My Old Confederate Home

by Rusty Williams

  Daughtry was thus forced to deal with the problems of the Home under the nose of the man who, in Daughtry's opinion, was responsible for the problems. And, because Henry George would continue to occupy the commandant's suite in the Kentucky Confederate Home, Daughtry was unable to move his wife to Pewee Valley.

  Things were definitely not going according to plan for Acting Commandant Charles L. Daughtry.

  On January 9, 1918, President Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat and a Southerner, announced his support of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, granting women the right to vote. The National Women's Party waged a vigorous campaign against anti suffrage senators, and it was apparent after the fall elections that Congress would pass the constitutional amendment.

  A month later, Bennett Young acquiesced to increasing political pressure by the Kentucky UDC and allowed them a formal voice in the management of the Kentucky Confederate Home.

  The women of the UDC had been unwavering supporters of the Home from the time of its conception two decades earlier. They had given freely of their money, time, and hearts to foster a place of comfort, kindness, piety, and respect for the “blameless martyrs” who lived there. Time after time, however, the men of the UCV and the board of trustees had thwarted the women's desire for more oversight of the Home's management. Efficient management was men's business, they believed, best handled by men.

  But times were changing. The Nineteenth Amendment (and changes in Kentucky statutes) gave women a voice at the ballot box and more equal standing in courts of law. At the same time, the men of the UCV and the Home trustees were aging, perhaps growing tired of their role as sole head of the ex-Confederate household. At the Kentucky Confederate Home—and at Confederate soldiers’ homes elsewhere—the 1920s marked a time of greater administrative involvement by women.28

  On December 27, 1918, John Leathers put before the board of trustees a proposal to establish an advisory committee of women; William A. Milton seconded the motion. Bennett Young said nothing, perhaps because he was eager to leave on a much-needed vacation to Florida.

  The board approved a committee of seven women to advise on domestic issues of the Home. The committee was to recommend to the board such actions “as they deem wise and proper for the comfort and care of the inmates.” Members of the committee would elect officers and send a representative to future board meetings. (The board also expressed hope that the committee would encourage UDC chapters to return their attention to the care and maintenance of the Home.)29

  The Kentucky UDC president recommended a slate of seven women for the Women's Advisory Committee, all officers of the Covington, Paducah, Nicholasville, Lawrenceburg, Paris, Lexington, and Louisville chapters. When the seven women met, they elected as their president and spokesman the Daughter from Louisville, social activist Mrs. John L. Woodbury.

  Years later—long after the mothers, wives, and sisters of Confederate veterans had passed away—women such as Charlotte Osborne Woodbury would be recognized as True Daughters. They were the biological daughters of Confederate veterans, true to the principles of the Lost Cause for which their fathers had fought.

  Charlotte Osborne Woodbury was the biological daughter of Thomas Osborne, veteran of the Sixth Kentucky Infantry and part of the Orphan Brigade. And she was true to much more than her father's Lost Cause.

  Thomas Osborne was a devout Baptist who demonstrated his faith through lifelong charity and progressive social work. His primary career was as a newspaperman—most notably as the Louisville Courier-Journal's religion editor—and he founded Baptist World, the weekly political organ of that denomination, while an officer of the Baptist Conference of North America. Closer to home, his dedication was as much to the cause as to the denomination. He was active on the boards of the (largely Catholic) All Prayer Foundling Home, the Kentucky Institute for the Blind (with Bennett Young), and the Louisville Industrial School (with John Leathers). Osborne's ardent support of trade unionism likely caused some concern among his conservative friends, but he was convinced that free access to honest labor was a moral right for all men.30

  Charlotte, Thomas Osborne's oldest daughter, grew up in a household that prized social work as an imperative of Christian belief. Mealtime prayers never failed to mention the needs of others and one's personal obligation to aid the disadvantaged. In the Osborne home, Charlotte learned that compassionate charity was best exhibited face to face, the result of personal involvement. As a child, she accompanied her father to board meetings, reading to a blind child or playing dolls with little girls who had no parents while her own father conducted the business of the institution. She was fifteen years old in 1888 when Thomas Osborne, John Leathers, and others organized Louisville's Confederate Association of Kentucky, and she witnessed how charity could change the lives of people like crippled Billy Beasley and his family.31

  Charlotte Osborne graduated from Louisville Girls High School and tried her hand as a journalist before marrying John L. Woodbury, a somewhat effeminate up-and-coming corporate attorney in 1899. He spent the early years of their marriage polishing his career; she threw herself into club work; and the couple never got around to having children.

  Beautiful though she may have appeared to her father and husband, Charlotte Woodbury wasn't particularly well equipped to skate through life on looks alone. She was a pale, doughy woman of five foot ten, with a manly figure. Her thin brown hair—long or bobbed—never behaved itself, and her face was slightly off kilter, with eye and mouth drooping lower on the left side than the right. But she had a beautiful heart, a determination to further progressive causes, and a deep, rolling voice that could boom like a pipe organ.

  As a young married woman, Charlotte Woodbury joined the heritage groups—the UDC and the DAR—and was invited to membership in several of the social clubs.32 But it was the work on behalf of Kentucky's children that most warmed her heart.

  In 1906 she and eight others formed the Kentucky Child Labor Association (KCLA). Urban industrialization in Kentucky was drawing the children of poor families into factories for long hours at minuscule wages, and the KCLA was intended to expose the exploitation of children while lobbying for protective legislation. (Charlotte Woodbury nominated her father as acting president until the group's members could elect officers.)

  Kentucky's rural children were at risk, too. Many parents lacked knowledge of basic nutrition and were condemning their children to scurvy, pellagra, beriberi, and other preventable diseases. Through the Kentucky Federation of Women's Clubs, Woodbury organized and ran the annual Baby Health Contest at the Kentucky State Fair. It proved an effective tool for getting healthful recipes and nutritional information into the hands of rural women who came to the fair in Louisville.33

  She didn't neglect her heritage work, either. Charlotte Woodbury chartered Kentucky's first Children of the Confederacy chapter (and enlisted her father to serve on the board). Louisville Daughters elected her president of their chapter, and in 1911 she began the first of two terms as president of the statewide UDC organization. By 1917 Charlotte Woodbury had begun to make a name for herself with the national Democratic Party organization, and President Wilson appointed her to the Council of National Defense in 1917. News of the two-meal-a-day plan and reports of unsanitary conditions at the Kentucky Confederate Home drew her attention back to the veterans there.34

  Charlotte Woodbury's brand of social activism echoed that of Bennett Young, and Young probably engineered her appointment to the Women's Advisory Committee in 1918. Woodbury was determined and headstrong in pursuit of a cause, but Young likely felt he could keep a tight rein on the daughter of his old friend Thomas Osborne.

  As it turned out, Bennett Young never had a chance.

  “As we look over the faces here today and see the changes that another year has wrought, candor compels us to admit that Death is moving with a busy and relentless hand,” Bennett Young told a group of veterans at their state reunion. “His assault is slow and gradual, but he is a foe tha
t will prove invincible, and in the end is sure to triumph.”35

  No one was more aware that the Confederate generation was passing away than America's best-known ex-Confederate.

  By 1919 Bennett Henderson Young stood at the apex of the national United Confederate Veterans organization. After commanding Kentucky's state organization for a decade (and hosting two successful national reunions in Louisville), in 1910 he was elected commander of the Army of Tennessee Department, overseeing activities of UCV camps in seven states. Two years later he was elected commander-in-chief, head of a national organization consisting of 40,000 active Confederate veterans. Young won reelection for three more terms until his voluntary retirement in 1916. A grateful organization named him honorary commander-in-chief for life, the only UCV member to hold that title. He rarely missed a meeting of the Kentucky Confederate Home board of trustees, but he was America's premier Lost Cause orator, and he crisscrossed the country to speak at dedications, reunions, political rallies, and anniversary celebrations.36

  At seventy-six years old, Bennett Young had every right to feel tired when he departed for a much-needed Florida vacation in January 1919. (“It is the only time in all of my life that I have ever felt real puny,” he wrote a friend shortly before his departure.) Staying in Jacksonville, where he and the Haldeman families were planning a real estate development, he realized just how puny he was feeling.37

  “Take me back to Kentucky,” he told his wife. “The end is near. I want to die back in the old Bluegrass State.”

  Bennett Young's final hours were as much a breathless adventure as the rest of his life.38

  On February 22, 1919, when Young's Florida doctor refused him permission to travel, Young called for a taxi to drive him to the railroad station in Jacksonville. “It means no chance, General!” the doctor shouted after him as the cab roared off into the night. At the train station, Young and his wife were joined by friends and another doctor. They found a private stateroom on a northbound express and wired Young's daughter in Atlanta that the train would arrive in that city in several hours.

  Meanwhile, newspapers in Kentucky and throughout the South began posting news of the famed veteran's death race to the Bluegrass State. Reporters waited with Young's daughter on the platform to see if Young was still alive when the train reached Atlanta.

  He was, but barely. His grim-faced daughter boarded the private car, and the train sped off for Kentucky.

  Telegrams sent during brief stops in Chattanooga and Knoxville provided details to Louisville newspapers and family friends of Young's last dash across the South. “I want to cross the river and bivouac with my gallant comrades who have gone before,” he was quoted as saying, but newspapers also warned their readers that Young's “life was ebbing away fast.”

  When the train pulled into Louisville's Union Station after midnight, Young was still clinging to life. A private ambulance, with police escort, met him at the station and carried him to his home at 429 West Ormsby Avenue.

  Bennett H. Young—Confederate raider, attorney, entrepreneur, writer, railroad man, historian, Sunday School superintendent, author, orator, and primary organizer of the Kentucky Confederate Home—died the following afternoon, on February 23, 1919.39

  Published articles marking Bennett Young's death made mention of the Kentucky Confederate Home, of course, but only as a single square in the much larger patchwork quilt that was his life. On paper, the Home was governed by the consensus of an appointed board operating according to parliamentary procedure. In fact, Bennett Young had run the Kentucky Confederate Home for eighteen years. With equal parts compassion, pragmatism, and prudence—and demonstrating an incredible attention to detail—he had directed the lives and activities of inmates, employees, and trustees.

  His death triggered some unexpected changes.

  If Commandant Charles L. Daughtry anticipated that he would be asked to fill Young's slot as president of the board of trustees, he was disappointed. The trustees never even nominated him. Instead, Louisville attorney William A. Milton was elected president of the board, and Milton asked John Leathers to serve as board secretary.40

  Even before Young's death, bookkeeper Florence Barlow had reached the end of her rope with Commandant Daughtry. She was slavishly dedicated to easygoing former commandant Henry George and the happiness of the inmates, but conflict with the more rigid and humorless Charles Daughtry grew to the point where Barlow angrily resigned (or was discharged) from the position she had held for almost fifteen years. Bennett Young had allowed her to keep her room in the Home until she could find other employment, but with Young's death all promises were left derelict. Over Leathers's and Milton's objections, Daughtry convinced the rest of the trustees to evict Barlow from the Home.41 Bitter at Daughtry in particular, the aging bookkeeper moved to a friend's Pewee Valley carriage house, where she could stay in touch with her beloved inmates.

  Henry George died of a heart attack several months after Young passed away, but Daughtry still didn't bring his wife to live at the Home. Instead, he employed a particularly unqualified woman from Brandenburg, twenty-one-year-old Imogene Nall, as bookkeeper and special assistant, and he installed her in the rooms vacated by Barlow and George (“I think she will have a refining influence on some of the men,” Daughtry explained).42

  Discipline problems among the inmates increased, and longtime employees seethed at the little farmer's high-handed manner, but Daughtry handled both with a firm hand. During his first two years at the Home, Daughtry recommended more inmate expulsions than Henry George had found necessary in twelve years. Meanwhile, long-serving resident physician Dr. Rowan B. Pryor left to enter private practice, and Daughtry also replaced several of the stewards and nurses. Home Matron Lela Henley expressed her objections to these changes in a manner that Daughtry privately considered insubordinate.43

  In the wake of Bennett Young's death, the board of trustees seemed to become less involved in day-to-day management at the Home. Meeting minutes reflect a tentativeness regarding personnel decisions, a reluctance to question Commandant Daughtry.

  Charlotte Woodbury and the Women's Advisory Committee, however, continued to conduct regular inspections of the Home and its inmates. The committee prepared its monthly lists of problems relating to nutrition, sanitation, and health care and held Daughtry accountable for resolving them. “I know I have made some mistakes,” Daughtry admitted to the board, “but I insist that the mistakes were of the head and not of the heart.”44

  All these machinations were largely out of the public eye, however. The inmates failed to stir the interest of Kentuckians, who were then more interested in their returning doughboys than in Confederate veterans of a half-century before.

  It would take a near tragedy to rekindle sympathy for the 180 inmates remaining at the Kentucky Confederate Home.

  Chapter 13

  The Trainer and the Undertaker

  Inmate George C. Wells of Scott County was no outdoorsman, but he had cleared enough land, fired enough forges, and boiled enough coffee over enough open campfires in his eighty-five years to recognize wood smoke when he smelled it.

  It was supper time at the Kentucky Confederate Home on Thursday evening, March 25, 1920, and George Wells was clomping his way toward the dining hall about as fast as an old man with one leg could ambulate. Midway along the second-floor verandah, however, Wells stopped, sniffed the air, and tried to figure out where that smoke was coming from.

  Downstairs in the almost-full dining hall, Commandant Daughtry paced between the tables, making sure each of his men was wearing his bib before he signaled the servers to bring out the evening meal of mutton, string beans, sliced tomatoes, and stewed peaches. Daughtry stopped at the back of the hall, lifted his nose in the air, caught a whiff of smoke, and likely thought to have a word with the cook about burning the cornbread. He turned to step toward the kitchen, but his attention was drawn to the one-legged veteran hopping across the lobby toward the open doors of the dining room.
<
br />   Red-faced and out of breath, George Wells burst into the hall.

  The goddam place is burning down and we'd best get ourselves out!

  Frowning at the profanity, Commandant Daughtry turned on his toes and quick-marched toward the one-legged man.1

  Gusty March winds. A forty-year-old frame structure built of lumber now dry as kindling. Wood-burning stoves and flammable fuel oil drums stacked in the basement. One hundred eighty old men—many bedridden—living in close quarters.

  It was a recipe for disaster.

  Fire protection was never a particularly high priority at the Kentucky Confederate Home; when the trustees discussed the matter, it was more often in terms of possible financial loss than loss of life. The executive committee kept fire insurance in place (as required by the state auditor) and reviewed the coverage from time to time. (Shortly after becoming secretary of the board of trustees in 1919, John Leathers recommended an additional $16,000 coverage be “placed on the Home in order to fully protect all our property.”)2

  A legislative appropriation in 1903 paid to equip the main building with some fire control and rescue equipment, including two 1,000-gallon wheeled water-pumping wagons. The commandant was instructed to post a fire watch each night, and an inmate was assigned to walk the hallways from lights-out until dawn, but there were no regular fire drills or strict rules for fire safety.

  During his tenure, Commandant Henry George organized a fire brigade, a team of inmates who were trained to use the pump wagons and respond to any fire emergency at the Home or the surrounding community. The fire brigade proved its worth in 1908 when chimney sparks touched off a fire on the Home's infirmary roof. Like well-drilled infantrymen, the old veterans ran for the fire shed. Within minutes they were pumping water onto the burning roof, and the fire was completely extinguished by the time Crestwood volunteer firemen arrived. It was “a blaze which for a time threatened destruction of the Home, but was gotten under control by hard work on the part of the inmates,” a newspaper reported.3