My Old Confederate Home

by Rusty Williams

  Mary Bascom expressed a concern noted by women in other UDC chapters: the wives of married men who had been admitted to the Home were left to fend for themselves or live off the charity of others. If there were a place for wives in Pewee Valley, she argued, those women could help care for their husbands and also by their presence reduce ungentlemanly behavior by unmarried inmates.

  Mary Bascom was a small-town woman who lacked the elegance and subtlety of Henrietta Duke. She was as plain-spoken and direct as her stockman husband, and she had no problem expressing dissatisfaction with Bennett Young: “There has been no provision made for the wives,” she said, “although General Bennett H. Young promised last winter that should be embodied in the bill that passed the last legislature. So I think the veterans will not do anything for us.” She urged her cousin to “bring this to the attention of your chapter, and see what they have to say about the matter.”18

  After the Cross of Honor ceremony at the Home, UDC chapters around the state began to agitate for greater involvement of women in the Home. Some felt that a management or oversight role was the most effective solution; others thought that opening the Home to women residents was the best course.

  Henrietta Morgan Duke and Mary Bascom would contribute to the compromise that resulted in The Motion.

  The women believed that their large cash donations and active service entitled them to a say in the management of the Home; the men of the board felt that efficient management was men's business, best handled by men. Even so, Bennett Young had to admit that things weren't going well.

  Board members were taking a beating in Kentucky's ex-Confederate community over their stewardship of the Home. It was embarrassing enough to hear from friends in the UCV camps, but they also had to answer to wives who had heard of the problems through their UDC chapters. Worse still, friendly newspaper publishers were beginning to spread the word that things weren't right at the Kentucky Confederate Home. Everyone was looking to Bennett Young for answers, and on September 2 he responded with a private letter to the board of trustees.19

  “It is now certain that the nature and character of the Confederate Home has been entirely misconceived by those who originated it,” he admitted. “It was believed at the time that it would be a home; instead it is practically an infirmary.” He acknowledged that medical care for the inmates wasn't all it should be: “There ought to be a physician in the Home, and there ought to be two trained nurses constantly on service. These things, of course, cannot be secured now.”

  To ease overcrowding and the dearth of available sickbeds, Young recommended that the board act to rent the house on an adjoining property to house the sick.

  He lamented the increasing discipline problems: “There has been quite a large amount of drinking. Numerous inmates of the Home have been found in a drunken condition, not only on the streets of Louisville but in Pewee Valley and the Home itself.”

  “We have all probably been carried away by sentimental notions as to what was due Confederate soldiers,” he said to the board members. Even so, Young assured them, the general public continued to support the Home and the good work it was intended to accomplish.

  To prove his point, he described a woman from Cincinnati, a former Kentuckian, who wanted to provide new bookcases, armchairs, lamps, a sofa, and carpeting for the inmate library. Biscoe Hindman, a well-to-do insurance man, had offered to pay for a monument to Confederate dead on the grounds of the Home. And Dr. Dudley Reynolds, a Louisville optician and Union army veteran, was treating the vision problems of inmates at no cost.

  “The people of Kentucky have responded nobly to the call made upon them,” Young reassured the board of trustees. “While there has been some criticism and some friction as a result of these contributions, yet without them the work of this board would have been impossible.”

  Uncharacteristically, Young neither took responsibility for nor offered a solution to the problems at the Kentucky Confederate Home. Instead, he seemed to express a willingness to tender his resignation if the board asked for it.

  “All these matters are merely suggestive on the part of the president,” he told the members, referring to himself in the third person. “He lays them before the board for its action and for the expression of its judgment in all things.”

  For the time being, the judgment of the board was to continue accepting applications and hope for the best.

  The judgment of the delegates to the seventh annual state convention of the United Daughters of the Confederacy meeting in Owensboro, however, was to act on The Motion.

  The second day of the Kentucky UDC annual meeting began with a continuation of chapter reports, committee reports, and memorial tributes read by well-mannered women in large hats. Shortly before lunch, state president Arnold asked if any new business was to be brought before the convention.

  Mary Bascom, representing the Bath County chapter, rose to her feet. She had written the words of The Motion in her slanted scrawl on the paper she had in her hand, but she had no difficulty reading it aloud to the women assembled.

  “We hereby move that a committee be formed to …”

  Mary Bascom, Henrietta Morgan Duke, and other women representing UDC chapters from across the state had decided it was time for women to take a more active role in the management of the Kentucky Confederate Home. The motion presented that morning in Owensboro called for a committee to be “composed of Daughters from different sections of the state” to meet at once with Governor Beckham, asking him to appoint an auxiliary board of trustees, a board consisting of women who would have sole responsibility for the health care, food, and entertainment needs of the inmates of the Kentucky Confederate Home. The same statewide committee would meet with state assemblymen, urging them to require that the Home be opened to aged wives and widows of veterans, who would live in cottages paid for by the UDC.20

  It was an ambitious plan, and one that would be considered a slap in the face of Bennett Young, the Home board members, and Kentucky's UCV leadership. It was indicative of the bad relations between the UDC and these groups that the women chose not to discuss their concerns with Young and the board, opting instead to go directly to the governor. The women knew their actions would be seen as nothing short of a declaration of revolution. For those women whose husbands served on the Home's board of trustees or as UCV camp officers, this was an act of outright defiance.

  The Motion passed unanimously.21

  It was obvious by October 1903 that conditions in the Kentucky Confederate Home were getting worse, not better. About the time Bennett Young received word of the women's actions in Owensboro—just thirteen months after the Home opened—160 inmates were “cramped for room and for comfortable arrangements” in a facility meant for no more than 100. The rented house had eased overcrowding hardly at all, but at least there were more infirmary beds for the sickest of the inmates.

  Young met with his old friend Harry P. McDonald, who was still a state legislator, and with Henry George, a respected ex-Confederate and Democratic state senator from Graves County, to discuss the problems at the Home.

  They all agreed Young would have to return to the state capitol for help.

  Chapter 8

  The Knight and the Icemaker

  Andrew Jackson Lovely and Otway Bradfute Norvell shared Room 52 on the third floor of the Kentucky Confederate Home. Approximately fifteen feet wide by twenty feet long, their room had a washstand and chest of drawers built into one corner of the room and a small closet in another. On warm days, the room was sunny and well ventilated. The east-facing window at one end of the room overlooked the laundry building at the rear of the Home; on the opposite wall, a door and transom opened to the hallway.

  Furnishings in the small room were necessarily spare. Muslin curtains framed the window, and except for a few framed prints, the papered walls were bare.1

  Room 52 was intended to be a sickroom, and both men had their own single iron bed. (In most rooms, two men shared a double bed.) Norve
ll was partially paralyzed, and he remained in bed on those days when other inmates were unable to carry him downstairs to the library or one of the sitting rooms. A steward visited Room 52 twice a day to feed and clean him. Lovely was able-bodied, but his mind was cloudy: sometimes he was lucid and engaging, other times disoriented and fearful. A matron locked the door each night to prevent Lovely from wandering the hallways and losing himself.

  Room 52 was one of the rooms visited by the delegation of women from the United Daughters of the Confederacy on Jefferson Davis's birthday in June 1903; Norvell and Lovely were among those who received Cross of Honor awards.2

  Indignant over conditions of overcrowding and poor health care, the women of Kentucky's UDC chapters selected a committee to call on Governor Beckham and key state legislators to ask for a formal management role in the affairs of the Home. In high dudgeon, the committee of women departed for Frankfort, intending to wrest a measure of control from Bennett Young and the Home's board of trustees.

  They never stood a chance.

  Bennett Young was all too aware of the problems at the Home, and he was sure they stemmed more from lack of money than lack of management. “The state appropriation will have to be increased to $175,” he stated flatly to the board of trustees late in 1903.3 The time for donations and volunteers was past. Only the state treasury was sufficient to cover the monthly operating costs and, with a little arm-twisting, pay for some of the improvements the Home needed so desperately. But if Young was going to lobby for increased funding for the Kentucky Confederate Home, he sure didn't need disgruntled women of the UDC kicking up any dust at the state capitol.

  “We are sure that a generous people will, through their legislators, liberally respond to reasonable requests for additional appropriations,” he told the trustees. Intending to neutralize the UDC's lobbying effort, Young announced to newspapers that he and the board of trustees would ask the state for more money to help ease overcrowding. “The Home was projected upon the idea that there would never be over eighty inmates,” he said, trying to turn lemons into lemonade. “Few realized the tremendous necessity for such an institution.”4

  Trustee Harry P. McDonald, speaking in his role as a state representative, told reporters he intended to introduce a bill that would allow the wives of indigent veterans to reside in the Home.5 His announcement blocked the wind from the Daughters’ sails before they arrived in Frankfort.

  The delegation of Daughters found little traction at the state capitol; Young and McDonald had preempted them. The women could express their moral outrage, but without access to the ballot box they had little leverage in Frankfort. State senators and representatives were dismissive, saying that, because the governor was the only one mandated to choose trustees, the women must talk to the governor. The governor's office directed the women to Bennett Young, saying that only the board president had the power to appoint a women's auxiliary.

  Even as the women began to realize they were getting a polite runaround, Bennett Young was already drafting legislation and lining up votes.

  Having been frustrated in the state capital, state UDC president Mrs. James M. Arnold arrived in Pewee Valley on January 6, 1904, for the Home's regular board of trustees meeting. The board members—except for Bennett Young, absent by necessity or choice—listened without comment as Mrs. Arnold asked that the Daughters be given representation on the Home's board of trustees. When Mrs. Arnold departed, the trustees voted to write her, explaining why they could not comply with her request. Regretfully, they said, they were unable to make arbitrary changes in the Home's legal charter, but if Mrs. Arnold's committee were to speak with state legislators in Frankfort, perhaps …

  If the women of the UDC expected their actions to infuriate the men, it was Mrs. Arnold who exploded. Fed up with the runaround, she fired off an angry broadside complaining of the men's unfairness in shutting out the women. The UDC chapters “had contributed liberally to the maintenance of the Home,” she wrote, and “had also helped to obtain it, and were being urged consistently to spend more money.” It was like “taxation without representation,” she asserted.6

  The women still believed that their donations and service entitled them to a say in the management of the Home; the men of the board still felt that efficient management was men's business, best handled by men.

  In the end, Kentucky's United Daughters of the Confederacy had to settle for a plan to establish a UDC chapter in Pewee Valley, an outpost located at the very gates of the Kentucky Confederate Home. With a wholehearted recommendation from the state organization, UDC national president Louisa McLeod Smythe authorized sixteen women to associate themselves under the name “Confederate Home Chapter #792 of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.”

  They described it as a “love feast,” the smoker his lodge brothers organized as a going-away party. A hundred members of Rathbone Lodge No. 12, Knights of Pythias, sponsored a royal reception and banquet in Rassenfoss's restaurant in Paris, Kentucky, to wish their brother A. J. Lovely a raucous farewell before he departed for the Kentucky Confederate Home. Clumsy quips, overlong toasts, and maudlin speeches brought tears to the eyes of the seventy-four-year-old Confederate veteran who had earned the love of his community.7

  There was not much to distinguish Lovely's wartime service. Thirty-three years old and unmarried, he enlisted at Prestonsburg as a private when it became apparent Kentucky wouldn't join the Confederacy. By 1862 he was serving under Colonel E. F. Clay in the Third Kentucky Cavalry as a lieutenant, a commissary officer. His company eventually surrendered in May 1865 in Mt. Sterling, and Lovely returned to Paris.

  As unremarkable as his military service may have been, A. J. Lovely and sixteen other Bourbon County veterans made a remarkable choice three years after the war when they organized Lodge No. 12, Knights of Pythias, the first lodge of that order in Kentucky (and perhaps the first in any state of the Old Confederacy).

  Of the popular fraternal orders of the time, most had historic roots reaching back centuries. The Order of the Knights of Pythias, however, had been formed in the final years of the Civil War by Union men. Taking their history and rituals from stories of the legendary friendship and loyalty between Damon and Pythias, Pythians believed that any two men, meeting in a spirit of goodwill and making an honest effort to understand each other, can live together in peace and harmony. A public part of the Pythian ritual involved the order's Uniform Rank, an armed militia on horseback that engaged in complex drills and exercises. The Pythian creed of universal peace through understanding in the wake of America's Civil War

  (combined with opportunities for practicing competitive horsemanship) must have had powerful appeal for these seventeen Bourbon County veterans.8 Lovely lived out the years following the war with little public accomplishment. He lived with his brother's family, farmed a little, kept shop occasionally, ran for mayor when urged, and pitched in from time to time on municipal jobs for which he was suited. He never married, never had children, never accumulated a financial estate.

  Instead, Lovely lived his lodge.

  He was the kind of member who never missed a meeting, who actively prospected for new members, who memorized every word of his rituals, and who performed the piddling little organizational jobs that other members overlooked. But, more important, Lovely was a man who, in every aspect of his life, during every waking hour, lived the principles of the Order of the Knights of Pythias: friendship, charity, and benevolence.

  Lovely held every local and state lodge office to which he could be elected and received every honor that the Knights could bestow. “There was no heart purer than the heart of Andrew Jackson Lovely,” a lodge brother said. Another described Lovely's patience, time after time and year after year, as he instructed initiates in the secrets of the Pythian Knighthood. “His battle cry the Golden Rule; his watchword, ‘Love ye, one another.’” He was adored for his goodness. Without preachiness or judgment, he lived a practical application of religious and charitable principl
es throughout his otherwise unremarkable life.9

  There came a time, however, when he was no longer able to support himself. With the passing of his older brother and sister-in-law, A. J. Lovely found himself with no place to live. At the same time, his lodge brothers may have noticed that their saintly old Knight was becoming more distracted, more forgetful about meetings or meals, neglectful of personal hygiene. A little forgetfulness was nothing surprising in a seventy-four-year-old man, but more disturbing might have been an occasional tendency to wander away, becoming hopelessly lost on the lanes he had traveled all his life.

  Comrades in the Paris UCV camp and brothers in Lodge No. 12 helped Lovely complete his application for admittance to the new Kentucky Confederate Home, and he was accepted.

  By the time he arrived at the Home on November 26, 1902, and was assigned to Room 52, it was apparent there was a fog gathering in A. J. Lovely's brain.

  Otway B. Norvell arrived in Room 52 of the Kentucky Confederate Home from Alabama by way of Louisville.

  Born in 1840 in Virginia and raised comfortably in northern Kentucky, Otway Norvell studied mechanical engineering at a locomotive works in Baltimore. He was mastering the industrial science of boilers, fluid systems, gases under pressure, and propulsion engines with a vague idea of entering the U.S. Navy.

  When secession fever broke out across the South, Norvell joined the Rifle Grays, part of the Eleventh Virginia Infantry, in Lynchburg. At the end of his enlistment period, he returned to Kentucky to join Basil Duke's regiment, the Second Kentucky Cavalry, under General John Hunt Morgan. Norvell was captured during Morgan's Ohio raid and sent north with other enlisted men to Chicago, where he was imprisoned in Camp Douglas for nineteen months. The young engineer was one of the fortunate few to be exchanged during the final months of the war, and in February 1865 he rejoined Basil Duke, who was reorganizing his cavalry. At the time of Lee's surrender, Duke was assigned to escort President Jefferson Davis and the Confederate government southward from Richmond, and Norvell's knowledge of locomotive systems helped speed the last retreat.10