There was no fire brigade in 1917 when a small fire, probably caused by faulty wiring, broke out in one of the towers of the main building. Loungers on the lawn saw smoke and sounded the alarm. A hastily organized bucket brigade using water from a fourth-floor standpipe put down the fire before serious damage was done.4
Other institutions of the time weren't so lucky.
In 1915 fire consumed a four-story frame building in San Francisco, a Catholic girls’ home, and only heroic action by the nuns saved thirty-six of the forty little girls who lived there.
A few years later, in Chicago, an unattended cookstove touched off a fire in an insane asylum, and flames swept through the dormitory before anyone could sound an alarm. Nineteen inmates died in their beds from burns and smoke inhalation.
A former resort hotel in Quebec, converted for use as a hospital, burned to the ground in 1916, despite its location less than two blocks from a metropolitan fire department. Fanned by a strong breeze, flames blew through the long hallways of the wood-frame building, cutting off patients in their rooms or trapping them in hallways. Recovery crews had difficulty separating the bodies of burned men from their twisted metal bedsprings, and hospital officials declared it fortunate that only twenty-five patients died in the hellish inferno.5
On March 25, 1920, hell came to visit the Kentucky Confederate Home.
Inmates later swore that a careless black handyman, out for a smoke on a rear porch in the northeast corner of the Home, started the fire. Whether it was the handyman or one of the inmates, it's likely that embers from a hand-rolled cigarette or a smoldering cigar butt or the live coal from a pipe bowl fell through the porch planks to the dry grass below. Lath latticework hid the dead grass from view, and the ember may have glowed there in the straw tufts for a while, fanned by a southerly breeze, as men walked overhead.
The supper bell rang shortly after 5:00 P.M.
When the grass finally ignited, it may have taken several minutes for the fire to touch off the lattice and burn its way up to the porch beams. Like seasoned firewood, the oak beams were dry, untreated, and ready to burn. Still hidden, the fire may have gnawed along the underside of several beams for a time, emitting little smoke, before poking upward to ignite the porch planks.
By the time one-legged George Wells, late to dinner and following his nose to the smoke smell, saw the fire, flames were burning across a fifteen-foot section of porch and were climbing the walls toward the upper floors.
A fire insurance map of the Home buildings and grounds, dating from about 1909, shows a facility equipped to protect itself from conflagration. Ten standpipes, each with fifty feet of two-inch hose attached, are spread throughout the main building and the infirmary, with fifteen Babcock chemical extinguishers mounted near the stairways of both buildings. Fire buckets, ladders, and two small pumpers are in the fire shed, along with two hose reels, each wound with a hundred feet of hose. The schematic shows a fire pump and hose next to a concrete water containment pool 150 feet to the rear of the Home and two 1,000-gallon water tanks in the attic of the main building. Big Kirker-Bender fire escapes—tall, sheet-metal escape slides like giant corkscrews—stand at either end of the building. Behind and between the main building and infirmary is an elevated wooden water tank, 50,000 gallons standing on legs eighty feet above the ground, with sufficient water and pressure to combat the fiercest blaze.
By 1920, however, most of the fire protection was gone.
The spiral escape slides still stood, but where there had been ten standpipes with outlets on each floor in 1909, many had been covered by paper, paneling, or plaster during periodic renovations in the years following. Most of the hoses were gone, too, borrowed for other purposes around the Home. If the chemical extinguishers were still in place, most were likely inoperable; there is no record of them being recharged, replaced, or serviced after 1915. Fire buckets were still stacked in a storage shed, but the wheeled pumpers were gone, cannibalized for parts or donated to the Crestwood Volunteer Fire Department. The concrete containment pool had cracked years before, and any water it held was green, sludgy, and full of debris. The attic and fourth floor of the main building had been sealed off for years, and it is unlikely that the storage tanks—if they still existed—were filled with water. There was no trained fire brigade; eighty-year-old inmates were too infirm to handle any equipment that remained. The nearest fire equipment was at the town of Crestwood, five miles away.
On Thursday evening, March 25, 1920, a hundred old men were crowding into the dining hall for supper. Fifty-nine more, incapacitated due to age or illness, lay in the infirmary waiting for someone to bring their evening meal. Outside, the southerly March wind was stiffening as sunset approached, whipping the flames that were beginning to burn through the porch roof.
Only the elevated wooden water tank, 50,000 gallons standing on legs eighty feet above the ground, promised any protection against a major fire.
“We was playing checkers when George Wells let out that unearthly yell,” Rufus Hawkins said. Hawkins, Jeb Jenkins, John Watkins, and others crowded around Wells to learn what the fuss was about.
Commandant Daughtry wasn't about to take the word of a panic-stricken old man that the building was afire, so he left the inmates in the dining hall and ran to see for himself. By then, flames were climbing the outside of the building, and wind was pushing flames into open windows on the second and third floors, setting curtains ablaze. After a quick look, Daughtry ran for his office on the south end of the main building.
The inmates in the dining hall, smelling smoke and beginning to grasp the situation, came to their feet and moved toward the doors. Like ants in a kicked-over mound, they scattered, some to look at the fire, some to the stairways upstairs, and others to doors leading outside.
Engineer Alexander S. McFarlan grabbed several of the dining servers and a half-dozen of the more able-bodied inmates, leading them outside to the old storage shed. He shouted orders to his makeshift crew, and in ten minutes they were spraying the fire with three hoses that McFarlan coupled to pipes on the big water tower.
McFarlan's fire brigade may have slowed progress of the fire outside the building, but the flames were already eating their way through the upper rooms. Dozens of inmates had left the dining hall to return to their rooms—some seeking a place of safety, others to rescue personal belongings—and the doors they opened allowed the wind to carry flames from room to room and down wide hallways. As smoke purled up the stairways, terrified old men ran aimlessly through doorways, in and out of the small upstairs rooms, slapping at hot cinders that fell on their shoulders, hair, and beards. Flame crawled across bedroom walls, feeding off layers of old paper. Strips of burning wallpaper fell to the floors, igniting hemp carpet runners.
Some of the inmates upstairs tried to fight the fire by swatting it with quilts, only to scatter fiery bits of cotton over the territory they were trying to save. Others grabbed for old photographs or special treasures, then tried to hightail it out of the burning building.6
Intending to make his escape down one of the spiral escape chutes, one inmate threw his overstuffed valise before him down the slide. The valise jammed the chute at the first corkscrew, rendering the slide useless for escape.7
From the northeast corner of the building where the fire started, the fire ate its way steadily southward through parlors, linen closets, and washrooms toward the commandant's office, where Charles L. Daughtry was frantically calling for help.
Smoke swirled around the ceiling of his office and flames drew nearer as Commandant Daughtry used the candlestick telephone on his desk to call for help.
Though Daughtry could ring his neighbors directly, calls outside Pewee Valley had to be placed through the local phone company's switchboard operator; the best operators remained calm and levelheaded in even the direst emergencies. (Several years before, Pewee Valley telephone operator Ida Ochsner, discovering a fire in her own building near the depot, remained at her second-floor switchboa
rd, coolly calling fire departments and notifying neighbors, as smoke and flame boiled up the stairway toward her. Her job complete, Ida docked the plugs, groped her way to an open window, jumped onto a telephone pole, and slid down to safety.)8 From her window at the exchange, the Pewee Valley operator could see smoke and embers rising from the Home. Unperturbed, she connected Daughtry to the fire departments in Crestwood, Louisville, Middletown, and La Grange. The departments assured him that help was on the way.
Flames reached Daughtry's office near the south end of the building by 6:15, forcing him to evacuate. He tucked the inmate register and a few other papers under his arm, then left the building for the last time.
The Pewee Valley telephone operator continued to place calls to neighbors who might help fight the fire, to local churches, and to City Hospital in Louisville, warning them to expect casualties.
Most of the neighbors didn't need a phone call to alert them: the twilight sky glowed blood-red as a rooster's comb from flames that were punching through the roof of the main building. They arrived by the dozens with buckets to help fight the fire. Engineer McFarlan recruited some to replace the tired inmates on his hose crew; others assisted veterans who were still stumbling out of the burning building with their rescued possessions. Father E. C. McAllister, rector of St. James's Episcopal Church, saw the fire from the front steps of his church and ran to the Home, arriving out of breath to offer whatever comfort he could provide to the living or the dying.
The intense heat of the fire forced the amateur firefighters away from the building as flames moved through the Home from north to south. Paint on the wood siding of the infirmary—forty feet south of the main building—bubbled in the heat.
Fifty-nine bedridden old men lay in the path of the inferno.
John T. Jones had seen his share of stable fires; he had worked around horses all his life. A native of Fayette County, he turned twenty-three years old in time to enlist in the Confederate army as a cavalryman in 1861. He served most of the war as a Morgan Man, returning to the saddle after a Federal bullet shattered his elbow, leaving him unable to extend his left arm completely for the rest of his life. After the war, Jones went to Bourbon County, earning his living as a horse trainer while he and his wife raised eight children.
The big ranches of Texas had a greater need for horse trainers than did postwar Kentucky, however, and Jones moved his family west. He—and later his sons—worked the stock farms of Texas, training native horses as cowboy mounts. Like R. J. Law up in Red River County, P. D. Self near Granbury, or Will Roberson out of Comanche, Confederate veteran John T. Jones spent the last years of the nineteenth century as an itinerant trainer, working a season or two at one ranch, then moving to another. His wife kept a house in Dallas, but when she died in 1904 Jones judged the range life too undependable for an old man and returned to the Bluegrass. He was admitted to the Kentucky Confederate Home in 1914.9
On the night of the fire, Jones was on the lawn of the Home when he heard that the infirmary building was in danger of catching fire. Like horses stabled in their stalls, fifty-nine men were trapped in small rooms, unable to make their own escape.
Jones had seen fire rage through a stable, the horses plunging and fighting for their freedom as the smoke rose and the flames neared—these were sights, sounds, and smells impossible to forget.
Eighty-two-year-old former horse trainer John T. Jones ran to the infirmary, intending to rescue as many of his fellow inmates as he could.
Official sunset that day came at 6:16, and by full dark the blaze could be seen for miles around. More residents arrived by the minute, and they could see in the dark that burning embers were floating high and northward on the wind, threatening to ignite neighboring properties. Someone called out that the nearby G. T. Blackley residence was aflame, and men with buckets ran toward that home.
Meanwhile, as inmates and volunteers carried the infirmary patients to safety, Father McAllister walked among the inmates and draped blankets over the shoulders of singed and shivering survivors. He sent some of his parishioners back to their homes to begin preparing food, and he asked a vestryman to open St. James to shelter the injured.
Trees surrounding the Home were bursting into flame from the heat, lighting the grounds like giant torches, as McFarlan directed his hose crew to throw water on the smoking north end of the infirmary building. The brass nozzles on the three hoses were growing too hot to hold, and the tall wooden legs of the big water tower were beginning to smoke.
At seven o'clock, help arrived in the form of local undertaker Milton A. Stoess.
Crestwood's Volunteer Fire Department was the invention of Milton A. Stoess: he organized the department, paid for most of the equipment, garaged the pumpers in a shed behind his house, and wore the Fire Chief's hat. Locals joked that the fire department was a way for Stoess to get first call on victims for his funeral parlor. The joke was funny because everyone in Crestwood knew how untrue it was.
Milton Stoess had grown up in the area, having been born on a Henry County farm in 1869, the son of German immigrant farmers. Near the turn of the century, having apprenticed with a Henry County undertaker, Stoess opened his own funeral parlor in Crestwood, a bustling railroad town five miles from Pewee Valley.
He looked the part of a small-town undertaker—tall, thin, narrow-faced. His frugality with words, which most took as a sign of his compassion and interest, was more likely the result of growing up in a German-speaking household. In time, Stoess acquired a fine funeral carriage, an ornate coffin wagon, a stable of good horses, a silvered lowering device, and plenty of chairs. He became a conscientious civic citizen, helping to organize a private water company, serving as an elder at the Christian Church, and founding the volunteer fire department.
One of the first regular customers of the M. A. Stoess Funeral Home was the Kentucky Confederate Home. Day or night, Stoess would retrieve the body of a deceased inmate for embalming and burial in the Confederate Cemetery or shipment home. Driving his hearse and dressed in black suit and boiled white shirt, Milton Stoess was the subject of some morbid humor when he visited the Home. So it was a surprise, in a night full of surprises, when the cadaverous undertaker arrived at the Home behind the wheel of a makeshift automobile chemical pumper in leather fire hat and denim overalls.
However he was dressed, Stoess and the Crestwood fire company were needed to fight the flames that had begun to lick and twist across the north wall of the infirmary building.
Along with the automobile chemical pumper, the Crestwood volunteer crew arrived with two thousand-gallon horse-drawn hand pumpers. After a hurried consultation, the taciturn fire chief deployed his volunteers and equipment. He sent one team of hand pumpers north to help with the fire at the Blackley home; the other he assigned to the perimeter of the Home grounds to douse grass fires and windblown embers. With a wary eye on the large water tank looming above him, he directed the crew of his chemical pumper toward the infirmary's north wing.
Welcome as the Crestwood equipment might be, the Kentucky Confederate Home desperately needed more resources if the place was to survive. As Stoess assigned his equipment to battle stations, a motorized fire company from Louisville was crawling over dark country roads toward Pewee Valley.
Fire Captain Fred Stephan of the Louisville Fire Department received Daughtry's alarm at 6:30 P.M. From his station on Louisville's east side, Captain Stephan assembled a hose-and-chemical wagon, a ladder truck, and one of Louisville's massive new American LaFrance motor-driven, motor-pumping fire engines.10
Louisville had acquired its first motor-driven fire engine seven years before (though it would take another decade to retire the last of the fire horses), and in 1917 the fire department had bought the first of its three American LaFrance motor-pumper behemoths. The huge vehicle rode on wood-spoke wheels across an eighteen-foot wheelbase and carried a thousand feet of two-and-a-half-inch standard fire hose. Its motorized rotary pump could throw 1,400 gallons of water per minute, an
d it was a proven lifesaver for urban fires. But the narrow solid rubber tires and the contraption's sheer size and weight—more than two tons—slowed the powerful vehicle to a crawl when it left paved city streets.
Thirty minutes after the first call, the firefighters rolled through the town of St. Matthews, on the outskirts of Louisville and still not halfway to Pewee Valley. For the remainder of the run, Captain Stephan, his fire company of nine men, and the much-needed fire equipment would creep along on dark and rutted dirt roads at less than twenty miles per hour.
As best John T. Jones could tell, the infirmary was finally empty of patients. Some of the horse trainer's old comrades were still being carried to shelter at the Episcopal church or Pewee Valley's Masonic Hall; others were stretched out on canvas litters, stunned to insensibility by the disaster unfolding before them and beginning to wonder who failed to make it out safely. Pewee Valley women circulated among the veterans, offering a warm meal or shelter in their homes.
Hundreds of onlookers milled around the Home grounds as Charles Daughtry and his secretary, Imogene Nall, frantically jotted notes and names, trying to compile a list of inmates who had escaped the fire and those who hadn't.
By 7:30 P.M. Milton Stoess had directed A. S. McFarlan to remove his small hoses from the tall water tower and connect them to working standpipes in the south and central wings of the infirmary. Crestwood's chemical pumper had, so far, managed to contain the fire to the north wing of the hospital, but flames jumped to the three-story laundry building behind the infirmary, and it appeared certain that that building would be lost.
There was still no sign of the Louisville fire equipment.
Volunteers were reporting to Stoess that the Blackley house was fully involved and the nearby Hudson residence was burning. Embers were igniting trees in the yard of writer Annie Fellows Johnson, endangering that house as well. A stiff wind still whipped the flames; glowing embers fell to the ground as far as three miles away.
My Old Confederate Home Page 24