My Old Confederate Home

by Rusty Williams

  “Uncle Josh” was the property of the Robinson family of Warren County in 1862. He was returning from the mill with a sack of meal when a Confederate cavalry troop stopped to ask the black man if he wanted to go with them. “I threw the sack of meal over the fence and left,” Josh told a reporter more than fifty years later. He joined the cavalrymen on the spot, he said, and spent the rest of the war caring for their horses.24

  Early in the twentieth century, black men with stories similar to Josh Robinson's—former slaves who had dodged Federal lead on the battlefront—began showing up at reunions of Confederate veterans. (The Morganfield UCV camp paid Robinson's expenses to attend national reunions.) These black Confederates never appeared on UCV membership rolls and certainly didn't attend the (all-white) veterans’ banquets or smokers, but some were issued uniforms and marched in reunion parades with their white “comrades.” White Southerners often passed the hat at these events, collecting a tidy sum to send home with the black Confederates.

  “Ten-Cent Bill” Yopp was one of the better known of the black Confederates. He was born a slave on the Yopp plantation in Laurens County, Georgia. At age seven he was given to the son of the family, who later became Captain Thomas M. Yopp of the Fourteenth Georgia Regiment. Bill accompanied his master into combat as a manservant, nursing the captain back to health after he was wounded at the Battle of Seven Pines. A tenant farmer after the war, Bill brought fresh fruits and vegetables to his old master, who had gone to live in Georgia's Confederate soldiers’ home. “Ten-Cent Bill” earned his nickname at the home by running errands for the inmates, charging them at the flat rate of a dime apiece. When his master died in 1920, the Georgia trustees allowed Bill Yopp to stay on at the home as an employee.25

  In August 1924 Commandant McFarlan received a letter asking for application forms for “William Pete, a colored Confederate soldier.” Lot D. Young, respected veteran, author, and Bourbon County politico, was sponsoring Pete's application for admission to the Kentucky Confederate Home.26

  Willie Pete had been an itinerant handyman around Bourbon County for longer than most people remembered. He claimed to have been a personal servant of General Joseph Wheeler, acting as Wheeler's stableboy and groom throughout the Civil War. The old black man attended reunions of the Morgan's Men Association, where he was accepted as “Wheeler's aged hostler.”27

  Lot D. Young, who occasionally employed Pete for odd jobs, helped the illiterate black man complete his admission application. “I am fully sensible of the effects of my recommendation to the Board in setting this precedent,” Young wrote. “But I felt that Pete's history and his loyalty, with his good behavior, quitted him to this recognition.”28

  Allowing a black man to march with white men in a parade was one thing, but to allow a black man—Confederate veteran or not—to live in the Home and take his meals alongside white men was simply unacceptable in 1924 Kentucky. Yet turning away a needy ex-Confederate—even if he was a black man—might spark another round of bad publicity for the Home.

  The board of trustees thus faced a dilemma at their September 3 meeting, but the pragmatic new commandant proposed an acceptable solution. In effect, Willie Pete would become an employee of the Home, sleeping and eating with the black employees.29

  “This old darky could not be regularly admitted as our ex-Confederate soldiers,” McFarlan explained to Young. “However, he can come to the Home and be accorded the comforts and benefits thereof. I will be able to give him odd jobs, feeling sure that he can do many little things about the Home.”30

  Young was pleased with McFarlan's plan and the progressivism it demonstrated. “You will find Pete an old-time obedient nigger, proud of his record as a Confederate and fond of the associations of these, his soldier friends,” replied Young. “It is a fine tribute the Board pays him, and the sentiment it implies is a refutation of insinuations sometimes indulged by prejudiced people.”31

  Willie Pete, the black Confederate, lived and worked at the Kentucky Confederate Home off and on for the next decade.

  George W. Dow, rector of St. James Episcopal Church, may have had a different impression of progressivism in Pewee Valley. Father Dow had expected to serve the Pewee Valley parish for the rest of his career, but the vestry concluded that his activist style was perhaps not suited to that small community.

  The rector and the Reverend Dr. White may have shared a few Proverbs (“They would have none of my counsel; they despised all my reproof”) before Dow and his wife departed for a new parish in Maryland in 1924.32

  Chapter 15

  The Engineer and the Little Girl

  For children growing up in Pewee Valley in the mid-1920s, the Kentucky Confederate Home grounds was a huge neighborhood playground: eight acres in the center of the village, sloping lawns crisscrossed with broad walkways, neat landscaping, tall trees, and well-tended buildings. During the warming days of spring, the grounds made a fine place for boys and girls to ride a bicycle, fly a kite, or just run for the sheer joy of running. On summer evenings, especially, there were always other children ready to put together a quick game of Red Rover or Swing the Statue before mothers began calling their families indoors for supper.

  The old men didn't mind; they seemed to enjoy being outdoors, too. Some would stroll the grounds or walk to the depot on sunny days; others sat on metal chairs enjoying the warmth. Except for the occasional crazy one, the old men were always proper, seldom yelling at the children or telling them to be quiet.

  Like benign gray ghosts, the veterans of the Kentucky Confederate Home floated around the children's world—always present but scarcely visible.

  The children barely noticed that there were fewer and fewer of them as each year passed.1

  Miss Evie Temple, secretary of the Kate M. Breckenridge Chapter, United Daughters of the Confederacy, wrote Commandant McFarlan on April 12, 1924, asking for a report on conditions at the Kentucky Confederate Home.

  “At present there are seventy-eight veterans in the Home,” McFarlan replied. “There are twenty-four men in the infirmary: none are critically ill, a great many, however, are very feeble.”2

  The new commandant went on to tell Miss Temple of his efforts to provide a respectable place for the inmates living there: “We strive to make this a real home; their every reasonable want is provided for, such as a variety of good wholesome food, good medical attention and kind nursing. A Christian influence is always present. Religious services are held every Sunday afternoon, the pastors of different local churches conducting the services.

  “As a means of contributing to the happiness of the veterans,” he added, “we would suggest that you write each one a bright, cheerful letter or card, as all of them enjoy getting mail.”

  McFarlan was furnishing decent care for the old veterans in his charge, and cheery mail might provide some pleasant moments for the aging inmates. But the Kentucky Confederate Home was becoming increasingly isolated from the world outside Pewee Valley.

  By the mid-1920s the foundations that had supported the Kentucky Confederate Home for more than two decades—energetic Confederate veterans’ groups, a generous state government, and a sympathetic public—were beginning to crumble.

  “The world gets more lonesome every year,” Thomas Osborne told the 1924 annual meeting of the Kentucky Division, United Confederate Veterans. “Our great camp at Louisville once enrolled over four hundred [members].” Osborne was one of only four remaining charter members of that camp.3 Of 3,000 active Kentucky UCV members in 1900, less than a tenth remained active in 1925.

  State government continued to support the Kentucky Confederate Home with its regular appropriation, but without the same enthusiasm as when thousands of ex-Confederates and their family members could swing the outcome of a statewide election. Kentucky had introduced a modest pension program for its Confederate veterans and widows in 1912, and politicians in Frankfort increasingly questioned why the state should continue to fund the Pewee Valley Home instead of just pensioning the
old men off with a monthly check for $12. (Lawmakers increased the pension to $20 in 1928.)

  By 1925 nine out of ten Kentuckians had been born after Lee's surrender. Cultural memory of the war remained strong in Kentucky, but the old men of the Civil War generation seemed impossibly distant to a generation growing up on radio, airmail, bobbed hair, and jazz. The newspaper-reading public might enjoy an occasional sentimental feature story about one of the Home's aging veterans, but there was little about the Home to sustain wide public interest.

  Kentucky's UDC membership was flourishing, however, and Charlotte Woodbury still made her weekly visits to Pewee Valley on behalf of the Women's Advisory Committee. Despite their involvement in so many other state and national projects—completing the Jefferson Davis Monument in Hopkinsville; supporting needy Confederate widows; reviewing school curriculums; promoting books by Southern writers; compiling records of Great War veterans; lobbying for the Jefferson Davis Highway—the Daughters maintained their steadfast support of the living relics at the Home.

  Residents of Pewee Valley could hardly ignore the institution in their midst. The Home's economic impact on the village had decreased as the inmate population declined, but the facility and the old inmates were a visible presence every day. They were “just part of our neighborhood,” according to one resident.

  Chief Engineer A. S. McFarlan had worked at the Home for fifteen years repairing boilers, patching leaky pipes, and maintaining the old structure using every tool in his kit. As commandant of the Kentucky Confederate Home during its final years, McFarlan would make good use of the Daughters and his Pewee Valley neighbors to help maintain an aging—and dwindling—population of old men.

  On Commandant Daughtry's death, Alexander S. McFarlan was the default choice to assume charge of the Home. McFarlan was not a Confederate veteran and had no management experience to speak of, but he was in many ways the ideal man to manage the Home during its final years.

  Born in Missouri three years after the end of the Civil War, McFarlan came to Louisville in his twenties to play baseball for the Kentucky Colonels, an early National League team. The young baseballer found himself in an industrial city in the midst of a mechanical revolution, a time when men were learning to use electricity and petroleum products to drive machines more efficiently. McFarlan had little formal training, only general apprenticeships here and there, but he had a knack for getting disparate parts of a complicated system to work together. He acquired a series of increasingly higherpaying jobs as a mechanical engineer when the Home's board of trustees hired him in 1908 to maintain the expanding facility in Pewee Valley.

  Some men may awake to the sound of birdsong and the smell of bacon frying in a skillet; Alexander S. McFarlan awoke with his ears attuned to the sound of a failing motor bearing and his nose sniffing for overheated lubricating oil. He was on call twenty-four hours a day, working indoors or out to coax hot water through a faulty heater or patch a hole in the roof of the old resort hotel. More than a handyman, the engineer devised systems for water, heat, electricity, and sewage, then installed the necessary equipment from blueprints he drew himself.

  Busy as McFarlan was, he was an attentive family man. He and his wife raised their children in a rented home in nearby Crestwood, and despite his odd hours at work, he found time to play baseball with his two youngest sons. McFarlan was a hardy man, not particularly tall, but well muscled from working with sledges and pipe wrenches. He had a square, open face marked by a neat mustache, and his hair was plentiful, remaining dark even into his sixties. Children, particularly, remembered McFarlan's hands: huge mitts with scarred knuckles as big as walnuts. He was an easygoing man with the power to crush a brass doorknob in a single hand.

  McFarlan knew every foot of pipe and every inch of wiring in the Home's buildings, but during his years as engineer he came to know more than the mechanical systems. Without involving himself in workplace politics and drama, he gauged the human forces at work in the Home and learned to read the management traits, good and bad, of the men he worked for. W. O. Coleman had been flummoxed by the paperwork necessary to do the job; he lost the confidence of the board of trustees because he couldn't organize his desk. Henry George managed a happy Home with regular entertainments and events, but George had never really been engaged in the daily operations of the institution. Charles L. Daughtry's egotism squandered the support of the Daughters and the Home's Pewee Valley neighbors.

  When Commandant McFarlan moved his family to Pewee Valley, he had already created a mental blueprint for the respectable place he intended to provide the remaining inmates of the Kentucky Confederate Home.

  “A. S. McFarlan and his wife,” wrote inmate George W. Noble, “are as kind and as good to all the inmates as if they were their own children. We have a fine farm, laundry, bathing tubs and each man can wash and dress once a week. We have nothing to do but eat and sleep. If we are not able to wash ourselves, they furnish a man to wash us; and if we are unable to feed ourselves, they furnish a man to feed us.”4

  Though McFarlan was a generation younger than his charges, he set out like a dutiful father to provide a safe, comfortable, and entertaining domicile for the Home's inmates. Doing much of the work himself, he removed the trees ruined by fire and planted new ones, staked out flowerbeds, resurfaced walkways, and strung outdoor lights. He posted a night watchman, hired night nurses, and made sure a physician was never more than thirty minutes away.

  Having observed his share of lazy and inattentive employees over the years, he sacked most of the stewards, laundresses, and helpers, replacing them with Pewee Valley residents he knew to be energetic and diligent. “Every employee is and must be kind and forbearing toward the inmates,” he insisted. “Cheerful and courteous treatment is rigidly observed by the employees.” To be certain his standards were met, he hired his wife as chief stewardess.5

  Like Henry George, Commandant McFarlan recognized the importance of entertainments to the happiness of the old men in his care. “For amusements, motion picture shows are given twice a week; radio every day and night.” He organized field trips for the veterans, often taking groups to “inspect” the operation of a Home vendor.

  During one of those inspection tours, fifteen Home veterans visited Louisville Provision Company. The inmates—all but one in his eighties—shuffled through big refrigerated rooms watching workers assemble crates of bacon, butter, lard, and eggs for delivery. The old men graciously pronounced the operation “fit” before receiving a meal in the company lunchroom and returning on an early train to Pewee Valley.6

  At the time of the trip—April 1925—eighty-five veterans remained in the Home.

  Christmas Day 1925 had been spare of much celebration at the Home. Commandant McFarlan and his wife made sure there was a decorated tree in the vestibule, but few of the inmates had relatives to remember them with calls, cards, or gifts.

  Charlotte Woodbury and seven other women of the Louisville UDC chapter arrived at the Home while the men were at lunch. Out of sight of the inmates, the women tied little gifts to the Christmas tree and placed wrapped packages under it.

  A visitor described what happened when the men emerged from the mess hall: “Merriment, even hilarity, echoed through the halls of the old Home and in the hospital lobby, where the happy old men gathered around the large Christmas tree.”

  At ninety-four, H. R. Crabtree was the oldest inmate in the Home, and he left his room in the infirmary to join the celebration. George Tandy, who had turned eighty-six the day before, had to be convinced the event wasn't his birthday party. Eighty-one-year-old George Booze, a new arrival from Corbin, boasted that he was “the only man on the place who could dance the waltz and the schottische,” then proceeded to demonstrate. Soon dozens of men were on their feet, each “trying to out-Charleston one another.”

  The UDC women handed out gifts of tobacco, socks, handkerchiefs, candy, and fruit while a photographer flashed pictures of the old men. The men shared tales of earlier Christm
ases, “while here and there a tear was brushed away with an impatient gesture as the name of a comrade, no longer among those present, was mentioned.”7

  Charlotte Woodbury and the other Daughters departed just before sunset, leaving behind the seventy-two remaining inmates of the Kentucky Confederate Home.

  William and Ada Herdt's youngest daughter, Virginia, was born in 1921, and the little girl grew up surrounded by the old men in their gray uniforms. The Herdts operated Herdt Motor Company, building wagons and repairing engines, and Home inmates regularly stopped by the shop for an idle visit or to pick up a part for the commandant.

  The little girl and her family saw inmates on the streets of Pewee Valley, too. Some of the old men carried jugs to an old spring wellhead, bottling the warm sulfurous water they believed might ease their aches; others hung around the depot, greeting arrivals and keeping up on the latest news. Occasionally a veteran came to the door of the Herdt's Tulip Avenue home, selling handmade brooms or craft items.

  “The old veterans are very nice,” George W. Noble said about his fellow inmates. “They have reared daughters and have great respect for the female. Some of the inmates here have been wealthy men and have loving wives, myself is one of them who once owned a nice home and a nice wife who was the mother of thirteen children. I owned a fine farm and raised them all, educated them to read and write.”8