My Old Confederate Home Read online

  On the fly, she learned a new career as the town rebuilt. “I did splendidly,” she said, “selling thousands of brick, mantels and grates, many carloads of sand, and a number of iron fronts.”

  Though she was dealing with contractors and workmen at their job sites, she never failed to wear feminine attire. “I never forgot I was a lady bred and born, and others always remembered it.”

  Barlow left Middlesborough with a healthy bank balance just before bust followed boom in 1893. She had learned to cultivate important people with her personal charm, self-confidence, winsome manner, and a sincere interest in their business. It wasn't long before she was employed as business manager of the Lexington Observer.

  Barlow's return to Lexington, her childhood home, rekindled memories of the war years. Her father was dead, never having recovered his creative spirit, and she found herself curious about the events that had so affected her family.

  “The war was very little talked about,” she wrote an acquaintance after Milton Barlow's death. “Then it was too late for me to get much valuable and interesting information from him, to my great sorrow.”15 She began corresponding with prominent Kentucky veterans, men with whom her father might have served, asking about their experiences in war and their knowledge of her father. In short order, a comrade of her father's, General Basil W. Duke, employed her in Louisville to help him edit and operate The Southern Magazine, a literary journal.

  Through Basil Duke (and as a result of her self-promotional correspondence), Florence Barlow became known to Kentucky's influential ex-Confederates as a woman who could meet business challenges. Bennett Young retained her when he needed someone to scout out public speaking opportunities; John Leathers referred her to the principals of a New York life insurance company, who hired her to open and operate their Kentucky offices.

  By the turn of the century Barlow was employed by Henrietta Morgan Duke as associate editor and business manager of The Lost Cause, a regional news magazine for Kentucky UDC members. She subsequently purchased the magazine and edited it for four years, further cementing her relations with ex-Confederates and their loved ones. Barlow had only recently sold The Lost Cause in 1905 when she met Mrs. L. Z. Duke of New York City at the Louisville depot for the ride to Pewee Valley.

  A coach carried Florence Barlow and Mrs. L. Z. Duke the short distance from the Pewee Valley depot to the Kentucky Confederate Home. Bennett Young, new commandant Henry George, and a contingent of uniformed inmates greeted the two women at the door.

  Mrs. Duke's tour of the Home and her overnight stay would doubtless have included a walk around the grounds and several meals in the dining hall. She likely visited the new infirmary and perhaps joined in a song or two by the parlor piano. But what made this visit different from others was the immediate and genuine affection that blossomed between the inmates and the petite New York socialite with the soft Kentucky accent.

  Later accounts likened it to love at first sight.

  Mrs. Duke demonstrated the elegance of society in her manner and dress, but there was a Kentucky naturalness about her that invited familiarity. Without a trace of coquetry, she had a directness that flattered the men and reminded them of their rooster days. In her presence, the old inmates became like smitten boys lining up to carry her schoolbooks or share their dessert with her. And the feelings were reciprocated.

  She shared her tragic personal history with the men of the Home: the death of her beloved older brother on the battlefield at Shiloh, an early marriage to a wealthy industrialist that took her away from Kentucky, the death of her infant child, and the sudden loss of her husband while the grief-stricken couple was recuperating in Europe. She could not compare her trials to those of the valorous ex-Confederates, she said, but she tried to meet adversity like a true daughter of the Southland. She was a grandniece of gallant Confederate general John B. Hood, and she was an active member of the New York chapter of the UDC.16

  At an appropriate moment before her departure from Pewee Valley, when Mrs. Duke asked how she might help brighten the lives of the veterans, Young and Barlow described the need for an assembly hall, a place that might contribute more to the inmates’ pleasure than anything else she could do. Soon after Mrs. Duke's visit, on September 6, 1906, Young announced to his board of trustees a donation of $2,200 from Mrs. L. Z. Duke of New York. The money—the largest single cash gift in the history of the Home—would be used to erect the L. Z. Duke Hall on the grounds of the Kentucky Confederate Home.17

  In exchange for the money to build his assembly hall, Bennett Young was willing to validate the phony personal history of the socialite from New York.

  According to best evidence, Mrs. L. Z. Duke was actually Sarah Elizabeth Howe from eastern Kentucky. Daughter of a dirt-poor subscription schoolteacher, she was a convicted prostitute and had owned several brothels in Dallas, Texas.18

  “Lizzie” Howe was born in 1844 in Greenup County, Kentucky, the youngest of six children. The family moved to Missouri in the 1850s. Lizzie was barely sixteen years old when she married Missouri farmer Joshua Thomas, according to a legal document filed years later by an abandoned daughter of the young couple. After two or three more marriages she appeared in 1874 in Dallas, Texas, using the name Lizzie Handley, and purchased property for a bordello.

  Settled barely two decades earlier, Dallas in the 1870s was still a rough-and-tumble town on the edge of the western frontier. Prairie farmers, cotton growers, and loggers came to Dallas to bank some of their money and spend the rest on entertainment. Lizzie Handley's entertainment business boomed. Within a decade she owned two ornate residences, each located on prime property in the booming town and each operating with up to fifteen women “boarders.” (For tax purposes the properties were listed as residences, but Lizzie and her girls could be frank with the census-taker. When asked their occupation, they all answered, “prostitute.” Newspapers had no compunction about referring to Lizzie as “proprietress of a bawdy house.”)

  From time to time, when Lizzie was charged with running a “disorderly house,” she closed her doors for a few days, paid her fine, then put her girls back to work. Lizzie lived well, and she plowed her profits into the purchase of more Dallas real estate.

  Among the sporting men of Dallas, Lizzie was a charmer. The nature of her business required her to treat men well, to feed their self-confidence while managing them like smitten schoolboys. Her free and generous nature so captivated at least one city official that he made her arrest records disappear. On Christmas Day she would deliver boxes of cigars to prisoners in the city jail (for which the prisoners desired “to return their heartfelt thanks,” according to one newspaper).

  By the 1890s, however, Dallas was striving for respectability. The arrival of major rail lines and schemes to open the Trinity River for navigation to the Gulf of Mexico convinced city boosters that the Texas town could become a metropolis and a polite home for wealthy families. A corps of fire-breathing local ministers, the Salvation Army, and other social reformers joined forces to clean up the “Reservation,” the name given several square blocks of open bars, pool halls, sporting clubs, and Lizzie Handley's bordellos. Her residences suffered several fires of suspicious origin. The state legislature and Dallas city government passed strict new laws meting out harsher penalties to owners of disorderly houses, and reform minded judges were throwing the book at any such proprietors who were brought before the bar.

  Lizzie Handley—now calling herself Lizzie Duke—began selling off her Dallas properties and then departed for an extended vacation in Europe. By 1891 she had liquidated Dallas real estate worth more than $120,000 and had resettled in New York in the guise of a wealthy widow and investor.

  A resident of Manhattan in 1900, she was calling herself “Elizabeth Z. Duke” and had shaved ten years off her age. She began trading in (apparently legitimate) residential properties and making short-term business loans as she completed the sale of her Dallas holdings.19 Though she no longer delivered cigars to men in ja
il, she became active in the Woman's Society for the Prevention of Crime, and—as L. Zebbeon Duke—applied for membership in the New York City chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

  When Sarah Elizabeth Howe, daughter of a dirt-poor Greenup County schoolteacher, returned to Kentucky to visit the Kentucky Confederate Home, it was as Mrs. L. Z. Duke, wealthy New York socialite.20

  Bennett Young wasted no time banking Mrs. Duke's $2,200 contribution and commissioning an architect to design the assembly hall. The building was completed well before the planned dedication of the hall in October 1907, a date chosen to coincide with the statewide reunion of UCV camps and the fifth anniversary of the opening of the Kentucky Confederate Home.

  In designing the hall, the architect didn't stray far from Young's original desire for a house of worship; the assembly hall resembled a country church building. It was a large, open, rectangular building with a stage and proscenium on one end and a slightly canted balcony overhanging wide front doors on the other. The walls on the long sides were lined with tall windows; balcony windows and four small dormers added more interior light. A Federal-style covered front porch provided shelter for those entering through the main doors. The modern building was piped for running water and wired for electricity, and it could seat a crowd of 300.

  The assembly hall was sited in a line with the original hotel entrance and front doors of the infirmary, and a broad sidewalk created a promenade that connected the three buildings.

  The day was bright and warm, but fewer than 2,000 people showed up in Pewee Valley on October 31, 1907, for the dedication of the assembly hall. Visitors strolled the grounds and explored the main building and infirmary. Most inmates basked in the attention of the crowd, and several sold their crafts. The boys’ band of Louisville's School of Reform entertained attendees with vocal and instrumental music. As UCV members arrived at the Home for their annual reunion and business meeting, they were directed to the dining room, where the cooks laid out platters of sandwiches, big cucumber pickles, salads, and a selection of cakes.

  After lunch, the crowd gathered around the front porch of the new assembly hall, waiting for the ceremony to begin. At 1:00 P.M., the doors of the new hall flew open, and Mrs. L. Z. Duke herself—on the arm of Bennett Young—stepped out of the building and invited the crowd to enter the new L. Z. Duke Hall. She stood on the front porch, graciously receiving each visitor, as the crowd filled the hall to overflowing.

  Among the visitors that day were General and Mrs. Simon Bolivar Buckner and the widow of General Ben Hardin Helm. Henrietta Morgan Duke was in attendance, but the state UDC organization had no formal role in the festivities. Florence Barlow attended, of course; she was there as an employee of the Kentucky Confederate Home. Young had hired her as full-time bookkeeper to assist Commandant Henry George with his administrative details. She had also taken it on herself to begin publication of the Confederate Home Messenger, a newsletter “published monthly in the interest of the Confederate Home.”

  The crowd followed Bennett Young as he escorted the petite and demure Mrs. Duke to a seat on the stage. Young presented her to the crowd, and she was bathed in wave after wave of applause as several in the audience took the stage to speak of her generous gift and the love she so obviously felt for the aging men of the Lost Cause. Virginia Parr Sale, daughter of now-dead Captain Daniel Parr, the boat captain whose gift of Louisville property had sparked the establishment of the home five years before, presented Mrs. Duke with a bunch of red and white roses, tied with ribbon the colors of the Confederate flag.

  “Deeply moved by this outburst of sentiment,” the Messenger reported, a teary Mrs. Duke stood to acknowledge the honors paid her. She spoke briefly of the great joy she derived from doing something special for the inmates of the Home.

  After several speeches and the election of UCV Kentucky Division officers, Chaplain J. H. Deering closed the meeting with a prayer, praising the good works and exemplary life of Mrs. L. Z.

  Duke.21

  It's hard to believe that Bennett Young was ignorant of Lizzie Duke's sooty past. He was too smart and too well connected not to know more about the Home's largest single cash donor than just the color of her money.

  Young was an experienced corporate attorney, a skillful litigator, and a savvy politician. He certainly must have routinely advised his clients that acceptance of large amounts of cash from a source not thoroughly investigated could, all too often, result in embarrassment.22 Some of Mrs. Duke's claims—that she was the grandniece of General John Bell Hood and the granddaughter of Revolutionary patriot Richard Montgomery—could have been proven false with just a few discreet inquiries of the Greenup County clerk. (Charles W. Russell, the Greenup County native who allegedly first told Young about Mrs. Duke's interest in the Home, must have heard rumors of the Howe family daughter who had fallen into sin.) And a closer look at some of Lizzie Duke's New York real estate transactions would probably have led back to Texas, where her business activities seemed to be an open secret.

  As commander of the Kentucky Division of the UCV and wellknown orator at UCV events nationwide, Bennett Young had plenty of sources who would have known, could have checked, or might have volunteered information about Lizzie Duke's professional career. Of Lizzie Duke's thousands of customers during two decades in Dallas, certainly some were Confederate veterans who recognized her picture and name when they appeared in Confederate Veteran along with an account of the assembly hall's dedication.

  If Bennett Young knew about Mrs. L. Z. Duke's past, others in Kentucky's UCV command and on the Home's board of trustees must have, too. Young was too smart a politician not to share the information (and the responsibility) for accepting such a large and public donation from a woman of the demimonde.

  It's likely that the shady background of New York socialite Mrs. L. Zebbeon Duke was an open secret in Kentucky. Lizzie Duke's visits to Kentucky were limited to quiet stays at the Home or the residences of a few select friends; there's no mention of her attendance at social events or gatherings honoring her visits. Kentucky newspaper editors, normally lavish in their coverage of special events at the Home, were uncharacteristically silent about the dedication of L. Z. Duke Hall. Newspapers that did note the dedication failed to identify the donor of the new hall by name.

  Florence Barlow seems to be the only person in Kentucky who wasn't aware of Mrs. Duke's past. Or maybe she didn't care. Confederate Home Messenger venerated the New York donor, and its editor regularly published news of the socialite's visits and her letters to Pewee Valley.23

  The morning following the dedication, Mrs. Duke met the inmates informally in the new L. Z. Duke Hall. The elegant woman moved among the old men, sharing a quick story with one, touching the elbow of another, all with a natural Kentucky openness that radiated approachability and a directness that flattered the men. She gave a short talk, expressing her joy at their happiness and comfort, and then joined the inmates in singing new words to the tune of “Give Me That Old-Time Religion”:

  We are old time Confederates,

  We are old time Confederates,

  A band of Southern Brothers

  Who fought for Liberty.

  The inmates formed into columns and escorted the petite woman down the driveway to the Pewee Valley rail station for her departure. They stood, waving, on the platform as her train departed to the sound of their God-bless-yous and not a few Rebel yells.

  The old men adored their benefactress. Maybe they couldn't put their finger on what it was, exactly; but there was something about Mrs. L. Z. Duke that reminded the men of the Kentucky Confederate Home of their rooster days.

  The dedication of L. Z. Duke Hall marked the start of a new era for the Home. The appointment of new commandant Henry George, the generous gift of Lizzie Duke, and the infusion of Florence Barlow's gumption and intelligence helped make the Kentucky Confederate Home a gentler, kinder place for both the residents and those who cared for them.

  Chapter 11
r />   The Fiddlers and the Indian Agent

  The audience knew to wait for the handshake.

  Colonel J. A. Patee and his Old Soldier Fiddlers were performing their feature act on the stage of L. Z. Duke Hall. This was the full thirty-five-minute act, the one that topped the bill on vaudeville stages in Trenton, Little Rock, and Billings, not the ten-minute opener for the larger legitimate houses in Chicago, Philadelphia, or New Orleans.

  At Florence Barlow's suggestion, Virginia Parr Sale and her husband had arranged with John Patee to bring his act to Pewee Valley in February 1911 for a special morning show during his weeklong booking in Louisville. Eager inmates of the Kentucky Confederate Home filled most of the seats in Duke Hall, while Pewee Valley neighbors and some out-of-town visitors crowded in behind. Commandant Henry George sat surrounded by the inmates, as delighted with the show as any in the audience.

  The Old Soldier Fiddlers was a five-man traveling novelty act that appeared on vaudeville stages small and large from coast to coast. The performers—Civil War veterans whose age ranged from sixty-six to seventy-six—performed antebellum tunes and old camp songs from North and South. Colonel Patee, wearing a formal black suit that showed off his showman's coif of glowing white hair, sat center stage. To his left were the “Two Sons of Dixie” in their gray uniforms; to his right were the “Two Boys in Blue” in Union army uniforms. Left and right, they alternated playing regional favorites on the fiddle, with spoons or bones clapping out jaunty rhythms. (“Goober Peas” was a favorite, with Commandant George and the inmates clapping along and shouting, “Peas! Peas! Peas! Peas!” during the chorus.)

  But Colonel Patee and the Old Soldier Fiddlers provided more than just a musical specialty act.