My Old Confederate Home

by Rusty Williams

  At first, the Home was everything the quiet community feared: boisterous crowds jamming the area for ceremonial events, bad smells from an overworked sewage system, and drunken inmates passed out on local porches.

  But five years later, by the time L. Z. Duke Hall was dedicated, those problems had largely disappeared. (It didn't hurt that the Home was a good economic neighbor, providing wages for up to twenty local residents and regular income for the coal distributor, the harness shop, the funeral home, and other local tradesmen.)19

  Commandant George and Florence Barlow reached out to their Pewee Valley neighbors, inviting clubs and organizations to use Duke Hall for meetings, concerts, and dances. “The hall is at all times open to any one who will come to amuse or entertain the veterans,” Florence Barlow wrote in the Confederate Home Messenger.

  Mrs. Mary Craig Lawton, who kept a summer house near the Confederate Home, conducted drama classes for Pewee Valley youngsters. Barlow invited her to present the drama club's play for the community in L. Z. Duke Hall. Nannie Barbee, known for her dialect performances before clubs and organizations in Louisville, drew a large crowd of Pewee Valley residents for her impersonations when she came to Duke Hall for a show. Oldham County's Masonic lodge used the hall to stage its fundraising musicales. After cataloging the Home's donated books and shelving them in the hall balcony, Barlow opened a lending library for Pewee Valley residents. The young single women of Pewee Valley held their leap-year dance in Duke Hall, and local churches united to hold a common Sunday night prayer service there.20

  Duke Hall thus became Pewee Valley's assembly room, theater, lecture hall, music room, movie house, party room, library, and chapel. At the same time, the Kentucky Confederate Home became an integral part of community life in Pewee Valley.

  Children played on the Home's rolling lawn, and residents used the Home's drives and pathways to pass from one part of the village to another. The Home regularly loaned chairs, tables, and cookware to local organizations for their own events, and fire equipment from the Home often responded to fires in the surrounding community. Bennett Young and the Home's trustees voted money to help maintain streets in the township.

  Despite the early fears of vocal Pewee Valley homeowners, the Home and its hundreds of old veterans eventually became, as one resident described it, “just part of our neighborhood.”21

  As Duke Hall helped open the gates of the Home to the local community, so did it open the Home to the camps and chapters of Kentucky's UCV and UDC. To the delight and benefit of the inmates—men whose presence in the Home was due to their long ago military service—L. Z. Duke Hall became a sort of Lost Cause clubhouse.

  At its annual meeting on the day the hall was dedicated in 1907, the Kentucky Division of the United Confederate Veterans voted to hold all future state reunions among the inmates on the grounds of the Kentucky Confederate Home.22 Reunion day came every autumn, when hundreds of veterans from UCV camps from around the state (along with their families and friends) descended on Pewee Valley for a day of reminiscing, tale-telling, food, music, a short business meeting, and plenty of Lost Cause oratory. Henry George saw to it that the Home looked its best: floors scrubbed, yard raked, and kitchen spick-and-span. Florence Barlow decorated Duke Hall with photos, flags, fresh greenery, and colorful bunting hung across the stage.

  Other Confederate veterans’ groups chose to meet in Duke Hall. The Orphan Brigade and Morgan's Men, as well as several other statewide veterans groups, held reunions at the Kentucky Confederate Home in the eight years after Duke Hall was completed.

  At these events, the inmates were hosts as well as guests of honor. Dressed in fresh uniforms, they would meet arriving trains and escort visitors back to the Home. They welcomed guests and showed off the Home's grounds. Proud inmates posed for snapshots, bragged on the quality of food served in the kitchen, and told tall tales about the luxury and ease surrounding them. The old men of the Kentucky Confederate Home, lacking the society of relatives and friends, basked in the elegance of the respectable place in which they were fortunate enough to live.

  “It was a happy thought to hold these reunions at the Home,” Barlow mused. “It increases the interest in the institution, and at the same time brings pleasure and joy to those who are gathered here.”23

  Ex-Confederates who visited the Home began including their inmate comrades in activities outside the confines of the institution. Louisville's UCV camp paid for eighteen Orphan Brigade inmates to attend the brigade reunion there, and the state organization paid travel expenses for thirty inmates to attend the national UCV reunion in Little Rock in 1911.24 Confederate veteran and political boss John “Colonel Johnny” Whallen invited inmates and Home employees for an outing at White City, an amusement park on the banks of the Ohio River near Louisville. Colonel Johnny arranged for private railcars to transport 115 inmates from Pewee Valley to the park, where they were met by a band and jugs of lemonade. The inmates were given the freedom of the park, where they could get on the thrill rides, peek into the sideshows, and marvel at the dancing elephant.25

  Bennett Young had managed to avoid giving a formal oversight role to the Daughters of the Confederacy, but Florence Barlow opened the gates of the Home to any chapter that wanted to honor the inmates. Barlow's duties in the Home allowed her enough free time to serve as an energetic president of the Confederate Home chapter of the UDC. Representing the Confederate Home chapter and the Home itself, she solicited other UDC chapters to hold celebrations at Christmas, Thanksgiving, Lee's birthday, and Fourth of July in the new hall.

  At Christmastime the UDC women hung presents on Christmas trees in the infirmary and the main building, then distributed them to inmates on Christmas morning. “We all got a small present: apples, oranges, candy, some gloves, handkerchiefs,” inmate T. W. Duncan wrote his family. “I got a neck warmer. All the old fellows here were well pleased.”26

  Barlow enlisted other chapters to produce gala events for the residents. For a springtime Strawberry Festival, visiting UDC members set out thirty decorated tables on the Home's lawn and hung the trees with Japanese lanterns. Chapter members brought twenty-five cakes, twenty gallons of ice cream, and twenty-five gallons of fresh strawberries for the old men. A band and vocalist performed as the women delivered plate after plate of cake and berries to the inmates (“We were absolutely choked with strawberries,” one veteran said later).27

  The Albert Sidney Johnston Chapter of the UDC hosted the inmates at the annual Jeffersonian Barbeque at the Kentucky State Fair. A hundred uniformed inmates a day, along with their chaperones, boarded private railcars for the trip to the fairgrounds for the two-day barbeque. Singly, the veterans had no problem roaming the grounds to visit the speakers’ stands or the racecourse. As a group, however, the inmates drew so much attention from the crowd of 20,000 Kentuckians that the UDC women had to rope off a section of their booth to protect the old men from the throng of well-wishers and the curious. Amazed at their celebrity, the veterans pocketed gifts of tobacco, coins, and baked goods before boarding the trains for their return to Pewee Valley.28

  An affable Henry George and the industrious Florence Barlow used L. Z. Duke Hall to throw open the institutional gates of the Kentucky Confederate Home. They wove the Home into the religious and social fabric of Pewee Valley village life; they knitted the daily lives of Home inmates into the larger communities of the state's Confederate veterans camps and UDC chapters.

  And with the open doors came visitors—plenty of visitors.

  In its earliest days, the Home was not so much a destination for visitors as a drop-off point for charitable donations. Inmates’ family members and friends came to Pewee Valley, but visiting hours were limited to one day a week for four hours. An overcrowded and smelly institution filled with hundreds of crotchety old men held little attraction for casual tourists, anyway.

  Improvements to the main building, construction of the new infirmary, the addition of modern utilities, and the opening of Duke Hall made
the Kentucky Confederate Home a more attractive destination for Kentuckians who wanted to see how their tax monies were being spent. The Home attracted an increasing number of Sunday drivers and tourists as well as relatives and friends.

  More inmates in the Home meant more callers, and a guest register kept in one of the main parlors recorded increasing numbers of visitors every year. In 1911 the board of trustees altered the rules of the Home to expand visiting hours to three days a week, six hours a day, but Commandant Henry George welcomed callers on any day at any time.

  In 1911 the nation marked the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of its Civil War, and interest in the old veterans blossomed. The increasing use of motorcars (and road improvements) allowed tourists to visit the home for an afternoon, strolling the Home's parklike grounds or studying the wartime flags, firearms, swords, and photos that Florence Barlow had collected and mounted on the walls of Duke Hall. (Barlow arranged to have a series of picture postcards printed—twelve full-color views of the Home—and she sold them to tourists.)29

  The Kentucky Confederate Home became a living museum of sorts, a twentieth-century repository of animate Lost Cause relics. Parents brought young children to shake the hands of men who had charged the valley of Stones River, ridden with Morgan's Raiders, or dug trenches in defense of Atlanta a half century before. Most inmates were thrilled to interact with tourists, to earn a few dimes posing for snapshots, to sell their wood carvings, or to recount their wartime exploits to a fresh audience. They thrived on the activity and attention.

  In 1907 Bennett Young envisioned the Home's assembly hall as a chapel for the inmates’ religious services; by 1915 L. Z. Duke Hall was a bustling community entertainment center for inmates, Pewee Valley residents, tourists, and Kentucky's ex-Confederate groups. Florence Barlow and Henry George did their best to keep a full schedule of activities in the hall, but one activity took precedence over all others: any other planned event was delayed, moved, or canceled to accommodate the funeral service of a Kentucky Confederate Home inmate.

  Inmate John F. Hart reported to a friend in April 1908 that only four fellow inmates had passed away since the first of the year. “This is a remarkable showing,” he wrote, “when it is remembered that there are nearly three hundred inmates whose ages range from 58 to 93 years, and most of them are more or less enfeebled by the weight of time.”30

  Despite improved medical care, better food, and a more cheerful environment, death was the inevitable outcome for every inmate. Ex-Confederates had pledged to “pay a decent respect to the remains and to the memory” of comrades who die, and Duke Hall became the Home's funeral parlor.

  Local undertaker Milton A. Stoess supervised construction of a portable framework on which a coffin could rest during funeral services. The catafalque and black draperies were stored under the stage of Duke Hall, ready for use on short notice.

  When T. J. Haynes, the inmate who carved and sold hardwood canes to Home visitors, died suddenly of heart failure in January 1910, his coffin lay in state on Stoess's bier, draped with a Confederate flag. Inmate comrades sat with him overnight in L. Z. Duke Hall until relatives could arrive from Fulton County and escort his body home for burial.

  Death comes one at a time in small towns, and even Pewee Valley residents gathered at Duke Hall to mourn inmates who passed away at the Home. “Everyone in town went to the funerals,” one resident recalled. “We had seen these men at the Home and around town. It was just respectful that we went to their funerals.”31

  Sixty-seven-year-old inmate Robert G. McCorkle had been an active member of Anchorage Presbyterian Church before entering the Home, and as long as he was able, he rode the electric car to Anchorage on Sunday to attend services there. Before he passed away in December 1909, he asked that his funeral service be held in Duke Hall among his comrades. McCorkle's flag-draped coffin rested on the bier at the front of the hall beneath portraits of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, John Hunt Morgan, and Mrs. L. Z. Duke as the pastor from Anchorage Presbyterian Church conducted the funeral service. The choir from McCorkle's church stood in the balcony, and a hundred uniformed inmates sat downstairs in neat rows before McCorkle's remains while Pewee Valley neighbors and a crowd of mourners from Anchorage and Louisville filled the side and rear seats.32

  At the end of the service, the old inmates of the Kentucky Confederate Home formed up in columns outside Duke Hall and accompanied McCorkle's casket as they marched silently for a mile up Maple Street to the Confederate Cemetery. They remained silent and bareheaded in double line at the cemetery, breaking only after the closing prayer for a dipper of water, a bit of rest, and a high spirited cakewalk down Maple Street to the Home.

  The years following the opening of L. Z. Duke Hall were the Home's apple-pie years.

  Henry George and Florence Barlow delighted in providing for the happiness of the men under their care. The Home was full to the point of being crowded, but the religious services, special entertainments, community events, and direct involvement with activities of the UCV and the UDC made it seem less so. For a while, the Home met the highest expectations of the men and women who organized it, built it, and operated it.

  “I don't know what I would have done if it had not been for this Home,” the Travelin’ Tree Man wrote to his sister. “’Tis a Godsend to me.”33

  The Tree Man was admitted to the Home in December 1913.

  The seventy-nine-year-old veteran's real name, the one recorded in the family Bible, was Taliaferro Walton Duncan. He signed his papers as “T. W. Duncan” and never used his first name, pronounced “Tolliver” in the Southern manner. Family and friends called him “Tol.” For more than thirty years before arriving in Pewee Valley, he walked the lanes, avenues, paths, and pig trails from farmhouse to farmhouse, zigzagging across northern Kentucky to sell his fruit trees. People in twelve counties knew him as the Travelin’ Tree Man.

  From March to September the Tree Man called on country farms and cabins, taking orders for the apple, cherry, peach, pear, persimmon, and pawpaw varieties best suited to that part of the state. He took a small deposit and arranged for later delivery from a big Ohio grower. At planting time, Tol Duncan would arrive with the trees, shovel in hand and full of advice about spacing, pruning, watering, and controlling disease and rodents. The Travelin’ Tree Man never married, never kept a regular house. He lived outdoors mostly, on the road or off the kindness of his customers.

  By the time he came to the Home, the Travelin’ Tree Man was worn out by a lifetime of labor without much money to show for it. “I am real weak. I give out doing nothing,” he wrote in one of his first letters from Pewee Valley. But the rest of the letters he wrote to relatives during the year he lived there marvel at the unexpected luxuries.

  “We old fellows here do not know when it is cold,” he wrote during his first winter. “We don't have to go outdoors for anything. House is kept warm all the time with heaters.”

  He described the thrill of being fitted with his new Home uniform: “If I had to buy it, it would cost me about $14. I am real proud of it. I know it will last me a long time.”

  “I wish you could be here to see the beautiful roses and the other flowers that are blooming now,” Tol Duncan told his sister. “This Home is an earthly Paradise.”

  Tol Duncan and the other inmates of the Confederate Home would enjoy that earthly paradise until tighter budgets and a looming world conflict once again closed the gates of the Home to the outside world.

  Chapter 12

  The Farmer and the Daughter

  At the February 1919 meeting of the board of trustees, for the first time in the history of the Kentucky Confederate Home, three women representing the United Daughters of the Confederacy—Mrs. John L. Woodbury of Louisville, Mrs. Russell Mann of Paris, and Mrs. George R. Mastin of Lexington—sat with Home trustees at the boardroom table. If some trustees expected the officers of their new Ladies Advisory Committee to make trivial recommendations that could be easily sloughed off, Ch
arlotte Osborne Woodbury would set them straight with her first report.

  Midway through the meeting, Mrs. Woodbury was asked to speak.

  After a sweet expression of gratitude for the privilege of attending the meeting, she reported that her committee had inspected the Home on several occasions in the previous month and found everything in perfect order, except for … just a few minor things.

  “There was a shortage of linens,” she said. The Kentucky UDC chapters have been notified, she added, and they were holding linen showers for the Home. New linens were already on their way to Pewee Valley.1

  With new linen tended to, Woodbury added that there were “interior decorations and other necessary things” that needed maintenance, and she produced a list for new commandant Charles L. Daughtry. Unused to taking orders from women, Daughtry accepted the list without a word. To show how appreciative the women were for the honor of serving the board, Mrs. Woodbury continued, the Daughters would gladly inspect the Home every month. The women would compile monthly lists of problems relating to nutrition, sanitation, and health care, then notify the commandant so he might correct them.

  Before relinquishing the floor, Charlotte Woodbury sweetly asked the board secretary to correct the minutes of the meeting. Board members were referring to her committee as the “Ladies Advisory Committee” when it had actually been voted into existence as the “Women's Advisory Committee.”2

  “I have been forced to suspend painting and other repairs on the building,” Commandant Henry George reported to the board of trustees on July 31, 1915.

  The Kentucky Confederate Home was a very different facility in 1915 than it was when it opened in 1902. In addition to the original old resort hotel, by 1915 there were also the sixty-room infirmary, Duke Hall, a three-story laundry building, several small outbuildings, and a cottage used to segregate inmates with tuberculosis. Someplace always needed painting, papering, patching, or plastering, and now there was not enough money to pay for repairs and maintenance.