History in the Dark

A publisher approached me recently with the idea of doing a book on one of the national United Confederate Veteran reunions. Gaines Foster (Ghosts of the Confederacy) and others have done a good job describing the general progression and importance of the reunions, but this publisher was interested in a more detailed look at a single reunion’s method of organization, activities, local involvement, economic impact, etc.

Because I’m currently headquartered in Dallas, I began looking for collections regarding the UCV’s Dallas reunion that brought more than a quarter million people to this pre-metropolis prairie town in 1901. Most of the material I’d need to tell the story was housed in special collections at the Dallas Public Library.

In the end, however, I declined the project for reasons that continue to irk me.

You see, the City of Dallas (like many other cities) is facing a budget shortfall. During the last budget go-‘round the city manager proposed slashing the library budget, laying off librarians, reducing branch hours and mothballing the reference and research floors of the central library for all but 24 hours a week. (Don’t even ask about the acquisitions budget!)

Limited access to the materials I needed would’ve prevented me from researching and completing the book in any reasonable amount of time.

As a result, the story of the 1901 Dallas UCV reunion will probably never be recounted in depth, and that’s a loss to scholarship. More to the point, however, the loss of that story will cost the City of Dallas. First of all, the city will lose the use fees I would’ve paid the library for materials and images that would appear in the book. But, more important, the city will lose a valuable history lesson about citizen involvement and private financing of one of the largest conventions in its history—and this at a time when Dallas is struggling to compete with other cities for event revenue and to fill a city-financed convention hotel.

Largely as a result of citizen hearings and action by Friends of the Dallas Public Library, the proposed cuts were reinstated…for the time being. The city is still writing checks in red ink, and it’s likely the library will be squeezed again during the next budget cycle.

So here’s the point of my sermon:

If you allow public officials to view your local library as little more than a warehouse that loans books, your community will suffer. Even the smallest public library system is also a repository of its community’s history, a place where dwells the institutional memory of the community’s successes and failures. To turn out the lights at the library is to rob your community of lessons that could strengthen it.

You can’t read history in the dark.

Over the Hill to the Poorhouse

I recently wrote about the percentage of married veterans who lived in Confederate soldiers’ homes while their wives lived elsewhere.

I recall that while researching My Old Confederate Home, I was most struck by the stories of married men who were forced to leave their wives of many years for the shelter of the Kentucky Confederate Home. (The Kentucky home, unlike some others, never accommodated wives or widows of veterans.)

As plans for the organization of the Kentucky home were being discussed, the wife of a Bath County stockman wrote a friend about an aged couple who lived in the county: “They are much too ill to care for themselves,” she wrote about the Confederate veteran and his wife. “They have no family, and I fear they will starve to death if a place cannot be made for both of them.”

The couple, married nearly fifty years, was forced to split up. He was one of the first admissions to the Kentucky Confederate Home; she went to live in the county poorhouse.

Counterfactual and Alternative Histories

During my hiatus from this blog I had a chance to catch up on some reading.

I read a lot of fiction, but I’d never read Harry Turtledove’s counterfactual Civil War series. I started with The Guns of the South, the first book in the series. I lasted 25 pages before I put the book down for good.

A friend said the Gingrich/Forstchen trilogy was better. Maybe it was. I got through 40 pages of Gettysburg before giving up.

The problem is not with the books; bazillions of people have enjoyed them. The problem is my inability to stay “in the moment” when the story begins to diverge from history as I know it. I can immerse myself in the most outrageous thriller fiction---Jack Reacher, anyone?---and swim the channel without a second thought. But put an AK-47 on a Civil War battlefield and I sink like a rock.

Why can’t I get into these? I’ve enjoyed counterfactual or alternate history in the past. (How the South Won the Civil War thrilled me as a kid, and I’ve read and reread most of the What If? essays collected by Robert Cowley.) Have I learned too much about the Civil War to be able to accept these counter-historical tales? Am I subconsciously resisting messing up my head with facts that aren’t facts?

What’s been your experience with counterfactual and alternative histories?

Act Now!

You better act now if you want to pick up this color postcard of the Tennessee Confederate Home.

It's for sale on eBay, and the auction runs through June 20.

Confederate Jumps to Death

Accounts of life in the Confederate soldiers’ homes are all too often sprinkled with stories of suicide by some aged inmates.

It’s understandable, I suppose. These were old men, often ill or mentally altered, living away from home and family. (At the time, clinical depression was not a medically diagnosed condition and there was certainly no pharmaceutical treatment for it.)

Some of these old guys were pretty brutal about how they took their own lives.

For example, Christian Theimer, age 82, woke one morning in 1910 and threw himself headfirst out of his upper-floor bedroom of the Texas Confederate Home for Men. He hit the sidewalk twenty-five feet below, splitting his noggin like a ripe watermelon and died almost instantly.

“Theimer lived in Galveston prior to [the devastating hurricane of 1900] and in it lost several relatives and all his property. He has been at the Home here since and has often been despondent.”

See Dallas Morning News, June 24, 1910

Two Kentucky Confederate Events

I’ll be in Kentucky this week, talking to two different groups about the Kentucky Confederate Home and the other Confederate soldiers’ homes. Both presentation are open to the public, and you’re welcome to sit in.

Louisville

Come to the meeting of the Louisville Genealogical Society on Tuesday, June 15 at 1 p.m. I’ll be talking about the Kentucky Home and answering questions about how to research ancestors who may have lived in any of the sixteen Confederate veterans homes built with private donations after the Civil War. The meeting will be held at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints at Linn Station Road and Hurstbourne in Louisville. For more information, contact lougensoc@yahoo.com.

Cold Spring (Campbell County)

The Campbell County Public Library system has an extremely active public affairs program throughout the year. They’ve chosen to invite me to the Cold Spring Branch on Wednesday night, June 15, at 7 p.m. The branch is located at 3920 Alexandria Pike in Cold Spring. For more information, contact jarno@cc-pl.org. I understand that several of the area CWRTs have been invited and will attend.

I hope to see you there!

A Home Overrun

Earlier this year I heard from Roy Moneyhun of Jacksonville FL, who took me to task for my description of the Florida Old Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Home. (You’ll see a thumbnail description of the sixteen lasting homes when you click on the “Confederate Soldiers’ Homes” link at the upper right corner.) I wrote that the Florida home opened in 1893 on ten acres outside Jacksonville.


Roy (and his friend Lloyd Hendry) had recently visited the site of the Home He gave me a good-natured scolding, saying that the site was certainly not “outside Jackson”, but on a waterway not far from the city center. (Here’s a lesson for writers of history: Readers question every fact.)

Turns out we were both right. Over the last century the city grew out to the little farmstead, overrunning the area with industrial development.

Here’s a picture of the Florida Old Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Home from about 1898:

And here’s a link to the Google Streetview of the location at 2336 Talleyrand Avenue today:

Roy also sent me this link to the Jacksonville’s SCV Kirby-Smith Camp #1209 (“The Largest SCV Camp in Florida!”) website and a page that tells a little more about the Flordia Home than I have in my thumbnail sketch.