My Old Confederate Home

by Rusty Williams

  “Whereas it has come to our knowledge that you have tendered your resignation …”1

  The facility now known as the Kentucky Confederate Home was originally one of Kentucky's grandest (and least successful) summer resort hotels. Villa Ridge Inn was built in 1889, conceived as a luxurious getaway for Kentucky's elite.

  Kentucky was dotted with pleasant little resort hotels, often built around natural springs. The Chalybeate Springs Resort Hotel in Union County attracted guests from Indiana, Illinois, and as far away as Texas. Swango Springs Spa and Hotel in Wolfe County operated as a posh resort through much of the nineteenth century. And, just north of Pewee Valley in Trimble County, the Parker family promoted their Bedford Springs Hotel and its warm sulfur waters as a healing treatment for everything from arthritis to mange.2

  Pewee Valley already had a reputation as a healthful place in which to reside when local entrepreneur Horace Smith spent close to $50,000 to build his 100-room summer resort in the Louisville exurb. With seventy-two guest rooms, Smith's Villa Ridge Inn was one of the largest hotels in Kentucky, and certainly the largest located outside a city. But Villa Ridge Inn wasn't so much about size as about luxury.

  Located on the crest of a gentle slope just 600 yards from the Pewee Valley train depot, the resort hotel stood four stories high, sixty feet deep, and as long as seven rail cars. A wide veranda, furnished with comfortable rocking chairs and wooden gliders, surrounded the building on three sides, and it was said guests could enjoy a mile-long covered stroll. Second-story balconies and generous windows on every floor provided splendid views of area homes and churches as well as natural cross-ventilation. Atop the frame building was an octagonal cupola and, atop the cupola, eighty feet above neat flower beds, was a flagpole from which flew the U.S. and Kentucky flags.

  The servants’ quarters—a two-story dormitory for live-in help—was located behind the main structure, with a fully equipped linen laundry and steam boilers in the basement. The boilers fed a heating system that provided warmth to every room on cool spring evenings or chilly autumn mornings. Four brick-lined wells and a pump house provided water for the indoor bathrooms located on the first three floors. (One of the wells produced a sulfurous water flow that was too sporadic—and too foul-smelling—to be promoted as a healing mineral bath.)

  On arrival at the Pewee Valley depot, hotel visitors could see the resort's tall cupola and flagpole above the trees. Uniformed porters loaded trunks and luggage onto carts as guests boarded open carriages for the short ride to the inn. As a guest's carriage entered the grounds and began its gradual ascent up the white gravel driveway, the visitor could easily mistake the Villa Ridge Inn—particularly at twilight, when warm gaslight shone from every room—for a luxurious White Star ocean liner, a vessel of aristocratic elegance planted somehow in the rolling hills of central Kentucky.

  That first impression of upper-crust splendor continued when the visitor's carriage halted under the porte-cochere and a liveried doorman opened the oak-framed front doors.

  Just inside the main entrance on the ground floor were a richly paneled lobby and a book-lined library. The parlor furniture was carved, massive, dark, and comfortable. Two additional parlors and a smoking room opened off a wide hallway that ran the length of the building to the dining room. Victorian paintings or pressed ferns hung on every wall, and sprays of fresh flowers appeared on every horizontal surface. Surrounded on three sides by large windows, the dining room could seat 80 for formal servings, but could accommodate more than 100 for casual meals, and the adjoining kitchen was equipped with institutional stoves, ovens, coolers, and prep tables.

  Three curving wooden stairways provided access to the upper floors, one in the center of the building and one on either end. Upstairs sleeping rooms and bathrooms opened off central hallways of wide waxed floorboards; large linen presses and servants’ pantries were hidden at convenient distances throughout the halls. The upstairs guest-room floors were covered with matting, while the hallways and all the downstairs rooms were carpeted.

  During prime summer seasons Pewee Valley's Villa Ridge Inn was a place where fashionable men in three-button double-breasted sack suits, pretty young mothers in trailing skirts and parasols, and well-scrubbed little girls in ruffled white dresses with pink sashes and hair ribbons strolled the broad lawns and among the shady trees of the spacious grounds.3

  Within six years of its opening, however, the luxury resort hotel fell into bankruptcy.

  During its short life, Villa Ridge Inn was bedeviled by a combination of too many expenses and too little income. The hotel was overbuilt: money spent on the hotel's necessary staff and its modern heating, lighting, and plumbing infrastructure was far more than could be recovered with only six dozen guest rooms during a summer tourist season. And Pewee Valley was just too close to Louisville to be a compelling getaway location for that city's upper crust. (By comparison, the extravagant French Lick Springs Hotel and Spa in southern Indiana thrived during the same period. It was more than an hour away by rail, and the owners enjoyed income from their golf course, casino, local tours, and healing baths, in addition to hotel revenues.)4

  “On the premises, we will sell at public auction to the highest bidder the property known as the Villa Ridge Inn.” Falls City Insurance Co. of Louisville, as liquidating agent, put the property under the auctioneer's hammer (without reserve or limit) on Saturday, October 26, 1895.5

  Real estate speculator Angus N. Gordon eventually acquired the property, but his White Star luxury liner was now more of a white elephant. He managed to lease the buildings to a private boarding school for several years, but by 1898 he was valuing the land and improvements at something less than $13,000. By the turn of the century Gordon had practically given the vacant hotel over to the use of Pewee Valley citizens for dances, musicales, and other legitimate entertainments. (Village residents provided the cash and maintenance services necessary to keep the facility heated, lit, and secure.)6 So when Kentucky's ex-Confederates announced in 1902 that they were looking for a veterans’ home site, Angus N. Gordon had just the right property at exactly the right price.

  That the Kentucky Confederate Home was presentable on the day it was dedicated and suitable for occupancy by arriving veterans was due to weeks of personal oversight and dawn-to-dusk physical labor by a bookish sixty-eight-year-old druggist from Owensboro.

  Salem Holland Ford was an odd choice to be named first superintendent of the Kentucky Confederate Home. He had spent most of his professional career in the drug trade at a time when the local druggist was as much a personal health care provider as was the country doctor. Some druggists of the period built fortunes by devising and marketing laxative syrups, catarrh salves, typhoid tablets, health drinks, and other patent medicines, but Ford had little interest in the entrepreneurial aspects of his profession. Instead, he was content with compounding and dispensing useful medicaments to those seeking relief from various ailments. Ford maintained an impressive pharmacological library, and he was a regular speaker at annual meetings of the Kentucky Pharmaceutical Association. He had no great political ambitions, but was willing to serve on the local school board when appointed by the mayor of Owensboro.7

  Nothing about Ford's appearance was particularly awe-inspiring. He was a slight man, trim, with thinning white hair. Behind a broad, drooping mustache, his lips were pursed like a disapproving Sunday School teacher, and his watery blue eyes tended to squint when he wasn't wearing his wire-rimmed spectacles.

  But Ford's military credentials were impressive.

  At the outbreak of the Civil War, Ford crossed the Mississippi River into Missouri to enlist as a private in the state guard there. Within a year he was attached to the Confederate army and elected captain of Company F, General Joseph Shelby's cavalry brigade under Major General Sterling Price. For two years Ford and his men conducted lightning raids throughout Missouri, north Arkansas, and parts of the Indian Territory. (During his time in Missouri and Kansas he had occasion to co
mmand Frank James, brother of Jesse, and he formed a lifelong friendship with soon-to-be-legendary lawman Wyatt Earp.)

  In combat and on raids, Ford was no reckless sword-waver, but a careful planner who maintained a quiet equanimity in even the most disordered situations. His troops trusted him; his commanders respected him. Near the end of the war, as Price's Trans-Mississippi Army faced increasing pressure in the north, Ford led his company on a 1,400-mile skedaddle around Union troops in Arkansas, through Indian Territory and Texas. Eventually, he surrendered and was paroled at Shreveport, Louisiana, on June 15, 1865.

  Back in Owensboro in 1879, Ford organized the Monarch Rifles, a private military company in Daviess County formed under Kentucky state law. He was elected captain, and for the next decade he helped build the organization into one of Kentucky's best-trained local militias. He played an active role in establishing Owensboro's Confederate veterans camp, and by 1900 was on General Poyntz's staff of the Kentucky UCV organization.

  The board of trustees voted to hire Ford as the first superintendent of the Kentucky Confederate Home at its marathon board meeting on September 4, 1902. He would receive a salary of $75 a month, plus free room and board at the Home for him and his wife. He had no experience running an institution of any sort—one of the other job candidates, Thomas Richards, was a career hotelier—but Ford was known as an energetic, well-organized man who said what he was going to do and did what he said. (By comparison, the other serious candidate, former state senator William O. Coleman, always seemed a little too unctuous and eager to please.)

  It was not until the first week in October, however, when the purchase of the old hotel was completed, that Ford could commence preparing the building and grounds of the old Villa Ridge Inn for the dedication ceremony barely three weeks later.

  First, he had to repair and clean the property. Most of the hotel guest rooms had been closed for several years. The entire facility required scraping, patching, repainting, and wallpapering. Ford oversaw the inspection, repair, and replacement of the gas and water lines. He called in local workers to make sure the pumps, tanks, and cisterns were operating properly and holding their seals. To prepare for the dedication and opening ceremonies, Ford saw that the trees were trimmed, the lawn was raked, and a new bed of crushed white gravel was spread over a dirt carriageway that led from the road to the front of the Home.8

  Ford was assisted by several veterans who had arrived early at the Home: Lorenzo Holloway and others. He used these early arrivals to help oversee construction and manage outside workers, but Ford alone had to navigate the political spider web of purchasing and staffing.

  As superintendent, Ford was “charged with the general management and supervision, [and] the employment of such help as may be necessary therein.” Major purchases and key employees, however, were the responsibility of the board of trustees. Before Ford could buy so much as a replacement doorknob, he was required to advertise for bids, then submit the bids to the executive committee for action. In this manner he had to acquire the necessary furnishings, linens, dinnerware, and stores necessary to house, feed, and care for 100 residents and staff.

  Dozens of businesses with ex-Confederate connections vied to supply the Home with what it needed (and sometimes didn't know it needed). Ford would listen patiently to every pitchman and drummer, interrupting occasionally to clarify a point or ask a question. Then, politely, he would direct the prospective purveyor to the Home's board of trustees.

  On no more consultation with Ford than a buggy-maker might have with a horse, the board of trustees hired a matron (to supervise meals and cleaning) and a steward (to serve the residents and clean the facility). Ford would be responsible for managing these employees, but he lacked the power to discipline or replace them.

  Still, Ford maintained an even temper and a calm demeanor.

  In addition to the renovation and management challenges, there was the torrent of gifts that poured into the Home every day.

  In testament to the statewide support of the Home and the old veterans who would live there, Kentucky residents sent gifts they felt would bring a bit of comfort or pleasure to the residents. Few days failed to bring an express wagon to the door of the Home, with a constant stream of drivers seeking to offload a carved easy chair, boxes of books, a tin of cupcakes, or some other precious item.

  Growers in Madison County sent a hogshead of tobacco for use by the old soldiers; M. W. Oliver sent a large Bible; E. J. Elliott sent a box of games; and Mrs. Poyntz shipped a crate full of magazines and her husband's old summer clothing.9

  “I had a … fern three feet across that I wanted to take down to the Confederate Home,” an Owingsville woman wrote her cousin. (In the end, she decided to send it by rail.) Women of the Paris County UDC shipped a huge crate “containing cakes, candies, literature, stationery, tobacco and a liberal donation of money” with the promise of similar shipments in future months. Governor Beckham and his mother sent an upright piano from their home in Bardstown to the Confederate Home's parlor, where it likely sat side by side with a pump organ donated by a Louisville music store.10

  Every gift required a note of thanks.

  “I am in receipt of five strong, handsome hammocks,” began one such expression of appreciation. “The hammocks have been swung in cool shady spots in our grove of wide-spreading oaks and beeches, and the ‘old boys’ will take great pride in them.”11

  Ford designated one of the downstairs parlors as a library, and two Louisville women solicited 3,000 books from printers, booksellers, local businesses, and friends to fill the shelves with reading matter.12

  The Home library likely had a dictionary, and if the donor had been particularly generous, the dictionary would have been Webster's International Dictionary of the English Language, published just three years earlier. If one of the early-arriving residents happened into the library one day to riffle through the pages of that new dictionary, and if his finger happened to stop on page 381 (“ink–innerve”), he might have read the definition of the word “inmate” as it was commonly used in 1902: “One who lives in the same house or apartment with another, a fellow lodger; by extension, one who occupies or lodges in any place or dwelling.” Thus, by the usage of the day, ex-Confederates who lived voluntarily in the Kentucky Confederate Home were referred to as “inmates,” a word used a century later to denote involuntary residents of institutions such as prisons or asylums.

  There was nothing involuntary about the first men who would be inmates of the Kentucky Confederate Home. They were eager to get to Pewee Valley.

  In late September, a month before the Home's scheduled opening, board secretary Harry P. McDonald printed 200 copies of a onepage inmate application form and mailed several to each of the state's UCV camps. A few more copies were distributed to interested UDC chapters and to veterans who requested them directly from the board. McDonald's printed form was the first step of a four-step admissions process that involved application, review, notification, and processing.13

  A veteran desiring to apply for a place in the Kentucky Confederate Home first had to give information about his residence and military service. (According to the law that established the Home, all residents had to prove their active military service for the Confederate States of America and their honorable discharge or parole at the termination of the war.) The questions asked of the applicant were not unlike the questions John Leathers had asked Billy Beasley years before when determining Beasley's worthiness for assistance: Where did you enlist? In what commands did you serve? Were you imprisoned? Wounded? Where were you discharged or paroled? Do you still have your papers? An applicant was required to swear that “he is unable by reason of bad health or mental or physical inability to support himself.” Further, “he says he is not addicted to the excessive use of intoxicating liquors” and agrees that he will abide by the rules and regulations of the Home.14

  Applicants also had to provide a recommendation from two witnesses, men who were in a “position to
know that the statements made in his application are true.” The witnesses were also required to attest to the applicant's moral worthiness, that “he is not addicted to excessive use of liquors” and that “he is a proper person for admission to said Kentucky Confederate Home.”

  Finally, a physician must swear that he examined the applicant and that he “is not addicted to the use of intoxicating liquors to excess and that he is not insane.”

  Completed applications came flowing back to Harry McDonald almost as fast as he could mail out the blanks. On October 24, 1902, the executive committee formally approved its first batch of fifteen completed admission applications: “It affords me great pleasure to inform you that your application for admission to the Kentucky Confederate Home was favorably passed upon by the executive committee. The Home is now open for your reception at any time you may desire to enter.”15

  The committee sent form acceptance letters to sixty-three-year-old Peter B. Adams, a resident of Lexington and a veteran of John Morgan's Ohio raid, and to S. G. Shumate, a slow-talking native of Virginia now living in Middlesborough on the charity of his friends. Seventy-seven-year-old Benjamin Thomas received his acceptance letter at his son-in-law's home in Louisville, where he was living with his daughter and her three children. Confederate veteran Stanford P. Ashford was an Arkansan when he enlisted in the Confederate infantry there, but he had tramped around quite a bit since the war and was living in Jessamine County when he received his acceptance letter. S. O. Foster lost his arm in Tennessee in 1863, but had been earning a decent living in Paducah until a stroke paralyzed his remaining arm. He made arrangements to leave for Pewee Valley right away.

  At least two, and perhaps as many as five, old veterans took up residence in the Home prior to its formal opening, arriving early to help Superintendent Ford prepare the property. The rest arrived as soon as they could settle their affairs and gather up sufficient train fare for Pewee Valley.