My Old Confederate Home

by Rusty Williams

  Not yet thirty years old at the end of the war, Otway Norvell traveled south to Mobile, Alabama, carrying with him a knowledge of man-made ice.

  Man-made ice is one of those easy-to-overlook keys to the creation of the industrial New South. Ice provided portable refrigeration, and refrigeration allowed the meat and milk produced in rural areas to be transported to cities, where they could feed the families of men employed in factories or busy port facilities. Northern cities maintained a large industrial workforce using stored ice—ice that was harvested from frozen lakes during winter months—but natural ice was a rarity in the South.

  An Indianapolis inventor was developing machinery that could produce large quantities of man-made ice economically, and the equipment was being proven in Louisville, Paducah, and Atlanta. The process involved boilers, fluid systems, and gases under pressure, just the sort of complicated mechanical engineering Norvell understood. The equipment produced quarter-ton slabs of ice—and huge profits.

  Installing similar equipment, Norvell opened Mobile's first artificial ice plant in 1870. By then, the young entrepreneur had married Ida Pillans, daughter of a civil engineer who was making money hand over fist helping rebuild Mobile after the war, and the couple lived with her parents as the ice business boomed. After several years, Otway and Ida moved to Birmingham to open an ice plant in the city that was becoming the South's iron manufacturing center.

  A medical text published in 1884, the year of Norvell's stroke, classified “a stroke of paralysis” as an illness of passion, a condition caused by the welling-up of great emotion, such as fear, excitement, or anger. Almost overnight, the active man found himself “entirely paralyzed, having only the partial use of his left arm, and had to be propped by pillows when writing.” Doctors advised total bed rest in a darkened room, devoid of any loud noise or stimulation.11

  Norvell rested in his Birmingham bedroom for three years, he and Ida living off the proceeds of the sale of his Birmingham and Mobile ice factories. In 1886 he applied for admittance to the Lee Camp Soldiers Home in Richmond, Virginia. “I believe under favorable circumstances I will recover my health,” Norvell told the admissions committee in a letter accompanying his application. His certainty that his health would be restored (and a strong recommendation from Basil Duke, his former commander) earned Norvell a bed in Virginia's new Confederate home.12

  Five years of convalescence in Richmond brought no improvement, and he returned to Birmingham and his wife's care. To keep his mind active, Norvell found work reviewing the financial books of some Birmingham businesses. He kept up an active correspondence with his wartime comrades in Kentucky and traveled occasionally to Louisville to consult with doctors at the medical school there.13

  By the time Norvell applied for admittance to the Kentucky Confederate Home in 1902, he had been an invalid for two decades. His muscles had atrophied, and he was prey to pneumonia and bloody bedsores. Loyal Ida was losing the strength to care for him.

  Otway Norvell was one of the first veterans accepted into the Kentucky Confederate Home, and he arrived on November 1, 1902. Before assigning him to Room 52, Superintendent Ford noted on a chart that Norvell's mental condition was good, but his physical condition was “ex[tremely] feeble.” A. J. Lovely joined Norvell in Room 52 several weeks later, and the old Knight's mental condition was assessed as “poor.”14

  The two men in Room 52 needed special care, care that was increasingly hard to come by as the Home battled financial and overcrowding issues in 1903. The eager women of the new Confederate Home chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy could provide some assistance, but the men needed regular medical care and access to a fully equipped medical facility.

  In short, they needed an infirmary.

  In February 1904 state representative Harry P. McDonald and state senator Henry George introduced a bill that would amend the original Confederate Home legislation. The bill raised the annual per capita payment significantly, from $125 to $175, and the alternative minimum annual payment to $20,000.15

  As Harry McDonald had promised, the bill contained a section that might allow the wives of ex-Confederates who were living in the Home to take up residence there. The board of trustees might, at their discretion, erect cottages on the grounds of the Home in which married inmates might be allowed to live in company with their wives. (It is debatable whether the ex-Confederates actually meant this provision to work, or whether it was included as a sop to the UDC.)16

  The bill passed the Senate without dissent and the House with only four votes against, but McDonald never had a chance to cast his vote. The Honorable Harry P. McDonald, Democrat and trustee of the Kentucky Confederate Home, was stricken with pneumonia and died four days later.

  There was some good news to offset the loss, however. Young and McDonald had hoped to get $20,000 earmarked in the current appropriations bill to build an infirmary for the Home, but state senator Henry George, lobbying fellow legislators to honor their beloved colleague Harry McDonald, secured the $20,000 and squeezed out an extra $36,000. George's deal making meant that the Kentucky Confederate Home could afford a modern infirmary, an assured water supply, an overhaul of the sewerage system, and improvements to the main building—and have a small cushion besides.

  Harry P. McDonald was buried in the Confederate lot at Louisville's Cave Hill Cemetery, just forty yards from Sergeant Billy Beasley's gravesite. An honor guard of inmates from the Kentucky Confederate Home and the Confederate Glee Club joined Bennett Young, Basil Duke, W. B. Haldeman, John Castleman, Thomas D. Osborne, John Leathers, and dozens more as Kentucky's business, social, and political elite—Confederate veterans all—escorted McDonald's body to its final resting place.

  Within days of the funeral, Bennett Young nominated Louisville manufacturers’ representative Andrew M. Sea to fill McDonald's role as board secretary and member of the executive committee. And he began interviewing architects who could design an infirmary and oversee improvements to the Kentucky Confederate Home.17

  “Only a short time ago the Confederate Home at Pewee Valley was established and was quickly filled with old veterans,” the Adair County News noted, “but they are fast passing away. There is scarcely a week but from one to three deaths are reported from this institution.”18

  The Confederate generation was dying off.

  Forty thousand Confederate veterans returned to Kentucky at the end of the Civil War; twelve thousand were recorded living in the state in 1890. By 1920 only slightly more than a thousand would remain. Time was closing in on the veterans. Even boys who had been teenagers when they enlisted in 1861 were, by the beginning of the twentieth century, approaching their sixth decade.19

  “In the little more than two months that the Home has been open, four of its inmates have died,” noted one state UCV officer in January 1903. “Two other veterans, whose applications for admission had been favorably acted upon, died before they reached the Home.”20

  From the beginning, Kentucky's Confederate veteran camps took it upon themselves to “pay a decent respect to the remains and to the memory of those [comrades] who die.” Whether state legislator or the owner of a cigar stand, every ex-Confederate was due the honor of a send-off by other veterans and a place to lie in eternity if he needed it.

  Thomas Jefferson Vaughn and John B. Patton each needed such a place.

  Vaughn was a mining man, a Virginian living near Prestonsburg in Floyd County. He was a strapping seventy-seven-year-old with an ill temper, no family, and a hacking cough from advanced lung disease when he arrived at the Home in early November 1902, the fifteenth inmate to sign the Home Register. He passed away during the night of January 16, 1903.

  At eighty-three years, John Patton had outlived his family and he was too ill to travel alone, so comrades from the UCV camp in Cynthiana accompanied him to the Home in January 1903. The superintendent noted that Patton's physical condition was “bad” and his mental acuity only “fair.” The old man was sent directly to the Loui
sville hospital due to “general debility,” and he died there during the first week of February.

  Death was no stranger in the Kentucky Confederate Home, but the deceased's remains were usually shipped back to their hometowns for burial in country cemeteries or family plots. There was no place, however, for Vaughn and Patton in Prestonsburg or Cynthiana, no churchyard or burying ground waiting for them. Hometown comrades and clergy would accept the remains, of course, but was there really any need to ship them across the state? Couldn't the Home bury them in Pewee Valley?

  Pewee Valley had a chartered public cemetery, ten acres of cleared land that had been shaped into eight large sections and planted with ornamental shade trees. It was located just a mile south of the Home at the end of Maple Avenue, a quiet residential lane spotted here and there with dogwood, rosebud, and crimson rambler. Shortly before the Home opened (and knowing there was no money to spare), Bennett Young asked the Louisville veterans camp to investigate the purchase of a section in the Pewee Valley cemetery as a burial lot for the Home's inmates. Young didn't anticipate that the men of the Louisville camp would approach Henrietta Morgan Duke.

  “[We] have upon [our] own motion,” James Bowles of the Louisville UCV camp wrote Young, “made an effort to induce the ladies of the Albert Sidney Johnston Chapter, Daughters of the Confederacy, to buy one acre of ground in the Pewee Valley cemetery to be used as a burial place for veterans of the Home.” Bowles was certain the women would come up with the money “if certain assurances were given by your honorable Board.”21

  Once again, Henrietta Duke wasn't willing to open her chapter's purse without some guarantees. She wanted her chapter to have exclusive responsibility for “adorning, and beautifying and decorating” the lot, including the understanding that they might erect an ornamental gateway or monument that included the name of the chapter. To be sure no one reneged on the deal, she wanted the cemetery deed made out in the name of her Albert Sidney Johnston UDC chapter.

  Bennett Young wasn't about to travel that road again. On the day they received the proposal, Young and the board of trustees responded, saying that, on second thought, they “did not believe in localizing this plan.” No single chapter or camp should be responsible for buying the section. Instead, responsibility should be shared “by all the sons and daughters of Confederates throughout the state.” Thanks, but no thanks.22

  Meanwhile, the board spent money it could barely afford to buy individual burial plots for T. J. Vaughn and J. B. Patton in Section III of the Pewee Valley cemetery, hoping to recover the cost from veterans in Prestonsburg and Cynthiana.

  But the problem wasn't going away. The deaths of three inmates—Robert E. Meade of Carrollton, S. R. B. Nichols of Hopkinsville, and Timothy Burns of Louisville—during the summer of 1903 raised the same questions. Was there really any need to ship them home? Couldn't the Home bury them in Pewee Valley? Once again, the Home bought individual plots and buried the men in Section III of the Pewee Valley cemetery.

  Passage of the new appropriation for the Kentucky Confederate Home in February 1904 finally allowed the board of trustees to buy Section III—enough space for up to 400 plots—for use as a Confederate burying ground. The directors of Pewee Valley Cemetery Company permitted burials there to commence prior to formal completion of the purchase in July. Section III would thereafter be known as the Confederate Cemetery at Pewee Valley.

  By February 1904 Commandant Coleman had removed A. J. Lovely and Otway Norvell from Room 52. The Home was too crowded, the need for special care too great, to permit a two-man sick room.

  Coleman converted the parlors and sitting rooms on the south end of the third and fourth floors into a makeshift clinic. Living four, five, or even six to a room, men temporarily incapacitated by illness lay side by side with those (like Otway Norvell) who were permanently bedridden. The large rooms—now crowded wards—made it easier to nurse the sick, feed them, and bathe them, but the dearth of good ventilation and sufficient heat (not to mention the likelihood of cross-contamination) made for an arrangement that was more conducive to dying than healing.

  Even as assemblymen in Frankfort were voting funds for a Home infirmary, twenty men were confined in the Home's makeshift hospital rooms. By the summer of 1904, Norvell was sharing the space with thirty-nine others.

  There was no place in the crowded clinic for A. J. Lovely. The old Knight was generally able-bodied and required no regular medical care, but the fog in his brain was becoming thicker, and the Home didn't have enough spare rooms to lock away confused old men.

  On June 30, 1903, his hometown newspaper noted, “The many friends of Mr. A. J. Lovely will regret to hear that he has been adjudged insane at Pewee Valley, where he was in the Confederate Home, and sent to Lakeland, the asylum near Anchorage.”23

  Lakeland Asylum, a state institution located five miles from the Home, was an expedient destination for men whose scattered minds made them difficult to care for. Commandant Coleman didn't have the space, staff, or expertise, and in 1903 alone he helped commit eight inmates. With a fully staffed infirmary, perhaps, A. J. Lovely and the other men might be able to return to Pewee Valley.

  “The Board of Trustees feel that the infirmary is an absolute and pressing demand,” The Lost Cause informed Kentucky's UDC members shortly after the state appropriation was passed, “and the architect is being urged with all possible speed to complete the provisions for an infirmary.”24

  Throughout the summer of 1904 Bennett Young and the board met regularly with C. J. Clarke of Clarke & Loomis, the Louisville architectural firm that had been hired to design the infirmary and oversee other improvements. Clarke presented drawings for a combination infirmary-dormitory, a single building with a surgical suite, forty-eight hospital rooms, four treatment rooms, nursing offices, a sitting room, and an airy central solarium. Clarke's design also included twenty residence rooms, two parlors, and a library. The estimated cost to build and furnish the facility was $28,500.25

  Wells and rooftop cisterns had proven insufficient to the increasing water needs of the Home, so the board voted to construct an impoundment pond, a concrete-lined reservoir the size of a football field. The $10,000 cost of the reservoir was matched by another $10,000 necessary to acquire the properties on which the pond and infirmary would be sited. Another $3,000 would be required to replace and enlarge the outmoded septic system.

  Fire prevention was another concern. Pewee Valley had no standing fire department, and the Home was a four-story wooden building crammed with decrepit old men. Andrew Sea noted that “if the building were burned, the loss to the Confederates of Kentucky would be well nigh irreparable.” (Only later did he remind the board of the “probability that if the buildings burn, some of the older and most infirm inmates would certainly be burned with them.”) An adequate fire protection system would run about $3,600.26

  At a special meeting on July 9, 1904, the board of trustees approved these projects, in a single afternoon spending all but $2,400 of the state's $56,000 appropriation. The board urged the architect to complete the projects by the end of October, in time for the second anniversary of the opening of the Home.

  Florence Barlow, editor of The Lost Cause, was asked why there had been no money earmarked for constructing cottages on the property, cottages that might have been used to house the inmates with their wives. “So many calls are made upon the trustees for improvements at the Home, that this matter, we are informed, has not been taken up at all,” she wrote to Kentucky's UDC chapters.27

  According to a story told by Bennett Young, one of the old veterans in the Home was dying, and he was asked where he wanted to be buried. “Just put me over with the other boys in the cemetery here,” the old man answered, motioning toward the Pewee Valley cemetery. The story inspired a Louisville businessman to pay for a monument in memory of the ex-Confederates who died at the Home.

  Biscoe Hindman was the son of General Tom Hindman, a Confederate who distinguished himself at Shiloh, Chickamauga, and el
sewhere. The younger Hindman was also an early member and former commander-in-chief of an organization formed just six years before, the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV). As an organization, the UCV would die with the last Confederate veteran; its offspring heritage organization, the SCV, was intended to live for generations while celebrating the Lost Cause virtues of the ex-Confederates.

  Hindman was the exclusive general agent in Kentucky and Tennessee for a large insurance company. Flush with cash, he offered Bennett Young carte blanche to select a monument for the new Confederate Cemetery at Pewee Valley.

  The monument eventually chosen was a symmetrical shaft of white bronze, twelve feet high and four feet square at the base. A well-attended dedication ceremony on June 18, 1904, followed the familiar template for monument dedications: prayers, music, and plenty of Lost Cause oratory. Biscoe Hindman spoke, Bennett Young was the featured orator, and Lieutenant Governor W. P. Thorne accepted the monument and cemetery plot on behalf of the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Members of the new Confederate Home chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy sat on the speaker's platform.

  To one observer, the most memorable sight at the ceremony was the solemn presence of scores of inmates from the Kentucky Confederate Home. The old men, dressed in their freshly laundered gray Home uniforms, had formed up in column at the Home and marched silently up dusty Maple Avenue a mile to the cemetery. Throughout the ceremony, they stood in double line, sixty-, seventy-, eighty-year-old men standing at attention, bareheaded in the summer heat. It was only after the closing prayer that the old men broke ranks for a dipper of water and some rest in the shade.28

  It was about this time that a tradition began, a tradition that would last more than a quarter century. Every inmate who was to be interred in the Confederate Cemetery would receive an honor escort from his fellow inmates. Regardless of the weather, the old men of the Kentucky Confederate Home would don their freshly laundered gray uniforms, form up in column behind a color-bearer, and march silently up Maple Avenue a mile to the cemetery alongside the remains of their comrade. They would remain silent and bareheaded in double line throughout the burial ceremony, breaking only after the closing prayer for a sip of water, a bit of rest, and a raucous walk back down Maple Avenue to the Home.29