My Old Confederate Home

by Rusty Williams

  Their tunes were interspersed with cornpone jokes and humorous banter between the men in blue and the men in gray, each taunting the other about their musical skills, the quality of their songs, and the general superiority of their section of the country. Henry George's loud, honking laughter echoed around the hall. He and the inmates cheered their Confederate comrades on stage, especially during the rube sketches, when the Sons of Dixie showed up the Boys in Blue as the thin-blooded cold fish that they were. (The Sons always got the best of the exchanges when the act performed in Southern states; the Boys won out on Northern stages.)

  Near the end of the act, as the jibes became more pointed, a seemingly irritated John Patee stood to admonish his players and deliver a short speech: We fought a bitter war many years ago, he said, but we are brothers now. He urged the shamefaced fiddlers to approach one another with the open hand of friendship. We are Americans all, he intoned.

  Blue and Gray then stepped together on stage for hearty handshakes that marked the emotional finale of the act. As the crowd broke into enthusiastic applause for brotherhood, reconciliation, and America, the men in gray picked up their fiddles to play “Dixie” while the men in blue waded into the audience at Duke Hall to shake the hands of the old ex-Confederate inmates. The applause, cheers, and Rebel yells continued until every hand was shaken.1

  The members of Old Soldier Fiddlers were veteran performers who put on a great show. And no one enjoyed a great show more than Commandant Henry George.

  Henry George was a boyish man, fifty-nine years old when he replaced William O. Coleman as commandant of the Kentucky Confederate Home in 1906, and he set out to make the Home a more pleasant place for veterans and staff alike. Like the successful retail merchant he had once been, Henry George was no stay-in-the-office manager; Florence Barlow could handle the bulk of the correspondence and reports. Instead, George preferred to spend his time with the inmates, lingering with them over cups of coffee in the dining hall or sharing a lengthy chin-wag around the parlor stove. His youthful enthusiasm, his involvement with inmates, his softer approach to discipline, and a full calendar of activities and entertainments transformed the Home for almost a decade.

  A casual man without airs, Commandant George was constantly rumpled, with a physique that would frustrate the most skillful tailor. His globular potbelly meant that he rarely fastened the bottom buttons of his vest, and the ends of his string necktie were never even. He had a full head of hair that was the yellow-tinged white of a mature magnolia blossom. (Despite the best efforts of his wife to brush it back, a runaway curl was always falling over his forehead.) He wore a goatee and shaggy mustache that covered his mouth and changed color depending on what soup was served at the last meal. George's nose was often red, not from drink, but from regularly blowing it into the huge, crumpled handkerchief he kept stuffed into a coat pocket. His wide-open blue eyes were the eyes of a boy, constantly amazed and amused by the wondrous world around him. Inmate John F. Hart described the new commandant as “a kindly, unpretentious gentleman, ever on the qui vive for our comfort and popular with all the inmates.”2

  Henry George listened appreciatively to the humorous tales told by the old men of the Home, and he would reward the storyteller with a honking laugh at the punch line. When asked, however, he had some interesting stories of his own to tell.

  At the age of fourteen, with both parents dead and nothing else to do, Henry George lied about his age and enlisted in the Confederate army in 1861. He was an impulsive soldier, but he made it through the war with only minor wounds and then returned to Graves County. The restless young veteran went to work in a dry goods store and found he could sell a muzzle to a dog through sheer enthusiasm alone. At age twenty-five, he opened his own store in Wingo, the county seat.3

  The Wingo store was an immediate success. Attorneys, judges, and citizens in town for court day would gather around George's stove and swap stories. The young man's willingness to listen and his boyish enthusiasm (even as he was selling them things they didn't know they needed) was enough to keep them coming back. In 1876 Graves County Democrats sent him to Frankfort as state representative.

  Henry George thrived in the political environment. His disarming appearance and genial good nature allowed him to sell other legislators on his bills as easily as he sold canned goods and nails at his store in Wingo. He served two terms as state representative and a term as state senator before being appointed by President Grover Cleveland to the Colorado River Indian agency in 1888.

  Located on the Colorado River ninety miles north of Yuma, Arizona, the Colorado River Indian Reservation was established in 1865 for the “Indians of said river and its tributaries.” The job of Indian agent was largely administrative and organizational; the agent doled out blankets, beeves, and discipline to the Mohave, Chemehuevi, Hopi, and Navajo natives who lived on the reservation. While other agents treated their charges like troublesome freeloaders, Henry George listened to them. He lingered over pots of coffee with them and listened to their legends; he sat around campfires and listened to their problems. He shared his own stories with them—Bible stories, mostly—and shared his enthusiasm with his laughter.4

  After three years, frustrated by the graft-ridden system, George resigned and returned to Graves County, where he promptly regained his old seat in the Senate. For several years, George served as warden of the Kentucky State Penitentiary in Frankfort, and under his beneficent management the institution became self-sustaining, the prisoners making and growing enough to offset the cost of housing them. Returning to his Senate seat, Henry George helped shepherd the Kentucky Confederate Home's $56,000 appropriation through the legislature after Harry P. McDonald's sudden death.5

  When Bennett Young needed a compassionate man with solid institutional credentials to replace the autocratic William O. Coleman as commandant of the Home, Henry George fit the bill. The former Indian agent accepted the job with the undisguised glee of a small boy at a Fourth of July parade.

  The Kentucky Confederate Home was, by the end of 1907, the brightest jewel in a necklace of Confederate veterans’ homes draped across the South and the border states.

  Confederate veterans in various states had acted largely independent of one another as they planned, financed, built, and opened soldiers’ homes in Louisiana, Virginia, Texas, Maryland, Arkansas, North Carolina, Missouri, Tennessee, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. (South Carolina would open a home in 1909, Oklahoma in 1911, and California in 1929.) Each state group was aware of the successes and disappointments of the others (and could learn from them), but each state faced different challenges in attempting to rally the optimum combination of active Confederate veterans groups, a sympathetic public, and generous state legislators. As a result, each state home differed in its financial footing, operational structure, and physical setting.6

  The Kentucky Confederate Home opened in Pewee Valley twelve months after the first statewide organizational meeting of Kentucky's ex-Confederates, an accelerated schedule due in no small part to Bennett Young's lobbying expertise and Governor J. C. W. Beckham's desire to please the ex-Confederate electorate. Other states experienced a more protracted schedule. Georgia's veterans built a home in 1891, and then asked their state legislature for operational funding. The state turned down the funding request, and the building remained unoccupied for a decade until it burned in 1901. The Georgia veterans finally received support from the legislature and opened a rebuilt home in 1902, a month after the Pewee Valley dedication. Alabama delayed any serious effort to build a home until 1901, largely because the state's Reconstruction constitution mandated that a tenth of all state revenues go toward Confederate pensions. The state eventually passed an appropriation to support the home in 1903.

  All the homes dealt with overcrowding and budget shortfalls from time to time, but Kentucky's legislature rarely denied a timely appropriation request for funds to maintain or improve the Pewee Valley facility. The superintendent of the Oklahoma Confederat
e Home, by contrast, would complain that his state's appropriation was insufficient. “It became necessary to use hallways for sleeping rooms in some instances,” he said. And the manager of the Texas home had to house inmates in a stable until the state legislature finally provided funds for remodeling. Several of the homes had to suspend admissions because of overcrowding; there is no evidence that the Kentucky trustees were ever forced to delay admitting qualified veterans due to lack of space.7

  An inmate of the Kentucky Confederate Home could swing in a hammock all day long, if he chose; able-bodied inmates of some other Confederate soldiers’ homes were required to work for their keep. None of the homes expected to be truly self-supporting, but the Virginia, Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, and North Carolina homes (among others) required inmates to find employment on the grounds, work that might include growing supplies for the home, clearing land for building, doing carpentry tasks, or performing laundry duty.

  The homes that supported active farms—Arkansas, Alabama, and Florida, for example—were often located in rural areas, accessible to family and visitors only after a rough ride down rutted lanes. The Georgia, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Texas homes were built in large cities, close to urban distractions and temptations. The Kentucky Confederate Home's location in the silk-stocking exurban village of Pewee Valley was near the population center of the state and easy to reach by roadway and rail.8

  The Virginia, Florida, and Alabama homes were organized on the cottage plan, with small cabins or barracks that were often difficult to heat or plumb. Arkansas, Tennessee, and Georgia built institutional (though attractive) central buildings that were more like a combination dormitory and rest home. Inmates in Kentucky lived in what had been a posh resort hotel, an elegant structure built for the comfort of its guests. “As we entered the spacious grounds we were almost startled by the impression that we were approaching a delightful summer resort,” a visitor from Tennessee wrote. A Florida veteran who had visited his own state's home said of the Kentucky Confederate Home, “If the inmates are not happy, the surroundings are not at fault.”9

  The appointment of Henry George and the opening of L. Z. Duke Hall in 1907 transformed life in the Home in several ways, ushering in an eight-year period marked by more comfort, graciousness, and affability than the Home's inmates and managers had experienced in its early years of operation.

  “There are now at present in the Home more men than were ever there at one time,” the Confederate Home Messenger noted in October 1907. Almost 400 men had been admitted to the Home since its inception, and the board of trustees was approving more applications every month. “The question arises, where will they find quarters?”

  More than 250 inmates were living in the Home in 1907 (with several dozen more on temporary furlough at any one time), but with the opening of L. Z. Duke Hall the Home seemed less crowded. Though the hall provided no additional living space, the new building gave veterans more elbow room, a place for their religious services, holiday gatherings, and other assemblies.

  Before the hall was built, occasional Protestant religious services were held in the main building, with a few old inmates standing in the lobby while a visiting preacher delivered his message from a perch on the stairway. But the 300-seat Duke Hall allowed for formal services (and more of them).

  The Reverend Alexander N. White, Confederate veteran and itinerant Baptist minister, was accepted as an inmate of the Home shortly after it opened in 1902. The wheelchair-bound preacher guided his comrades down the path to salvation whether they wanted to travel it or not. He rarely missed an opportunity to share the Gospel with another inmate; he was a cheerful presence at sickbeds and a comforting figure at deathbeds. Time after time, Home management warned White for being too meddlesome, but enough of the inmates welcomed his religious ardor that the cheerful minister was undeterred.

  With the opening of Duke Hall (and with Henry George's tacit approval), White took it upon himself to organize regular religious services, scheduling visiting ministers for Sunday afternoons, song services on Wednesdays, and revival evangelists whenever he could snag them.

  “The veterans at the Home are having religious services of a superior quality every Sunday afternoon,” the Confederate Home Messenger reported. “Pastors as a rule give the best they have on these occasions.”10

  Preachers with congregations in LaGrange, Middletown, and Prospect rotated regular Sunday service assignments at Pewee Valley. Dr. Peyton Hoge, however, had a hometown advantage. He had been called to the pulpit of Pewee Valley Presbyterian Church about the time the assembly hall was dedicated, and he signed up to preach at the Home on the third Sunday of each month. In 1908 Hoge and another Presbyterian minister held a weeklong revival in L. Z. Duke Hall that drew crowds of inmates and Pewee Valley residents. Other denominations also served residents of the Home. The rector at St. James Episcopal Church regularly administered communion to Anglican inmates or any others who desired to partake. Members of the nearby St. Aloysius Catholic Church arranged to transport Catholic inmates to Mass, and the Salvation Army announced its intention to hold band concerts and preaching on the Home's lawn.11

  As religious activity flourished in the Home, problems with drunkenness and bad behavior seemed to decrease. The Confederate Home Messenger noted that several inmates had chosen to affiliate with local churches. “It is hoped that more will be impressed with their need of a Savior,” the paper added drily.12

  L. Z. Duke Hall provided a venue well suited to the programs and entertainments that Henry George and Florence Barlow were more than happy to arrange, amusements that helped reduce some of the tensions and discipline problems that had festered during the Home's earliest years.

  Suddenly, calendar pages had more entries and clocks seemed to run faster for idle inmates.

  One of the first entertainments held in the hall was a lecture by Louisville attorney William B. Fleming, a state assembly member and acquaintance of Henry George. Fleming brought his electric stereopticon to the Home for a lantern show illustrating the rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte. “The rare and beautiful pictures which he presented are taken from fine paintings, statuary and points of interest in the life of Napoleon and Josephine,” an attendee reported.13

  Music lover Andrew Broaddus, owner of a freight company, was invited to bring his Victor Talking Machine and a collection of recordings to the Home for a special concert. Commercial music recording was still in its infancy, and these Civil War veterans marveled at the voice of famed tenor Enrico Caruso wafting from the wooden box that sat onstage at Duke Hall. “But it was when the clear, beautiful notes of a cornet rang out ‘Dixie’ that the veterans almost stood on their feet in rapture,” according to the Confederate Home Messenger. “They almost imagined themselves again on the field of battle.”14

  Florence Barlow, too, was active in filling the calendar with amusements for the inmates; her bookkeeping responsibilities left plenty of time to line up lecturers and performers to appear in Duke Hall. Singers, ventriloquists, elocutionists, magicians, folklorists, bird callers, and dialecticians: all of them responded to Barlow's polite invitation to appear onstage at Duke Hall before an audience of Confederate veterans.

  She wasn't shy about encouraging some of the Home's suppliers to provide entertainments for the inmates, either. The Ballard Flour Mills of Louisville arranged for a demonstration of motion pictures in front of a packed audience in Duke Hall, another display of twentieth-century technology that likely astounded the old vets.15 (Later, in 1909, the board of trustees contacted the electric railway company asking permission to tap its lines to obtain sufficient power to install a movie projector in Duke Hall.)

  But the acts that excited the inmates most were the vaudeville acts.

  “My Dear Miss Barlow,” vaudevillian Polk Miller wrote in the confident, expansive hand of a lifelong showman, “I write to tell you that the long cherished hope that I might go to Pewee Valley to entertain those dear old comrades in the Home is soon to be
realized.”16

  Miller was a Confederate veteran from Virginia, a banjo virtuoso and dialect storyteller. He and his “Old South Quartette” traveled the country nine months a year, booked into a circuit of vaudeville theaters a week at a time, usually playing three shows a day, six days a week. Second-tier acts like Miller's could prove their value to a city's theater manager (and assure future bookings) by generating local publicity. A free performance for “those dear old comrades in the Home” would be certain to add press clippings to his scrapbook.

  Miller was no second-tier act to the veterans when he played to a standing-room-only audience of inmates, family, and friends at L. Z. Duke Hall in January 1911. “More veterans were present than ever before on any similar occasion,” according to Florence Barlow, to witness Polk Miller's two-hour show of yarns, jokes, and old-time music.17

  Another favorite performer at the Home was “Captain Jack, the Poet Scout.” Jack Crawford was a bigger-than-life Western showman, a contemporary (and minor competitor) of Buffalo Bill Cody. The Poet Scout's performance consisted of a recitation of his cowboy poems, interspersed with stories of the Wild West and (largely fictional) incidents from his life. “Captain Jack gave the veterans one of the most unique and delightful entertainments they have had,” Florence Barlow reported.18

  Inmates had the best seats—front and center—in L. Z. Duke Hall to see nationally known performers like Captain Jack, Polk Miller, and the Old Soldier Fiddlers. But these shows, and other entertainments arranged by Barlow and George, drew increasingly large numbers of Pewee Valley residents. Perhaps the greatest benefit of Lizzie Duke's gift of an assembly hall was the increasing involvement of neighbors in the daily life of the Home. Duke Hall served to open wide the institutional gates of the Kentucky Confederate Home to the residents of Pewee Valley.

  In 1902, when trustees announced that the new Kentucky Confederate veterans’ home would be established in Pewee Valley, local homeowners threw a fit. They threatened lawsuits to prevent having a state institution plopped in the midst of their quaint village.