My Old Confederate Home (12 page)

The audience erupted over mention of Tennessee's brilliant cavalryman.

“ … the peerless Breckinridge …”

The roar from the crowd was almost constant, but Young continued with the names of battles and leaders dear to Kentuckians' hearts.

“ … the Federal lines at Harrisburg, Mississippi …”

The roar increased in volume.

“ … that memorable campaign from Dalton …”

Louder still.

“ … to Atlanta …”

By this point the call-and-response between speaker and audience was at a sonic volume sufficient to blow the windows out of any Baptist church. At the absolute crescendo of excitation, however, at the precise moment when this roaring mob of 10,000 seemed ready to strip bark from the trees in their frenzy, Young went silent.

The crowd was confused, and its sound spluttered away to nothing.

For a long moment Young simply stared at his audience, letting their attention focus on him alone. He spread his arms wide and finally, in a low, steely voice that was almost sepulchral, continued.

“Today we swing wide these hospitable doors and bid these heroes come in.” Young slowly closed his arms to his chest, as if embracing the whole of the crowd.

“Here with sheltering love no want shall go unsupplied… . Here they can abide in peace, plenty, quiet and comfort until they shall answer the divine roll call and cross over to the unknown shore to keep company with the immortals.”

As the audience cheered these words Young reached into the lectern to produce a set of golden keys. He displayed them to the crowd, then turned to Governor Beckham's seat on the platform.

“And to you, governor of our beloved Commonwealth … I tender these keys with unfaltering faith that Kentucky will never forget her brave and chivalrous sons, who at Shiloh …”

Again, the audience exploded at mention of that fateful name.

“ … Hartsville …”

The call-and-response began once more, louder even than the first time.

“ … Kennesaw Mountain …”

“ … Jonesboro …”

“ … Resaca …”

“ … Murfreesboro …”

Men who had yelled themselves hoarse threw hats in the air and waved handkerchiefs; women swooned and kissed their hands to him; children stood paralyzed by the incredible explosion of noise surrounding them. Few heard (or needed to hear) the final few words of Young's dedicatory address.

When the audience finally regained its composure, they saw that Governor Beckham was standing at the podium, golden keys in one hand and a sheaf of papers in the other.

“There is a certain lady in this crowd who has me very much intimidated,” the Boy Governor began. “During the war her work of sending supplies to the Confederate soldiers in the South was carried on to such an extent that it attracted the attention of Federal authorities, and she concluded that the climate of Canada would be more congenial to her than the prospect of a Northern prison. That lady was my mother.”

The audience chuckled; most knew of Julia Tevis Wickliffe Beckham's wartime activities. She was the adventuresome daughter of Kentucky's beloved governor Charles A. Wickliffe and the sister of Louisiana's Governor R. C. Wickliffe. Now an attractive dowager, she enjoyed the rare distinction of being the daughter, sister, and mother of governors of states.
¹³

Julia Beckham, former Confederate spy, acknowledged the polite applause without leaving her seat.

“She said that if I dared say anything that was not complimentary to the Southern soldiers or the cause they espoused, she would get right up and disown me,” Beckham said with a shy grin. “So to avoid running the risk of anything of the kind, I have committed to paper what I have to say.”

Beckham formally accepted the Home on behalf of the State of Kentucky. His speech was unremarkable, but it was well received by the ex-Confederates, lauding as it did their wartime patriotism and assuring them that the people of Kentucky would care for them in their old age. The governor's voice was confident and clear, and he did not attempt the oratorical flourishes or bombast that might have been more appropriate for an older man. Beckham read his speech rather than deliver it from memory. The youthful governor basked in the warmth, if not adulation, of the crowd, and he gave his mother no reason to disown him.

As the festivities wound to a close, Bennett Young motioned for a fragile old man to join him at the podium. Slowly, almost painfully, the man rose from his seat on the speaker's stand, his eyes sunken and lusterless. Assisted by his matronly daughter, a black manservant, and an ebony walking stick, he wobbled toward Young, looking not unlike a giant mantis in a black wool suit.

Captain Daniel G. Parr, whose gift of a house and lot sparked the final push for a Confederate veterans home eighteen months before, leaned close to Young in utter confusion as he was introduced to the crowd. On behalf of their family, Parr's daughter, Virginia Sale, presented a silk streamer—a red, white, and blue guidon inscribed “The Confederate Home”—and it was hoist on the flagstaff.

A final benediction sent the crowd on its way.

The ceremonies in Pewee Valley on October 23, 1902, marked a clear dividing line for Kentucky's ex-Confederates. In less than two years they had completed the tasks necessary to build a veterans' home. From that day forward they would have to provide for its management.

Governor Beckham and his mother departed Pewee Valley that afternoon on the governor's special train. He carried with him the golden keys, symbolic of his proprietorship of the Kentucky Confederate Home. Beckham would sleep that night in his Frankfort apartment, comfortable that he had done nothing to embarrass himself in front of the veterans. A year later he would win reelection, his victory ensured by the near unanimous support of Kentucky's ex-Confederates.

Lorenzo Holloway would sleep that night at what was now officially the Kentucky Confederate Home. As a young man he had spent three ugly years in a Federal institution, and he had chosen to spend the final years of his life in another type of institution. Under the management of the board of trustees and the eyes of other interested parties, the Kentucky Confederate Home promised to be a more benevolent institution than the one that imprisoned Holloway during the war years.

The Kentucky Confederate Home would be a respectable place, but an institution nonetheless.

Chapter 6

The Druggist and the Sheriff

T
hree inmates approached the door of the superintendent's office on the ground floor of the Kentucky Confederate Home and knocked politely. The man who answered was dressed in work pants and an old shirt, his spectacles coated with the same dust that seemed to cover every horizontal surface in the Home, a result of ongoing carpentry, scraping, sanding, and minor renovation projects.

The inmates handed the superintendent a formal resolution, the wording of which had been debated the evening before, then written on a crisp sheet of Home letterhead stationery. A second sheet, this one with the signatures of eighty-four veterans and Home employees, was affixed to the first.

The superintendent removed his spectacles, wiped them clean with his shirttail, and began to read the formal language.

“Whereas it has come to our knowledge that you have tendered your resignation …”
¹

The facility now known as the Kentucky Confederate Home was originally one of Kentucky's grandest (and least successful) summer resort hotels. Villa Ridge Inn was built in 1889, conceived as a luxurious getaway for Kentucky's elite.

Kentucky was dotted with pleasant little resort hotels, often built around natural springs. The Chalybeate Springs Resort Hotel in Union County attracted guests from Indiana, Illinois, and as far away as Texas. Swango Springs Spa and Hotel in Wolfe County operated as a posh resort through much of the nineteenth century. And, just north of Pewee Valley in Trimble County, the Parker family promoted their Bedford Springs Hotel and its warm sulfur waters as a healing treatment for everything from arthritis to mange.
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Pewee Valley already had a reputation as a healthful place in which to reside when local entrepreneur Horace Smith spent close to $50,000 to build his 100-room summer resort in the Louisville exurb. With seventy-two guest rooms, Smith's Villa Ridge Inn was one of the largest hotels in Kentucky, and certainly the largest located outside a city. But Villa Ridge Inn wasn't so much about size as about luxury.

Located on the crest of a gentle slope just 600 yards from the Pewee Valley train depot, the resort hotel stood four stories high, sixty feet deep, and as long as seven rail cars. A wide veranda, furnished with comfortable rocking chairs and wooden gliders, surrounded the building on three sides, and it was said guests could enjoy a mile-long covered stroll. Second-story balconies and generous windows on every floor provided splendid views of area homes and churches as well as natural cross-ventilation. Atop the frame building was an octagonal cupola and, atop the cupola, eighty feet above neat flower beds, was a flagpole from which flew the U.S. and Kentucky flags.

The servants' quarters—a two-story dormitory for live-in help—was located behind the main structure, with a fully equipped linen laundry and steam boilers in the basement. The boilers fed a heating system that provided warmth to every room on cool spring evenings or chilly autumn mornings. Four brick-lined wells and a pump house provided water for the indoor bathrooms located on the first three floors. (One of the wells produced a sulfurous water flow that was too sporadic—and too foul-smelling—to be promoted as a healing mineral bath.)

On arrival at the Pewee Valley depot, hotel visitors could see the resort's tall cupola and flagpole above the trees. Uniformed porters loaded trunks and luggage onto carts as guests boarded open carriages for the short ride to the inn. As a guest's carriage entered the grounds and began its gradual ascent up the white gravel driveway, the visitor could easily mistake the Villa Ridge Inn—particularly at twilight, when warm gaslight shone from every room—for a luxurious White Star ocean liner, a vessel of aristocratic elegance planted somehow in the rolling hills of central Kentucky.

That first impression of upper-crust splendor continued when the visitor's carriage halted under the porte-cochere and a liveried doorman opened the oak-framed front doors.

Just inside the main entrance on the ground floor were a richly paneled lobby and a book-lined library. The parlor furniture was carved, massive, dark, and comfortable. Two additional parlors and a smoking room opened off a wide hallway that ran the length of the building to the dining room. Victorian paintings or pressed ferns hung on every wall, and sprays of fresh flowers appeared on every horizontal surface. Surrounded on three sides by large windows, the dining room could seat 80 for formal servings, but could accommodate more than 100 for casual meals, and the adjoining kitchen was equipped with institutional stoves, ovens, coolers, and prep tables.

Three curving wooden stairways provided access to the upper floors, one in the center of the building and one on either end. Upstairs sleeping rooms and bathrooms opened off central hallways of wide waxed floorboards; large linen presses and servants' pantries were hidden at convenient distances throughout the halls. The upstairs guest-room floors were covered with matting, while the hallways and all the downstairs rooms were carpeted.

During prime summer seasons Pewee Valley's Villa Ridge Inn was a place where fashionable men in three-button double-breasted sack suits, pretty young mothers in trailing skirts and parasols, and well-scrubbed little girls in ruffled white dresses with pink sashes and hair ribbons strolled the broad lawns and among the shady trees of the spacious grounds.
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Within six years of its opening, however, the luxury resort hotel fell into bankruptcy.

During its short life, Villa Ridge Inn was bedeviled by a combination of too many expenses and too little income. The hotel was overbuilt: money spent on the hotel's necessary staff and its modern heating, lighting, and plumbing infrastructure was far more than could be recovered with only six dozen guest rooms during a summer tourist season. And Pewee Valley was just too close to Louisville to be a compelling getaway location for that city's upper crust. (By comparison, the extravagant French Lick Springs Hotel and Spa in southern Indiana thrived during the same period. It was more than an hour away by rail, and the owners enjoyed income from their golf course, casino, local tours, and healing baths, in addition to hotel revenues.)
⁴

“On the premises, we will sell at public auction to the highest bidder the property known as the Villa Ridge Inn.” Falls City Insurance Co. of Louisville, as liquidating agent, put the property under the auctioneer's hammer (without reserve or limit) on Saturday, October 26, 1895.
⁵

Real estate speculator Angus N. Gordon eventually acquired the property, but his White Star luxury liner was now more of a white elephant. He managed to lease the buildings to a private boarding school for several years, but by 1898 he was valuing the land and improvements at something less than $13,000. By the turn of the century Gordon had practically given the vacant hotel over to the use of Pewee Valley citizens for dances, musicales, and other legitimate entertainments. (Village residents provided the cash and maintenance services necessary to keep the facility heated, lit, and secure.)
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So when Kentucky's ex-Confederates announced in 1902 that they were looking for a veterans' home site, Angus N. Gordon had just the right property at exactly the right price.

That the Kentucky Confederate Home was presentable on the day it was dedicated and suitable for occupancy by arriving veterans was due to weeks of personal oversight and dawn-to-dusk physical labor by a bookish sixty-eight-year-old druggist from Owensboro.

Salem Holland Ford was an odd choice to be named first superintendent of the Kentucky Confederate Home. He had spent most of his professional career in the drug trade at a time when the local druggist was as much a personal health care provider as was the country doctor. Some druggists of the period built fortunes by devising and marketing laxative syrups, catarrh salves, typhoid tablets, health drinks, and other patent medicines, but Ford had little interest in the entrepreneurial aspects of his profession. Instead, he was content with compounding and dispensing useful medicaments to those seeking relief from various ailments. Ford maintained an impressive pharmacological library, and he was a regular speaker at annual meetings of the Kentucky Pharmaceutical Association. He had no great political ambitions, but was willing to serve on the local school board when appointed by the mayor of Owensboro.
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Nothing about Ford's appearance was particularly awe-inspiring. He was a slight man, trim, with thinning white hair. Behind a broad, drooping mustache, his lips were pursed like a disapproving Sunday School teacher, and his watery blue eyes tended to squint when he wasn't wearing his wire-rimmed spectacles.

But Ford's military credentials were impressive.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, Ford crossed the Mississippi River into Missouri to enlist as a private in the state guard there. Within a year he was attached to the Confederate army and elected captain of Company F, General Joseph Shelby's cavalry brigade under Major General Sterling Price. For two years Ford and his men conducted lightning raids throughout Missouri, north Arkansas, and parts of the Indian Territory. (During his time in Missouri and Kansas he had occasion to command Frank James, brother of Jesse, and he formed a lifelong friendship with soon-to-be-legendary lawman Wyatt Earp.)

In combat and on raids, Ford was no reckless sword-waver, but a careful planner who maintained a quiet equanimity in even the most disordered situations. His troops trusted him; his commanders respected him. Near the end of the war, as Price's Trans-Mississippi Army faced increasing pressure in the north, Ford led his company on a 1,400-mile skedaddle around Union troops in Arkansas, through Indian Territory and Texas. Eventually, he surrendered and was paroled at Shreveport, Louisiana, on June 15, 1865.

Back in Owensboro in 1879, Ford organized the Monarch Rifles, a private military company in Daviess County formed under Kentucky state law. He was elected captain, and for the next decade he helped build the organization into one of Kentucky's best-trained local militias. He played an active role in establishing Owensboro's Confederate veterans camp, and by 1900 was on General Poyntz's staff of the Kentucky UCV organization.

The board of trustees voted to hire Ford as the first superintendent of the Kentucky Confederate Home at its marathon board meeting on September 4, 1902. He would receive a salary of $75 a month, plus free room and board at the Home for him and his wife. He had no experience running an institution of any sort—one of the other job candidates, Thomas Richards, was a career hotelier—but Ford was known as an energetic, well-organized man who said what he was going to do and did what he said. (By comparison, the other serious candidate, former state senator William O. Coleman, always seemed a little too unctuous and eager to please.)

It was not until the first week in October, however, when the purchase of the old hotel was completed, that Ford could commence preparing the building and grounds of the old Villa Ridge Inn for the dedication ceremony barely three weeks later.

First, he had to repair and clean the property. Most of the hotel guest rooms had been closed for several years. The entire facility required scraping, patching, repainting, and wallpapering. Ford oversaw the inspection, repair, and replacement of the gas and water lines. He called in local workers to make sure the pumps, tanks, and cisterns were operating properly and holding their seals. To prepare for the dedication and opening ceremonies, Ford saw that the trees were trimmed, the lawn was raked, and a new bed of crushed white gravel was spread over a dirt carriageway that led from the road to the front of the Home.
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Ford was assisted by several veterans who had arrived early at the Home: Lorenzo Holloway and others. He used these early arrivals to help oversee construction and manage outside workers, but Ford alone had to navigate the political spider web of purchasing and staffing.

As superintendent, Ford was “charged with the general management and supervision, [and] the employment of such help as may be necessary therein.” Major purchases and key employees, however, were the responsibility of the board of trustees. Before Ford could buy so much as a replacement doorknob, he was required to advertise for bids, then submit the bids to the executive committee for action. In this manner he had to acquire the necessary furnishings, linens, dinnerware, and stores necessary to house, feed, and care for 100 residents and staff.

Dozens of businesses with ex-Confederate connections vied to supply the Home with what it needed (and sometimes didn't know it needed). Ford would listen patiently to every pitchman and drummer, interrupting occasionally to clarify a point or ask a question. Then, politely, he would direct the prospective purveyor to the Home's board of trustees.

On no more consultation with Ford than a buggy-maker might have with a horse, the board of trustees hired a matron (to supervise meals and cleaning) and a steward (to serve the residents and clean the facility). Ford would be responsible for managing these employees, but he lacked the power to discipline or replace them.