My Old Confederate Home by Rusty Williams

Author:Rusty Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky

Chapter 10

The Socialite and the Editor

According to the story told later, Confederate veteran Charles W. Russell contacted Bennett Young sometime during the summer of 1905 about a New York socialite who was visiting Louisville. The visitor was Mrs. L. Z. Duke, a wealthy widow and native Kentuckian, who desired to pay a call on the Kentucky Confederate Home. Russell was careful to explain that she was not directly related to General Basil and Henrietta Morgan Duke of Kentucky; it was rumored that her late husband was one of the Carolina tobacco Dukes. The New York woman had money, and it was thought she might be persuaded to donate some of it to the Home.

By the time Young arranged to call on Mrs. Duke at the Galt House, however, she had departed for New York. Young wooed her with a series of flattering letters, inviting her to return soon for a tour of the Home.

Mrs. Duke was unable to schedule a return trip to Kentucky until June 1906. Young asked Florence Barlow, former editor of The Lost Cause and newly elected president of the Confederate Home chapter of the UDC, to meet Mrs. Duke in Louisville and escort her to Pewee Valley.

Mrs. L. Z. Duke was a small woman, standing barely over five feet tall, and she dressed for the short trip in a shirtwaist and skirt that made her look younger than her sixty-five years. She was quick with a firm handshake that spoke of her free and generous nature and a sprightliness that promised excitement and adventure. Nature stopped short of making Mrs. Duke beautiful: her blue-gray eyes were set too far apart, and a flattened nose looked as though it might be more at home on a retired prizefighter. But she had a warm, open smile that beckoned men and women to her.

If Mrs. L. Z. Duke was not the reserved and aloof New York socialite that Florence Barlow was expecting to meet that day, then Florence Barlow was certainly not the shallow small-town clubwoman that Mrs. Duke may have expected.

Miss Barlow—she was an unapologetic spinster—had recently celebrated her fifty-first birthday with the sale of her interest in The Lost Cause, and she radiated a competence and an enthusiasm that earned the trust of businessmen and moneyed women used to hiring social secretaries and planners. Even at middle age she retained a youthful prettiness, and she styled her hair and wore her dresses in the latest styles, but without a hint of flashiness or brass. (She avoided haute couture, however, not wanting to give the impression of competing in any way with corporate wives or potential patronesses.) She could converse knowledgeably on almost any subject, but always with a subtle respect for the social status of her conversational partner.

By the time the editor and the socialite arrived in Pewee Valley on that June morning in 1906, the two women were on their way to becoming fast friends.1

Clocks moved slowly at the Kentucky Confederate Home; the days were long, and there was little to fill them.

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