THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, January 9, 1995 TAG: 9501070058
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY GREG SCHNEIDER, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 297 lines
A LONG, LONG lifetime ago, there were in Richmond a number of ladies whose husbands had engaged in the unpleasantness with the North and, as a consequence, died. That conflict ending as it did - poorly, from this perspective - these honorable women were left with none of the customary government pensions to sustain them.
They had sacrificed, they had tended the wounded of body and spirit, they had seen their world incinerated, and they had borne it all with the haughty grace that exemplified Southern Womanhood. And now a group of them was appealing for help - politely, of course - to the luminaries of the day.
Gov. Andrew Jackson Montague would urge his wife to take up the banner, writing that assistance ``is the best monument which can be reared to the Confederate women, for it does not give to their memories a decorative stone, but bread in their last and needy days. Help in life is better than paeans after death.''
On March 3, 1898, the Home for Needy Confederate Women was chartered - the last cause of the Lost Cause.
Exactly three months later, on the day on which Jefferson Davis would have seen his 90th birthday, a baby girl was born near the town of Warrenton to Elizabeth and Benjamin Ezekiel Yates. They christened her Osa Lee, the middle name a testament to Benjamin's ultimate commander during the war.
Yates was a tenant farmer, a humble life that kept his family searching for new fields to plow. This second wife, much younger, called him Mr. Yates, and that formality was perhaps all that remained of his prior stature. For this small, white-bearded man had once ridden to glory and destruction with J.E.B. Stuart and the Confederate cavalry, that most mythical of forces from a past already billowing with legend and hyperbole.
The life that awaited Osa Lee Yates would have none of the fire of her father's early days. But she would, in a different way, personify the era he represented. For just as her birth coincided with the creation of the ultimate memorial to the women of the Confederacy, the close of her life will dissolve it.
The Confederate home opened Oct. 15, 1900, in a downtown Richmond building purchased for $7,500 with money raised in bazaars and through a $1,000 grant from the General Assembly.
Elizabeth Lyne Hoskins Montague, the wife of the governor, assumed leadership of the cause and was joined by Mary Custis Lee, daughter of the general whose portrait graced every Southern parlor.
Of the first 10 ``inmates,'' as they were called, some paid their keep and others relied on the home's endowment. ``Only the woman herself knows to which category she belongs,'' promised the literature. The group hewed to a strict series of requirements:
``All applicants must be free from mental derangement, contagious diseases, morphine or alcohol habits, and epilepsy.''
``No gossip or tale-bearing will be tolerated.''
Despite these restrictions, the population doubled in four years, and the facility moved to more spacious quarters nearby. Former Gov. Fitzhugh Lee, who had been a celebrated general, attended many functions in the home, but his presence could not protect the ladies from budgetary melodrama. By 1904, the state had cut off funding, and the home was entirely dependent on private donations.
This required the ladies Montague and Lee to issue periodic appeals for sympathy and funds, a task that might have seemed distasteful but one at which they showed some skill. Elizabeth Montague, noting that ``every true Virginian or Southern heart will vibrate when the chord is touched,'' penned a stirring missive in 1904 that cast the cause in terms transcending latitudinal loyalties. It concluded:
``Let us, as a united people, join hands and hearts to perfect this work and make of it a fitting memorial to the self-sacrificing heroines of the South, so that in the years to come, the Home, unfettered by debt, shall stand for the triumph of patriotic devotion.''
Scores of women - widows, sisters and daughters of Confederate veterans - were applying for admission. The General Assembly resumed contributing funds in 1914, but whatever security this provided was short-lived. On Christmas Eve 1916, the building burned, and although no one was injured, the women were left homeless.
The home's trustees found temporary shelter, but the crisis emphasized what Elizabeth Montague already knew: The home needed a permanent location. And it should befit the grandeur of its mission.
Osa Lee Yates' father, Benjamin, was born in 1843 and grew up in a farm family of 21 children. His parents never owned slaves. Benjamin Yates went to war, he would maintain, for home and honor. At age 18, Yates borrowed horses to cart the bleeding and dying from First Manassas, the savage early battle that introduced the rebel yell and earned Gen. Thomas J. Jackson the moniker ``Stonewall.''
When he turned 19, Yates enlisted in Culpeper as a member of the Little Fork Rangers. His first major action came at Seven Pines, outside Richmond, another Confederate victory and the one in which Robert E. Lee took command of the army. Later that year, 1862, Yates was shot through either the leg or the neck; he never spoke of the wound and service records are contradictory. Whatever the injury, it was recorded that Yates declined treatment until the day's fighting was finished.
He would ride on through many of the major battles of the war, including Second Manassas and Brandy Station, the largest cavalry conflict in American history. He survived Gettysburg. Finally, in late 1864, Yates, one of his brothers and five other Little Fork Rangers were captured at Fisher's Hill in the Shenandoah Valley. Yates buried his gun and sword before he could be taken.
He spent eight months in a Maryland prison camp. At one point, the commanding Union officer asked Yates how to get to Culpeper, and Yates told the man to get there the best way he could, because he wasn't going to tell. Another time, he had a chance to take part in a breakout by swimming across the Potomac but declined. He couldn't swim.
Yates won his freedom when the South lost the war. He took a boat to Richmond, where he encountered a former captain who had sent him some tobacco to sell in prison. Yates tried to give the captain his money, but the officer told him to keep it for a new start in life.
With those funds in his pocket, Yates and two others began walking along the railroad tracks toward Fredericksburg. They found a handcar chained to a tree, broke it loose and rode as far as a burned-out bridge. They continued walking to Culpeper. Yates was 22, and he was home to stay.
The fury of war gave way to domestic languor. Yates married and fathered six children. His wife died, he remarried and fathered four more. The third of these was Osa Lee Yates.
Osa was a pretty child who wore her hair in braids. She attended a one-room schoolhouse and helped with chores around the farm - feeding chickens, milking cows. Cats were her favorite animals. One would sit on a fence post and pat her arm for a squirt of milk.
Osa's lifetime would span the introduction of automobiles, airplanes, telephones, motion pictures, television, nuclear energy and space flight; there would be wars unlike anything her father imagined, but that all happened someplace else.
Her father died in 1929. Osa worked as a hostess in a Washington, D.C., restaurant for a short time in 1930, staying with a pregnant cousin to help with the new baby. Then Osa returned to Warrenton to help her sister Lena care for their mother, who had taken ill.
In 1938, the sisters opened a home for the aged. Osa managed the housekeeping, raised a large garden and always kept chickens. Lena died in 1951 - three years after their mother - and the home shut down. A few years later, Osa moved to Richmond and found similar work at a Methodist home. She retired to a small apartment in 1960, never having married.
Elizabeth Montague was on course for a new Confederate home by 1930. A wealthy Confederate veteran who once took strolls by the old place had left a generous bequest, and the state - if the politics of it could be navigated - was preparing to clear a site. The home would replace the Robert E. Lee Camp Confederate Soldiers' Home, which by then had almost emptied of the cloudy-eyed old rebels it had been built to serve.
Already hallowed by the veterans' camp, the site was also only a block away from fashionable Monument Avenue, called the Champs Elysees of the South for its heroic promenade of statues: Lee, Stuart, Jackson, Davis, Maury.
Donations now, in a time when white Americans North and South regarded the late conflict with enormous nostalgia, were not a problem. Mary Custis Lee made an especially grand gesture, donating proceeds from the sale of a family heirloom: the tent used by Gen. Lafayette at Yorktown during what her forebears called the First Revolution.
The most prominent Yankee sympathizer was undoubtedly Grace Anna Goodhue Coolidge, wife of President Calvin Coolidge. The first lady had visited the home and learned from Elizabeth Montague how to knit a particular type of counterpane bed covering. Grace Coolidge sold the pattern to McCall's magazine and donated the $250 she got.
Montague, meanwhile, concluded that it would be fitting for the Confederate home to be modeled after the most famous home in the land: the White House. The by now imperious former belle traveled to Washington to obtain the blueprints. She wound up at the desk of an Army general, who was taken aback. The blueprints for the White House, he said, had not left Washington since being smuggled out for protection during the War of 1812.
Perhaps it was time, Elizabeth Montague suggested, that they had a little airing out. The general asked for an hour to consider the request and, after that, handed over the plans. He may have savored his situation, given that his name was U.S. Grant III and that it was his grandfather who, in large part, was responsible for the ladies' plight.
The new, 100-room Home for Needy Confederate Women opened in 1932 to much fanfare. Montague attended with her daughter and granddaughter, both named Janet. The elder Janet would go on in 1950 to assume her mother's mantel as president of the home's board of trustees.
By the time of transition, the home had reached a peak of about 80 residents. The women loved to gather around the old piano, which had belonged to Jefferson Davis' daughter, and sing songs from long ago - ``Dixie,'' ``Sewanee River,'' ``Old Black Joe.'' They went together on outings, had festive dinners and decorated lavishly for Christmas.
A newspaper account from 1935 longingly described the home as a retreat to ``the period of lavender and old lace, of crystal chandeliers and glass-domed curios, of horsehair furniture and stately rooms.''
Among the home's most distinguished residents were a great-niece of Thomas Jefferson; a cousin of Chief Justice John Marshall; Capt. Sally Tompkins, who was commissioned by Jefferson Davis and had converted her home into a wartime hospital; and three nieces of President John Tyler.
Janet Montague Nunnally passed the presidency to her daughter Janet Nunnally Burhans in 1975. For a time, the home's heyday continued. The state supplied sherry, whiskey, gin, peach wine, blackberry wine and port wine during the holidays. The home served as a backdrop for movies and television shows depicting the 19th century White House; James Garner and Sam Waterson were among the handsome celebrity guests.
Osa Lee Yates finally left her small apartment and entered the home in 1968. She had been on the waiting list for a year. At this time, the home still had more applicants than it could accommodate. Within a decade, though, the flood became a trickle. The board of trustees discussed admitting granddaughters of veterans - who by now were pleading to be included - but decided not to do so.
Osa fit in well at the home. She, like the other ladies, had her own room. But she was seldom confined there. She preferred to be outdoors, where the grounds of the sprawling facility became her own.
First she purchased a pair of blue jeans and then a lawnmower. On sunny days, Osa could be seen mowing alongside the groundskeepers. She took over care of the rose gardens in front of and behind the home, and she tended them religiously, never using chemicals or insecticides but always producing copious red blooms.
She bought a bicycle, but that was never comfortable, so she wound up with a three-wheeled contraption that she could pedal back and forth behind the home, which abutted the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Virginia Historical Society in a neighborhood of turn-of-the-century row houses.
Residents were not allowed to keep pets, but two stray cats must have sensed Osa's kinship and befriended her. She named them Mutt and Jeff and fed them surreptitiously through a side door. She helped the maintenance man with his painting. At night, she would fix small meals in the kitchen.
Every Christmas, Osa helped the staff decorate a 12-foot tree in the parlor, an elaborate process that took several days and was done behind closed doors to surprise the other ladies.
After a time, of course, the number of other ladies dwindled. The last daughter entered the home around 1980, and by the last third of that decade, the total population was down to about the original population - no more than 10.
The spacious home, now mostly empty, had started to slide into disrepair.
What Elizabeth Montague raised, her granddaughter would help dismantle. Janet Burhans felt she had no choice; by 1989, the home's board of trustees could not afford all the painting, patching and replacing that was needed just to house the few remaining daughters. So they closed the home and auctioned off its contents.
There was great furor over the decision. Richmond is a city whose monuments still breathe, and this one died hard. A 98-year-old resident filed a lawsuit to block the closing and took the case all the way to the Virginia Supreme Court. To no avail.
By now, seven women were left, and the board found them space in a new nursing home carved into the rapidly disappearing wilderness of suburban Chesterfield County. The seven were given their own wing, private rooms and a dining area where they could continue eating together. Osa Lee Yates was thrilled. Everything was clean and new, and she had new flowerbeds in which to work.
Holly DeJarnette, the home's administrator, transferred to the new residence with the ladies. She had worked at the home since 1980. A transplanted New Yorker, DeJarnette's Yankee accent had long since succumbed to a soft drawl, and from the beginning, all the ladies were most gracious about accepting her place of origin.
The board of trustees continued to meet monthly; the ladies continued weekly luncheons with their longtime doctor; and they received notes and visits from relatives and sympathizers all over the country. Only their location had changed.
But the women were, for the most part, in their 90s, and one by one they passed from this world, until, by spring of 1994, only one remained: Osa Lee Yates.
Osa's room at Brandermill Woods has little to indicate the long ribbons of history that are connected to it. There are cat and horse figurines scattered on the dresser; pictures of cats on the walls; a cat pillow resting on the old quilt on the bed; a cat calendar. Pictures of the roses she used to tend are here and there and throughout a large scrapbook. Almost unnoticeable among it all are a framed certificate from the United Daughters of the Confederacy and a small framed print of a woman in a long gown mending a Confederate flag.
Osa has been confined to a wheelchair since breaking her hip eight years ago - she had perched on the arm of a chair and slipped - and can no longer hear very well. She enjoys male visitors most of all - ``You're a good looking man,'' she is apt to say, regardless of the truth - but she also looks forward to regular visits from several nieces who live nearby.
Her meals are served in the dining hall that was set aside for the Confederate women. Here are the last noticeable links with the former home: a large Confederate battle flag and a looming, age-darkened oil portrait of Robert E. Lee.
DeJarnette, like the picture of Lee, keeps watch over Osa Lee Yates. The home's board of trustees still meets every month and checks in on its last remaining charge. When Yates passes away, DeJarnette will be out of a job and the board will dissolve.
The home itself now belongs to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, which has yet to occupy it with offices or programs. Its rooms are empty and stripped bare. Paint that had been cracked and peeling is being freshened a section at a time. The gardens are reduced to a pair of overgrown hedges that sit like clots in front of each wing of the building. Straining unexpectedly from the boxwoods and random growth, chin-high and angling out blindly, are the last few of the roses that Osa Lee Yates once tended, each capped by a final wild fist of red. MEMO: The historical information in this story was assembled from a number of
sources, including Civil War service records and documents from the Home
for Needy Confederate Women stored at the Virginia State Archives;
family histories maintained by Osa Lee Yates' nieces Betty Gollwitzer
and Jane Thacker of Richmond and Peggy Goff and Ann Bryant of the
Warrenton area; and interviews with former home administrator Holly
DeJarnette and board of trustees president Janet Nunnally Burhans.
ILLUSTRATION: Color staff photo by Beth Bergman
The Home for Needy Confederate Women was modeled after the White
House.
Osa Lee Yates today, at age 96.
B/W photos
Osa Lee Yates grew up on a farm near Warrenton, one of 10 children
of a confederate veteran.
Benjamin Ezekiel Yates fought in many of the bloodiest Civil War
battles before being captured by Union forces.
KEYWORDS: HOME FOR CONFEDERATE WOMEN by CNB