My Old Confederate Home

by Rusty Williams

  Seven-year-old Gin Herdt—no one called her “Virginia” except schoolteachers and preachers—didn't know or particularly care about the personal histories of the men of the Kentucky Confederate Home. The inmates were immaterial to the world inhabited by small-town children. However, like most of the others growing up in Pewee Valley, Gin knew most of the old veterans by sight, if not by name: Mr. Kern was short and barrel-chested; he sometimes delivered the mail around Pewee Valley. Mr. Shearin was tall and skinny with thick round spectacles that made him look like an owl. Mr. White rolled along the walkways in his wheelchair, but he was going blind and mostly stayed on the porch unless he had someone to push him. Mr. Herring had snow-white hair and a bowlegged walk; Mr. Metcalfe's mouth was caved in from lack of teeth. Mr. Kemper always had money, and he sometimes gave nickels to children who ran errands for him.

  Every house in Pewee Valley, it seemed, had its favorite veteran, an inmate who might show up to do a little gardening or a few odd jobs for tobacco money. The Herdts had John Thomas Laws of Louisville, a ninety-year-old former sergeant of the Second Kentucky Infantry, Company K.

  “‘Uncle Tom,’ we all called him,” Gin recalled. “He was like a member of the family.”

  Tall, gentle Uncle Tom Laws spent time in the Herdt home doing errands and, now and then, babysitting Gin and the other Herdt children while their parents took some time away. Tom also helped at the wagon shop, occasionally driving into Louisville with William to deliver a job or pick up a part.

  The Herdts visited Tom at the Home, too. “Momma would bake him a cake on his birthday, and we'd take it over to him,” Gin said.

  Gin remembered the last time that she and her family walked from their house to the Kentucky Confederate Home to see Uncle Tom. She sat with her father, sister, and brother on folding chairs in Duke Hall while her mother played piano for the funeral service of Confederate Sergeant John Thomas Laws, who fought at Fort Donelson, Stones River, Jackson, Chickamauga, Mission Ridge, Resaca, Dallas, Peachtree Creek, and Jonesboro.

  The little girl grew up in a neighborhood surrounded by old men who, sixty years before, had left their homes and families to fight for a cause that was lost before the first battle was joined. By August 31, 1928, forty-six of them remained in the Home.9

  The winter of 1928–1929 was a hard one for the inmates of the Kentucky Confederate Home; a particularly virulent strain of flu took the lives of nineteen veterans in twenty-two days.10

  In the midst of the epidemic, State Inspector John N. Ashcraft arrived in Pewee Valley to audit the institution. Ashcraft made no recommendations in his report, but stated as fact what everyone knew: “So long as the Home is maintained in these large quarters with a capacity for around 250 persons, the overhead expense and per capita cost of taking care of these veterans is bound to be large.”

  On February 11, 1929, the day Ashcraft forwarded his report to the governor, thirty-five veterans remained in the Home.11

  “When a man dies he is dressed in a nice Confederate soldier's uniform, put in a nice coffin and his funeral preached; buried in the Confederate Soldier's Cemetery one mile from the Home and tombstones put at the head of his grave,” inmate George W. Noble wrote in 1928.12

  Commandant McFarlan was conscientious about his paperwork, and the imminent death of an inmate triggered a process unique to the Home. First, McFarlan would consult his death book, a ledger entitled “Information about Inmates Requests and Kinfolks.” In it, an inmate might list his next of kin, contact information, burial instructions, or special requests. Veteran D. B. Bennett wanted his body returned to Dawson Springs for burial, and he entered the name of a funeral director there. Lavan M. Shearin asked that someone telephone his daughter in Indianapolis in the event of his death, but if “at night, send telegram.” Ninety-two-year-old widower M. N. Webster wanted “no kind of dope administered when sick.” George Booze had built up an account in Pewee Valley State Bank sufficient to ship his body back to Corbin for burial, and he left a note in the death book authorizing McFarlan to withdraw the money for that purpose.13

  “The doctor has reported to us that Mr. George C. Wells is failing very fast and in all probability will not last long,” McFarlan wrote to the veteran's daughter in August 1925, following Wells's request in the death book. “At his age, you understand a change may come for the worse at any time.”14

  When an inmate passed away and the family was notified, McFarlan called undertaker Milton Stoess in Crestwood. McFarlan had negotiated a package price for veterans who were to be buried in the Confederate Cemetery. For $14, the funeral director would retrieve the body, wash it, dress it in a fresh uniform supplied by the Home, place it in a wood coffin for the funeral service in Duke Hall, then transport it to the cemetery and inter it there.15

  By the 1920s Stoess was using an automotive hearse to carry coffins from the Home to the cemetery. A few inmate mourners might ride in the funeral car, but most, wearing dress uniforms, would march in silence, bareheaded under the old banners, north on Maple Avenue.

  Little Gin Herdt and other Pewee Valley residents would watch the solemn procession to the cemetery, then later see a handful of old men walk back down Maple to the Home, yipping and yawping like schoolboys, full of the giddy and guilty exhilaration of having outlived another comrade.

  With the funeral of George L. Tandy on May 23, 1929, twenty-nine veterans remained in the Home.16

  Political vultures were circling Pewee Valley, but the women of Kentucky's UDC chapters were not about to see their hallowed Home carried away.

  At its state convention in October 1929, the UDC voted to press for legislation converting the Kentucky Confederate Home into an institution for the care of Kentucky veterans of the Spanish-American War and the recent World War. Such action, they pointed out, would avert sending the remaining Confederate veterans to poorhouses and at the same time would inaugurate a service for needy veterans of other wars. The women had helped pay for the Home, they supported it with their hearts and purses, and they were determined to keep it open as a Lost Cause memorial. The state UDC president pledged to field a full-time delegation of Daughters at the next legislative session.17

  Politicos cast covetous eyes on the plum Pewee Valley property—forty-two prime acres of land, including a working farm and like-new institutional buildings—even as the remaining veterans passed away. The state examiner noted, “The grounds and buildings now used for the Home could be used to relieve the congested condition at some other institution.”18

  Directors of the state's eleemosynary facilities began lining up support with the governor's office and favored legislators, hoping to inherit the buildings and grounds. Kentucky's major newspapers, which had once consistently editorialized on behalf of the veterans, now ran columns speculating on who should inherit the property and what should become of the ex-Confederates remaining there.19

  Governor Flem D. Sampson had little interest in the Kentucky Confederate Home. At the beginning of the 1930 legislative session, he appointed two dead men to the board of trustees, a mistake discovered only after the dead men were confirmed as trustees and telegrams sent to inform them of their appointment.20

  There were few remaining veterans able to serve on the board of trustees, so by 1930 the board was made up of an equal number of veterans and sons of veterans. Governor Sampson appointed Charles F. Leathers, son of late Louisville banker John H. Leathers, to the board in 1930. Veterans who founded and operated the Kentucky Confederate Home in its early years—the original trustees—managed a home for the benefit of former comrades, often men whom they had commanded in combat, many of whom they had known personally for decades. The new generation of trustees—the sons of veterans—sought merely the orderly disposition of affairs, respectful guardianship of old men who were more like distant uncles than comrades.

  Commandant McFarlan's competence earned him free rein from the passive board. Remaining ex-Confederates, the Daughters, and inmates lauded his operation of the Home;
best of all, he ended each year with a slight budget surplus. Over the years the board raised McFarlan's salary to $200 a month, and his wife earned an additional $60 for her duties as matron. In addition, McFarlan's oldest son was on the payroll at $120 a month as engineer, providing the commandant's household a comfortable $4,560 annual income.21

  The Daughters failed in their attempt to expand the role of the Kentucky Confederate Home during the 1930 legislative session, but their furious lobbying managed to defeat several bills that would have abolished the Home.22

  By October 1931, as the Daughters debated their strategy for another legislative session and the effects of the Great Depression deepened in Kentucky, twelve veterans remained in the Home.23

  The United States experienced financial panics in 1873, 1893, and 1907, but never had all areas of the country and all classes of people been affected as deeply and as personally as during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

  Kentucky tax revenues were shrinking as farm prices bottomed out and mines shut down. Factories slowed their output; fewer boats visited Kentucky river ports. By 1933 one fourth of Kentucky's banks had failed. (George Booze lost most of the money he had banked for his burial.)

  The Home's trustees reacted to worsening economic news by reducing the number of employees and cutting the salaries of the remaining employees by 10 percent, but expenses could be curtailed only so much.24 Sentiment in Frankfort seemed to be in favor of closing the Home, especially when the state examiner reported it was costing more than $1,000 a year per resident to house and feed the ex-Confederates in Pewee Valley (this at a time when many Kentucky families were struggling by on a third of that amount).25

  “As a taxpayer, may I suggest that there seems to be a glaring waste of state funds” on the Home in Pewee Valley, one reader wrote to the editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal. The writer's father was a Confederate veteran, and he fully appreciated the tender feelings the Home carried with it, but the fact that it required twelve employees to care for eleven inmates “in itself seems to be a strong impetus toward closing this institution.”26

  Charlotte Woodbury and the women of the UDC flooded legislative offices with letters of their own. While they acknowledged the high cost of caring for the inmates, they again proposed that other dependents of the state be placed there with the veterans. (“It has been suggested that the crippled children be moved to this beautiful country place,” Woodbury wrote.)27 The Daughters were still a political force to be reckoned with, and they enlisted members of the Daughters of the American Republic and the Kentucky Federation of Women's Clubs to join their lobbying effort. Camping out in Senate offices, women described the hardships to be visited on the old veterans if they were to be moved “to new, unfamiliar and lonely surroundings.”

  Incredibly, the UDC prevailed. Though the State Budget Commission supported closing the Home and moving the veterans elsewhere, and a state assemblyman proposed legislation to that effect, the measure failed. When the legislature passed several temporary funding bills to sustain the Home through 1934, the national UDC organization lauded Kentucky's Daughters for having “saved the Confederate Home,” noting that lawmakers “yielded to patriotic and sentimental pleas not to evict the aged men.”28

  On July 6, 1932, when the state examiner urged new Governor Ruby Laffoon to take executive action to close it, nine veterans remained in the Home.29

  “The Home as an institution may now be likened with those it fosters,” Commandant McFarlan acknowledged in September 1933. “It is nearing the end of its existence and there is no doubt of the next General Assembly making some provision regarding the Home and the future care of the few inmates now in it.”30

  Economic conditions in the state continued to worsen, and it was glaringly apparent to everyone that the life of the Home was coming to a close.

  Lawmakers and newspaper editors heard daily from Kentuckians who viewed the Home as an unnecessary waste. “The enormity of over-expenditure of taxpayer funds in this institution grows more apparent and more appalling,” wrote one disgruntled Oldham County resident. The commandant took his share of criticism, too: “The material assets of the various members of the family who operates the Home have risen to a most comforting point.”31

  Everyone had to get along on less, and the McFarlan family was no exception. McFarlan had taken further pay cuts, and by 1933 was making just $125 a month. His wife had been cut from the payroll (though she still worked at the Home), and his oldest son had left Pewee Valley to look for another job.32 Gin Herdt's father had converted his motor business to a Ford motorcar dealership in 1925, but by 1933, with no one buying new cars, William Herdt and his sixteen-year-old son struggled to make a living repairing trucks and automobiles for those who could afford to operate them.

  If times were hard, the children of Pewee Valley barely noticed. The Kentucky Confederate Home grounds was still a fine neighborhood playground. The children trooped to Duke Hall for graduation ceremonies, piano recitals, and, once, even a Charleston contest. The benign gray ghosts in their Home uniforms still floated around the children's world, but so few remained they were hardly a presence.

  Gin Herdt was twelve years old in 1933, her scabby-knee-and-bare-feet years about to end. One of the veterans—eighty-six-year-old Tennessee-born Charles Morris, perhaps, who served in the Twelfth Kentucky Cavalry seventy years before—gave the little girl a quarter for singing a favorite song. She ran to the drugstore, using the coin to buy her first lipstick.

  The children wouldn't have noticed on December 26, 1933, when State Examiner Nat B. Sewell, in the strongest official language yet, urged that the Kentucky Confederate Home be closed and the property be sold or leased to raise revenues for the state.33

  Six Kentucky Confederate veterans remained in the Home.

  In March 1934 a state representative introduced a bill calling for the abolishment of the Kentucky Confederate Home. According to the bill, inmates remaining in the Home on July 1, 1934, would be transferred to the care of the Pewee Valley Sanitarium and Hospital, which would receive $2.00 a day per inmate for their care. The grounds and buildings would be turned over to the state's Department of Public Property for final disposal.34

  The Daughters made a halfhearted effort to block the legislation, but even the most devoted among them realized that the handwriting was on the wall. As the board of trustees instructed McFarlan to begin closing out the books and inventorying items, Pewee Valley residents began to daydream about what might become of the grounds on which the elegant Villa Ridge Inn once stood.

  Recalling Charlotte Woodbury's earlier suggestion, many in the village favored a proposal that the Home be converted “into an orthopedic hospital for the care and treatment of crippled children.” Ebullient new president Franklin D. Roosevelt, crippled by polio, encouraged the hope that children disabled by disease or defect might be made to walk again, and neighbors of the Home noted that “the spacious grounds would provide plenty of outdoor recreation for the juvenile patients.”35

  Others suggested that Pewee Valley secure Federal Public Works Administration monies and dedicate the land as a state park. Still others desired that the property become a permanent Confederate memorial park.36

  Those pastoral dreams crashed into bureaucratic reality on April 16, 1934, when a delegation arrived in town to evaluate the property's fitness as an overflow facility for the Lakeland Asylum. Pewee Valley residents’ vision of brave little children frolicking over the grounds was replaced overnight by the prospect of having hundreds of violent, drooling lunatics housed in their midst. Frank E. Gatchel, chairman of the Pewee Valley town board, called for mass meetings, and howls of protest could be heard as far as Frankfort.37

  Rather disingenuously, Governor Laffoon pronounced that he “hoped to dispose of the property as advantageously as possible to the state, without doing any injustice to the community of Pewee Valley.” First, however, the ex-Confederates must be moved.38

  With the death of ninety-o
ne-year-old Ike Humphrey, five Kentucky Confederate veterans remained in the Home.

  Members of the board of trustees conferred by phone with Kentucky attorney general Bailey Wooton on matters related to the July 1 closure.

  Men and women from all over the state were showing up at the Home's door asking for the return of items they had donated over the years. Confederate-era flags, firearms, and furniture—some quite valuable—decorated the public rooms of the Home, and the board had no reliable record of the original donor. Retain the items for disposition by the Kentucky Department of Public Property, Wooton instructed. Birdie Parr Marshall and her attorney arrived in Pewee Valley with a court order demanding the portrait of Captain Daniel G. Parr commissioned by the Parr family thirty years before. The portrait was hanging in Duke Hall, and the boat captain's daughter wanted it back. Give it to her, the attorney general said.39

  The board also dealt with the matter of the donation jar, a sum of $131 in cash that had accumulated over the years from small gifts given by visitors. Wooton told the board that they were free to hand the money over to Charlotte Woodbury and the Confederate Home chapter of the UDC for improvements to the Confederate Cemetery at Pewee Valley.40

  As July 1 approached, Commandant McFarlan completed his inventory of every book, every painting, every piece of furniture, every appliance, every frying pan—everything in the Kentucky Confederate Home. Facing unemployment himself, McFarlan did his best to buoy the spirits of the five remaining inmates; he made final arrangements to release the employees and move the old men on Friday, June 29.

  A week before the move, Attorney General Wooton phoned Charles F. Leathers, and Leathers phoned McFarlan at the Home. There had been a hitch. The law abolishing the Home had never been published and was therefore not yet legally in force. Hold everything.

  For three weeks Commandant McFarlan, his wife, and the five remaining inmates rattled around the empty rooms, among the crates and draped furniture of the Kentucky Confederate Home, entertaining one another with stories they had shared a hundred times.