My Old Confederate Home

by Rusty Williams

  Well into the twentieth century, residents of Maple Avenue would come out of their homes and stand on their front porches to see the solemn procession of old Confederates accompany another veteran to his final resting place. Then, after a quarter hour or so, they would step outside again to watch the boisterous old men on their walk back to the Home, yipping and yawping like schoolboys, full of the giddy and guilty exhilaration of having outlived another comrade.

  The inmates lined up for a different type of march on Friday, November 11, 1904, for the dedication of the Kentucky Confederate Home's new infirmary. More than a hundred old vets, dressed in summer Home uniforms, greeted officers of the state UCV organization at the Pewee Valley depot and escorted them to the Home.

  A crowd of nearly 2,000 arrived that morning for the ceremonies, and many availed themselves of the opportunity to tour the old resort hotel and the new Infirmary Building. At Young's urging, the board had spent the remainder of the state's appropriation for improvements to the original building. The two lower floors had been recarpeted, repapered, and repainted, and the smell of fresh paint replaced the smells of old cooking and leaking sewage. A new coal boiler in the basement doubled the heating capacity, and an electrical plant was providing light and power to the Infirmary Building (although the main building had not yet been wired). Kirker-Bender fire escapes—tall spiral escape slides—stood at each end of the building, and Babcock chemical fire extinguishers near each staircase on every floor had replaced the sand-filled leather fire buckets. The fire buckets now hung inside a red-painted shed behind the infirmary, alongside two forty-gallon wheeled fire carts and eight fire ladders.30

  At noon, the crowd gathered in front of a speaker's platform for the dedicatory ceremonies. After an opening prayer and brief remarks by minor politicians, Bennett Young stepped to the rostrum for the ceremonial presentation of the building to the Commonwealth of Kentucky.

  The ex-Confederates had expected Governor Beckham to attend the dedication and accept the Home, but last-minute business in Frankfort kept him away. Young adjusted his remarks accordingly, but was interrupted mid-speech when Lieutenant Governor Thorne pushed his way through the crowd, mounted the platform, and elbowed a stunned Bennett Young away from the podium. Thorne made a few remarks thanking the ex-Confederates for improvements to the Home, then launched into a disjointed defense of his controversial executive pardon.

  There was later speculation that Thorne was drunk that afternoon, but there was no question that he was political poison. Several weeks earlier, with Governor Beckham out of state, Thorne had pardoned a man from his hometown who had been convicted of the rape and murder of his own daughter. The details of the man's crime and trial had been reported across the state and were so repulsive that Thorne's pardon—apparently granted to repay a political favor—was unthinkable.

  Boos and hisses broke out among the crowd, and women on the platform fled as men surged toward Thorne, threatening to beat him to a pulp. Not wanting to wrestle Kentucky's lieutenant governor away from the rostrum, Bennett Young sat down, but only after turning his chair to face away from Thorne. When Thorne concluded his rambling harangue, he signaled to the band to strike up “My Old Kentucky Home.” Band members placed their instruments on the ground and crossed their arms.

  The celebration collapsed in confusion and disgust, but the dedication was only ceremonial, after all. The Home that had opened two years before could then accommodate fewer than a hundred inmates comfortably; now it could shelter twice that number. Sick and injured inmates now had a reasonable expectation of medical care in an infirmary that might help heal them. And the main building, sorely taxed by the earlier flood of inmates, had been freshened and improved.31

  Otway B. Norvell was one of the first to move to a private room in the new infirmary. Unfortunately, that building, too, was soon overcrowded.

  “It has been shown that even this infirmary will not care for those absolutely dependent upon its appliances for comfort,” Bennett Young admitted less than a year after it was completed.32

  Even so, a well-equipped infirmary with a staff of four nurses and a full-time physician was eminently preferable to Room 52, a drafty third-floor sleeping room. Completion of the new Infirmary Building probably prolonged Norvell's life by a few months, but the paralyzed icemaker died of pneumonia on July 2, 1905. At his wife's request, he was buried in Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville, where he was described as “a brave soldier, a silent sufferer, a fond husband, a guileless Christian.”

  A. J. Lovely never made it back to Pewee Valley from Lakeland Asylum; his mind had clouded so completely as to remove any hope of recovery. Lodge brothers, comrades, and friends from Paris organized monthly trips to visit him until he died on September 30, 1906. They returned his body to Paris to lie in state at the Knights of Pythias Hall before burial services by ex-Confederates in the Paris cemetery. A year later, Rathbone Lodge No. 12 unveiled a monument dedicated to Lovely's memory, saying that “no grave on earth [was] deep enough to conceal the blameless knighthood of such a man.”33

  With the encouragement and blessing of its citizens, the Commonwealth of Kentucky provided $57,000 to help make the Kentucky Confederate Home a more respectable place for its aging and invalid Confederate veterans. But every improvement made to the Home created a fresh spurt of applications for admittance.

  For the remainder of its first decade of operation the Home would remain crowded, and its directors would have to deal with the particular problems of managing the care of two hundred or more needful (and sometimes troublesome) old men.

  Chapter 9

  The Railroad Man and the Barber

  William S.Gray deserved his Saturday night toots. He had worked day labor for the railroad most of his life, Monday morning to Saturday afternoon. For Gray, Saturday night was the workingman's night for a little carousing, a little drinking, and a little howling at the moon. It made no matter to him that he lived under the rules of the Kentucky Confederate Home.

  On Sunday morning, October 9, 1904, Gray staggered downstairs to the dining hall for breakfast, still drunk from the night before. He was loud and boisterous, and the other diners tried to ignore him. When George Wood leaned across the table to shush him, Gray drew his knife and threatened to cut Wood's throat.

  A later inspection of Gray's room uncovered a stash of whiskey hidden in the top of his closet.1

  Visitors to the Kentucky Confederate Home often described the luxury of the facility and referred to the dignity, nobility, grace, and charm of the old inmates. If the physical conditions there were less than what the United Daughters of the Confederacy expected during the first year of operation, things improved markedly as a result of the state's increase of the per capita payment to $175 and as effects of the 1904 special appropriation were felt.

  By March 1905 more than 220 inmates were living in the Home and infirmary (with 27 more on temporary furlough or hospitalized in Louisville), and applications for admission continued to flood the board of trustees. For old men past their working age, or men who lived off the uncertain grace of relatives and friends, the Home was a sweet retreat that clothed, fed, and healed them.

  Tom Fain was a seventy-one-year-old widower when he came to the Home in 1904 from Ashland. Shortly after he arrived in Pewee Valley, Fain gloated to the editor of his hometown newspaper about the weight he had gained, thanks to the excellent meals and pleasant surroundings. The inmates have plenty to eat and wear, Fain told the newspaperman, and little to do but eat, drink, and lie around in the shade.2

  Peter Snapp was born in Germany seventy years before he came to Pewee Valley from Owensboro in 1903. He arrived at the Home near dead from consumption, but care, food, and warmth helped him recover. Snapp's only brother died, leaving him $75, and the inmate chose to donate a part of the windfall to the Kentucky Confederate Home. “He took $25 for his own and insisted that he wanted to give $50 for the Home, as the Home was his best friend,” marveled treasurer Fayette Hewitt.3
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br />   Pleasant as it may have been to inmates who had never dreamed of living in such luxurious surroundings, the Home was also an institution populated by old men who needed an increasing amount of medical care. Added funding and the new infirmary allowed the Home to treat ex-Confederates who might not otherwise have been able to afford it.

  Within months of the Home's opening, in early 1903 the board of trustees voted to hire Dr. R. B. Pryor of Louisville as full-time physician. On January 5, 1905, they established a medical advisory committee to oversee medical care and sanitary conditions at the Home. (One of the first actions of the advisory committee was to ban smoking in the infirmary.)4

  Sixty-three-year-old Charles E. Bellican owned a printing company in Louisville until he turned it over to his nephews and entered the Home in 1903. By 1905 persistent cataracts clouded his eyes to such a degree that he was virtually blind. Dr. Pryor arranged for Dr. Dudley Reynolds to remove Bellican's cataracts in the Home's new surgical suite.

  Reverend A. N. White was a traveling minister from south of Lexington until his hip crumbled, the eventual result of a Union bullet lodged in the bone for more than thirty years. He entered the Home confined to his bed, too disabled to use crutches, but the Home provided White a new wood and wicker rolling chair.

  There were some rough patches during the first eighteen months, but by mid-1904 most inmates were finding the Kentucky Confederate Home the comfortable, respectable place that had been promised them.

  Even with the new infirmary and improvements to the Home, women of the UDC were still keeping a sharp eye on conditions there. Mrs. C. C. Leer, representing the Richard Hawes chapter in Paris, scheduled an overnight visit to Pewee Valley to check on the welfare of Bourbon County veterans residing in the Home.

  Alice Leer arrived in Pewee Valley with her brother, Home trustee H. H. Ewing of Owingsville, who was there to attend a board meeting. She was a lifelong Bourbon County resident, and her remembrance of the war years there led her to become a charter member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy chapter. Leaving the depot and walking to the Home, her first impression was of its elegant grounds and buildings.5

  “We were welcomed by a friend of my childhood, he having recognized us as we approached the Home,” she wrote. The Bourbon County inmate escorted Leer and Ewing into one of the downstairs parlors.

  Commandant Coleman wasn't above a little stagecraft for visits like this, and coincidence or not, four other veterans with ties to Bourbon County were waiting in the parlor. “Soon each ex-Bourbon's hand was extended, whilst the eye expressed a thrilling pathos as of the meeting of a friend, mother, sister.”

  Mrs. Leer chatted with the old men for a while before being taken on a tour of the Home.

  The lobby stairwell led upward to a spacious foyer on the second floor. Thirty men lived in thirteen rooms on the second floor north of the foyer, but this was the most desirable floor, with small suites and sitting rooms opening onto the sunny verandahs. Commandant Coleman, the Home's matron, the bookkeeper, and the stewardess had rooms south of the foyer. The smallest room, a linen room, contained stacks of freshly laundered towels and bedding. Two rooms on the second floor were reserved for visitors and guests, and Mrs. Leer was probably given Room 19, the “General John S. Williams” room, named and decorated by the daughter of the late general.

  On the third floor, fifty men lived in twenty-five rooms. These were smaller rooms, without the regular presence of Commandant Coleman, the matron, or visiting dignitaries in the hallways.

  The fourth floor was prized by men who wanted to hear the sound of rain on a roof at night and by a few mischief-makers who wanted as much distance as possible between themselves and Home authorities. The rooms, several with barrel ceilings and most with dormer windows, were clean and orderly.

  “We were shown from the first to the fourth floor,” Alice Leer reported to other UDC chapters, “and I am proud to say we found every department in perfect order.” Mrs. Leer and her brother took their evening meal at Commandant Coleman's table in the dining room, and she spoke of her “great pleasure to see the gray-haired veterans seated at a bounteous table.” She couldn't help but recall, however, “the many times that I had seen the stalwart Southern soldier cold and hungry.”

  After supper, the Bourbon County contingent retired to the parlor for more conversation. Alice Leer likely shared with John Marshall, Thomas Cummins, and John Nesbitt the latest news and gossip about their relatives back home. Isaac Mundy may have told her that he had recently joined the Episcopal church just across the tracks and road from the Home. They certainly would have discussed the recent death of John Hourigan, the burial of John B. Patton in the new Confederate Cemetery at Pewee Valley, and the broken mind of sweet old A. J. Lovely, who was still residing at Lakeland Asylum.

  Eventually, Mrs. Leer sat at the piano to play some old tunes. She was accompanied by fiddler Trimble Arnold, “an ex-Bourbon whose reputation as a violinist is renowned.” They closed the evening with a half-dozen choruses of “Dixie,” and other inmates crowded into the parlor to sing along and cheer. “My memory swept back forty years ago when just budding into womanhood, I so proudly played that old tune, so often surrounded by Confederate soldiers.”

  The matron, Mrs. Girand, then announced that lights would be extinguished at nine o'clock.

  In her report to UDC chapters, eventually published in The Lost Cause, Alice Leer was effusive in her praise of the Kentucky Confederate Home. “It affords me pleasure,” she wrote, “to know these comforts are being enjoyed by these blameless martyrs who have reached the evening of life, while the shadows of night are crowding on the pathway to the tomb.”

  Tom Fain, Peter Snapp, Charles Bellican, and the Reverend A. N. White—all men who showed sincere appreciation for the benefits of the Home—may have been among the inmates who crowded the parlor the evening Mrs. C. C. Leer and Trim Arnold played “Dixie” well into the night. “It stirred my soul to its utmost depths upon glancing over this body of soldiers,” Mrs. Leer wrote of that evening. She felt herself surrounded by aging, yet noble, Johnny Rebs, all marching bravely through their final years toward a Final Bivouac.

  Sincere though her emotion may have been, Alice Leer was viewing the Home and its inmates through Lost Cause goggles.

  The Home was, to be certain, a well-appointed, safe, clean place of refuge for men who had run out of options. But these were old men living away from their lifelong home and relatives, each man with his share of deafness, missing teeth, hemorrhoids, phantom pain from amputated limbs, irritating habits, meanness, and outright craziness.

  Generally, the inmates were ordinary old men, more than two hundred of them living in close confines, day after day, with a lot of time on their hands and little to fill the hours. What made them different from others of their age was that the men of the Kentucky Confederate Home had spent four years in a civil war that was bloodier, uglier, deadlier, and more personal than any other conflict in American history.

  The nightmare of combat and fear of imminent death can haunt a soldier long after he leaves the battlefield.

  Doctors in the wake of the First World War noticed that some men couldn't shake their paralyzing fear, even after being removed from the sound of the guns. They named the condition “battlefield neurosis,” or “shell shock.” Hospitals treating veterans of the Second World War established wards for soldiers suffering from what doctors then called “battle fatigue.” Only near the end of the twentieth century, in the aftermath of still another war, did doctors define the condition and give it a new name: “post-traumatic stress disorder.”

  Some are more susceptible than others, but for even the bravest soldier the emotional effects of a horrific experience like combat may extend far beyond the battlefield. The veteran might relive frightening moments over and over in his mind; might have trouble concentrating or sleeping; might become numb to relationships with spouse or family; might become unreasonably aggressive or combative. Without treatment
, the veteran might come to rely on alcohol, drugs, or suicide to end the unremitting pain.

  The inmates of the Kentucky Confederate Home didn't have a name for it, but many must have suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. Episodes of drunkenness, violence, and even suicide were all too common. The men of the Home were old men of differing temperament and background, of course, but some still carried psychological wounds from their wartime experiences of decades before.

  Some could demonstrate a touching kindness to a comrade; others might attempt murder for a stolen pouch of tobacco.6

  J. P. Muncy's outburst may have been sparked by something as mundane as a missing pair of socks. Or an overcooked pork chop. Or a careless remark by a hard-working woman tired from a day of seeing after the needs of two hundred crabby old men.

  Whatever the reason, it caused one of Alice Leer's “blameless martyrs” to explode.

  J. P. Muncy arrived in the Home from McCracken County in October 1903 and quickly developed a reputation as a hothead and troublemaker. On January 5, 1904, responding to some real or imagined slight, Muncy laid into the Home's portly matron, Mrs. F. N. Girand, with every bit of blue language and spittle-flying rage a former riverman could muster. He never touched the woman, but Muncy ended the encounter with threats against the matron.

  When Muncy heard that Commandant Coleman preferred charges against him for “filthy, indecent and slanderous language,” he urged his fellow inmates to boycott morning roll call in a show of solidarity. Most other inmates, however, had no interest in standing with Muncy, especially when Coleman tacked on an additional charge of insubordination.