plan for the Home. “Enclosed find check for $300, a part of the money raised by me for the Confederate Home.” Despite his reservations, Bascom served on the Committee of Twenty-Five, and he had personally raised more than $400.

  “I am somewhat disappointed that there has been no provision made under which a needy comrade together with his dear old wife can be provided for,” Bascom wrote. “Still, I hope that the managing board may in the near future be able and willing to devise some plan by which this oversight may be remedied.”39

  There had been so many struggles during the previous year. Despite the petty fights, heated arguments, and money worries, Kentuckians were about to open a comfortable home for disabled and impoverished ex-Confederates.

  “Trusting and believing that the good work so propitiously begun may be pursued until we can have a Home of which all of us will be proud, I remain your comrade and friend, A. W. Bascom.”

  When it opened on October 23, 1902, the Kentucky Confederate Home would not be the home that every ex-Confederate had envisioned. But, working together, Kentuckians were poised to provide a respectable place for their comrades who needed it.

  Chapter 5

  The Governor and the Prisoner

  Aboard a special train approaching the Pewee Valley depot, thirty-three-year-old Governor John C. W. Beckham was as nervous as only a politician facing uncertain reelection could be. His formal campaign wouldn't begin until spring, but on this trip rode a hope that he would be more than an accidental governor.

  Normally self-assured for a man his age, today he was nervous. He needed the respect and support of the Confederate veterans waiting for him in Pewee Valley.

  Waiting with the rest of the welcoming party on the platform of the Pewee Valley Depot, seventy-eight-year-old Lorenzo D. Holloway had time to reflect on the new governor. Thirty-three years old and managing a whole state. Awfully young to be a governor. When Lorenzo Holloway was thirty-three years old, he hadn't managed much more than the books of a small stable. At thirty-three, Holloway hadn't yet been in prison with 10,000 men. And he hadn't yet seen good men die in droves.

  As dawn broke over central Kentucky on Thursday, October 23, 1902, the sky transmuted from black to indigo to cerulean blue, here and there buffed by wisps of low-hanging wood smoke. September had been unseasonably warm, and autumn was late arriving. It was a blackberry autumn, and the trees had held their fire through October.

  Sixteen miles east of Louisville and about that far south of the Ohio River, Pewee Valley was a quiet village of well-bred estate homes, unpretentious stone church buildings, white fences, coffee-colored dirt lanes, and a population of fewer than 500. Originally known as Smith's Station, residents adopted the current name in the 1850s for reasons lost to legend. The pewee is a bird, a woodland flycatcher that may once have made its home in the brushwood and broomsage of the area. Pewee Valley sits 300 feet higher than Louisville, a topographic feature that accounted for the elegant summer homes built there years before by wealthy Louisvillians who thought altitude and cooler summer evenings would make them less susceptible to the night vapors blamed for most summer illness.

  Two side-by-side rail tracks—one for the steam trains connecting Louisville and Frankfort, another for interurban electric rail service—bisected the hamlet; a county road paralleled the tracks. Near the center of the village was a small commercial district, including a dry goods store, a meat market, a post office, a bank, a blacksmith shop, and the rail depot.

  Six hundred yards up the county road from the rail depot, the former Villa Ridge Inn stood atop a gentle hill surrounded by newly raked grounds, awaiting its dedication as the new Kentucky Confederate Home.

  As a rising sun painted Pewee Valley with its daytime colors, farm families from neighboring areas were clip-clopping up the county road in work wagons and buggies. The farmers were the first arrivals for a daylong celebration of bands, bunting, dignitaries, spectacle, and Lost Cause oratory.1

  The board of trustees was desperate to open the Kentucky Confederate Home to residents as soon as possible. Bragging rights were at stake, of course, sectional pride for having financed, legislated, equipped, and opened a Home just twelve months after the meeting at which the board members set their hands to the task. (Ex-Confederates in Virginia, Texas, Georgia, Missouri, Maryland, and elsewhere spent years to do the job.) But financial considerations provided the most pressing reason for urgency. Until the state took formal possession of the Home and residents moved into it, no money would flow from the state's funding tap. Every month the Home remained unoccupied cost the trustees almost $300 in utilities and maintenance, an amount their minuscule reserve wouldn't cover for long.

  Superintendent Salem H. Ford and his helpers and contractors had been working for weeks to prepare the former resort hotel for occupancy. The rooms of the old hotel needed scrubbing, sweeping, patching, repairing, painting. The building was sound and generally in good condition, but it hadn't been occupied for five years. Ford had to flush out water pipes, recharge gas cisterns, test each lamp, and replace pump gaskets, all the while dealing with loads of gifts, furnishings, and provisions that arrived daily.

  There was much left undone, but by Thursday morning, October 23, 1902, the old Villa Ridge Inn was ready to reopen as the Kentucky Confederate Home.

  Early-arriving farm families hitched their wagons to fences and trees surrounding the Home and roamed the grounds, determined to make a day of the celebration. Some spread blankets and baskets of food near a speakers’ platform that had been built at the top of the looping driveway that led up the hill to the Home's entry. Long wooden picnic tables dotted the grounds.

  At midmorning Salem Ford hoisted a U.S. flag and a Confederate flag to fly side by side from flagstaffs atop the four-story building. Red, white, and blue bunting was draped along the speakers’ stand and the Home's gallery echoed the colors of the two national flags flying overhead.2

  By 11:00 A.M. the broad lawn surrounding the Home was teeming with more than 4,000 people. “In keeping with the true spirit of Southern hospitality,” a visitor wrote, “ample provision had been made to feed all who had come.”

  Churchwomen of Pewee Valley set out food and lemonade on the outdoor tables, while clubwomen from throughout the state distributed hampers of picnic fare. A detachment of cadets from the Kentucky Military Institute gathered in rank to rehearse their duty as honor guard for the dignitaries who would arrive later. The lively sound of popular tunes and patriotic marches rose from a brass band that wove through the crowd.

  Every hour, it seemed, another thousand men and women from all parts of the state arrived by cart, carriage, trolley, train, and the occasional motorcar. The rail companies offered a discounted round trip fare to Pewee Valley for the day. The later arrivals were townspeople mainly, the shopkeepers, physicians, bankers, and small businessmen of Kentucky's increasingly influential middle class. They found seats
at the outdoor tables or spread picnic blankets on the raked grounds. Families gathered with other families of the same town, until congregations of visitors from Kuttawa melded into the visitors from Carrollton and Hopkinsville and Prestonsburg and Somerset.

  “When the crowds began to gather in numbers on the broad lawn and under the trees it was first feared there would not be enough to give all a plenty,” a reporter observed. But the women of Pewee Valley continued to produce hampers, steaming dishes draped with tea towels, and platters of sliced meats for the new arrivals.

  The veterans—men of the Civil War generation, now in their sixties, seventies, or older—were scattered among the throng, and many were in the company of their wives, children, and grandchildren. Some wore old gray jackets or hats, remnants of uniforms that had been saved in trunks for decades. Others wore newer gray suits of a martial cut, the now-standardized uniform of the United Confederate Veterans organization. Here and there an old man would let out an excited yip as he recognized, then embraced, another old man. “[The veteran's] elastic step and joyous laugh belied his age as he met in happy reunion with his old comrades in arms,” noted one visitor.

  Kentucky's major newspapers gave the dedication front-page play in the early editions, and by midday Pewee Valley was jammed with more than 10,000 visitors, the largest gathering of Kentucky ex-Confederates, sympathizers, family, and friends since the end of the Civil War.

  A quarter mile away, Lorenzo D. Holloway waited on the platform of the Pewee Valley rail depot for the governor's train with Home superintendent Salem Ford. Holloway had been the first to register as a resident of the Home, and he would be among the first that day to size up Kentucky's Boy Governor.

  Lorenzo Holloway was almost forty years old when he left his farm in Scott County and the horse ranch where he worked to join John Hunt Morgan's cavalry in the autumn of 1861. He was a well-read man, good with figures, and trusted by the younger men of Smith's Regiment, Fifth Kentucky Cavalry. In the summer of 1863, he was a captain and regimental quartermaster when Morgan's cavalry swept northward on the ill-fated Ohio raid. Holloway was captured and imprisoned with sixty-odd other officers—including Thomas Eastin, Basil Duke, and General Morgan himself—in the Ohio state penitentiary.

  “I am becoming quite fond of my cell,” he wrote his mother in October 1863. “I can eat as much as I want and no limit to sleeping. Can keep warm, dry, clean, read my Bible, sing in a whisper and pray for myself, my family, friends and enemies.”3

  Conditions at the Ohio prison may have been too relaxed, a situation some prisoners exploited in November 1863. Aided by smuggled weapons (and a bribed guard or two), Morgan and a handful of officers escaped from the penitentiary. Humiliated Federal officers sent Holloway and the rest of the remaining prisoners to Fort Delaware.

  Located on a small island at the mouth of Delaware Bay, Fort Delaware was a recommissioned Union fort intended to hold the thousands of Confederate prisoners captured at Gettysburg and Vicksburg. By the time Holloway and the other Ohio prisoners arrived, Fort Delaware was a hellhole.4

  The last years of the war produced a quantity of Confederate prisoners of war the Federal bureaucracy was simply unprepared to handle. Southern prisons (such as Andersonville) couldn't obtain the resources needed to feed, clothe, and house large numbers of Federal prisoners; Union prison officials couldn't get the resources in place quickly enough to care for the prisoners they were capturing. Fort Delaware was ill-equipped to handle the number of prisoners arriving there.

  “I am very poor, bones nearly through,” Holloway wrote his sister several months after arriving at Fort Delaware, “but by my regular habits and the grace of God, my health is unimpaired.”

  Thirty thousand prisoners were housed there; Holloway was fortunate to have a strong constitution. The death rate rose as high as 30 percent as overcrowded prisoners coped with smallpox, cholera, bad water, poor nutrition, and insect infestation, as well as sadistic guards.

  Facing the winter of 1864–65 in prison, Holloway begged his sister to send him a few food items and a stout Kentucky comforter. “It may be the last act of kindness you may have to extend to an only and unfortunate brother,” he told her. “If I should have to winter on this island, I don't want to have to freeze and die of rheumatism or pneumonia.”

  Thousands of younger men died of cold, hunger, or despair that winter in Fort Delaware; but forty-year-old Lorenzo Holloway survived. In May 1865 he was released from prison and returned to Kentucky.

  Governor Beckham's special train arrived from Frankfort at the Pewee Valley depot near high noon. From the window of his private rail car, Beckham could see the welcoming committee jostle themselves into a rough receiving line on the platform.

  Beckham had endured welcoming ceremonies at countless rail depots all over the state during the three years of his governorship. But in the year since President William McKinley was shot to death during a stop in Buffalo, these routine events carried more than a tinge of worry, particularly for a governor who had gained office only after his predecessor was gunned down.

  But that was just one more layer of anxiety added to an already worrisome day. The young governor was facing his first real reelection campaign, and he needed the unqualified support of Kentucky's ex-Confederates.

  The gunshots that killed William Goebel still echoed in Kentucky politics three years later. Kentucky's moderate Democrats—including Bennett Young, John Leathers, W. N. Haldeman, and others of the state UCV leadership—had bolted the Democratic Party to vote against Goebel in 1899, and they were lukewarm about Beckham. In a special election to fill Goebel's unexpired term, Beckham squeezed out a razor-thin margin of 3,700 votes (out of a half million votes cast), then set out to mend fences with the state's traditional Democrats. He slavishly supported Bennett Young's plan for the Kentucky Confederate Home and helped grease legislative skids in the General Assembly, all the while expressing his fealty to the Lost Cause—this despite rumors that Bennett Young was contemplating his own run for the governorship against Beckham.5

  Kentucky's state UCV organization and local camps were avowedly apolitical, but the men of the Confederate generation were Democrats down to their bootlaces. Governor Beckham needed all their support, all their clout, and every one of their votes to keep his office in the upcoming election.6

  Beckham and his mother appeared at the door of his rail car and stepped onto the platform of the Pewee Valley depot. Even from a quarter mile away, they could hear the noise of the growing crowd gathered on the grounds of the Kentucky Confederate Home. After a brief greeting by the chairman of the welcoming committee and an equally brief response, Beckham and his mother turned to the receiving line.

  Lorenzo Holloway stood next to Superintendent Salem H. Ford on the depot platform, somewhere between a Pewee Valley town committeeman and several gussied-up ladies of the UDC, all waiting a turn for their handshake with the governor.

  Holloway had spent the years since Fort Delaware working at a variety of state bookkeeping and auditing jobs. A widower, he left Frankfort to return to farming in Scott County when Fayette Hewitt resigned as state auditor, and his friendship with Hewitt earned him early acceptance to the Kentucky Confederate Home. Holloway arrived in Pewee Valley before the formal opening to help Superintendent Ford prepare the building for occupancy. He and Ford had been detailed to the depot to meet the governor.

  Holloway's first impression of Governor Beckham was likely the same as all who saw him for the first time: he was so young. The governor was well barbered, beardless, with oiled hair parted down the middle in the current style for young men. Beckham was hatless; he dressed carefully and well without looking dandified.

  But Beckham was no fragile youngster who had to be handled with sugar tongs. Despite his youth, Governor Beckham betrayed no lack of confidence as he worked his way down the receiving line, every move graceful and practiced without seeming so. He gave the impression of being someone who knew how the world turned and was wil
ling to keep it spinning in the right direction. Maybe he was up to the job.

  Within a few moments, Beckham had made his way down the receiving line. He, his mother, Senator J. C. S. Blackburn, and the other out-of-town dignitaries stepped into decorated carriages for a quarter mile parade to the grounds of the Kentucky Confederate Home, escorted by an honor guard of Kentucky Military Institute cadets.

  Seventy-eight-year-old Lorenzo Holloway and Superintendent Ford walked back to the Home behind the parade of open carriages.

  Thirty minutes later the special train from Louisville arrived, six cars carrying 100 boisterous state UCV reunion delegates and their own brass band. The band struck up “Dixie,” and the ex-Confederates formed into ranks. Flag-bearers flanked the procession—Stars and Stripes in the place of honor at the head of the right-hand column, Stars and Bars on the left—as they marched in column (mostly in step) up the crushed-rock carriageway to the grand building they would later dedicate for the use of Kentucky's invalid and indigent Confederate veterans. Wild cheers from the crowd greeted the flags, the sound of “Dixie,” and the waving veterans.7

  Some of the arriving dignitaries joined Governor Beckham and Senator Blackburn to inspect the building. Visitors marveled at the sheer luxury of the Home, surrounded on three sides by a wide, comfortable verandah. At a time when only city dwellers knew such amenities, the Home had gaslight in every room, steam heat throughout, and roof cisterns that allowed for indoor bathrooms on the first and second floors. There were seventy-two guest bedrooms already furnished, two oak-paneled parlors, and a dining room that could seat 125 comfortably. The former lobby had been converted to a library, and more than a thousand volumes lined the shelves. Just the week before, movers had delivered a pipe organ and an upright piano, along with box after box of sheet music.