Beechmore: The
Jennie Casseday's Rest Cottage for Working Women Years and Beyond
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Beechmore: The Little Colonel Years
Jennie Casseday’s Rest Cottage was located on the Pewee
Valley property shown as
Beechmore on The Little Colonel game board
from 1896 until the 1940s.
Although Jennie Casseday's Rest Cottage for Working Women was not
mentioned in the Little Colonel stories, it was a Pewee Valley fixture
for more than half a century, including the years when Annie Fellows
Johnston wrote the Little Colonel stories and lived at
The Beeches. Also, it's
namesake may have inspired the sad tale of
Marietta Waring in "The
Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation", 1905.
In "Jennie Casseday of Louisville : her intimate life as told by her
sister, Mrs. Fannie Casseday Duncan," Mrs. Duncan eloquently describes the
experience that eventually led Jennie to open the Rest Cottage in 1889:
"One day when Jennie was just grown and
had the world before her, she had some dresses made for a watering-place
summering, and she went to a dress making establishment where they make
dresses like dreams. By some mistake, she was taken to the work room, on
the top floor, instead of the daintily furnished fitting rooms of
Madame's apartments. The work room was a hot, square room right under a
tin roof, with blindless windows all a-row to the midday sun. Here human
toilers sat and span to make creations for rich young women. That was
long before the days of women clerks, office girls, women in business.
Flushed, tired faces looked up at Jennie as she was unfortunately
ushered into their midst. In two corners were coal stoves which heated
irons and the June atmosphere with equal indifference. The whole scene
was a revelation to Jennie Casseday."
It was many years after her chance encounter with the abysmal
conditions in the garment industry before Jennie Casseday was able to
bring her idea – an inexpensive place for working girls to take a summer
vacation -- to fruition. Documents residing at the Filson Historical
Society in Louisville, Ky. show that during the Rest Cottage's first seven
years of operation, the land and buildings were rented. Camden in Oldham
County (a train stop in what is now Crestwood, Ky.) was the site for the
Rest Cottage’s first summer. In 1895, it was held in Pewee Valley at “Mr.
Kaye’s near Houston/Huston” and in 1896 at “Beechmoor.” A year later,
the Rest Cottage’s Board of Directors bought the “Beechmoor” property
outright and held a formal dedication service on Wednesday, June 9, 1897
on the anniversary of Jennie’s birthday.
Named for Frances Willard's home in Evanston, In., the Rest Cottage was
described in promotional brochures as a "vacation home for wage-earning
women, to which they can go in the summer idle time and spend two weeks in
absolute rest near to nature's heart." The vacationers included "young
women from the telephone and telegraph offices, from the stenographer's
desk and storehouse and school-room; and many were toiling beyond their
strength and were weary and exhausted."
A sample page from their register tallied 15 teachers; six bookkeepers;
19 dress-seamstresses; 21 tailoresses; 10 stenographers; 13 store clerks;
six "old women much laid by," three milliners, three finishers, one music
teacher, three cash girls, one hair-dresser, one copyist, four weavers,
one book agent, one artist, three operators, one janitor in a public
school, two apprentices, one linen woman in a hotel and five housekeepers.
Activities at the Rest Cottage included "jingle parties and whistle
games, black-bird pies and cob-web parties, straw rides and cake walks,
pic-nics and donkey parties, charades and lantern strolls, serenades in
the moonlight, and watermelon feasts, tableaux on the lawn, lighting
with flashlights." In addition, "the ministers of various churches were
invited out to tea every other week...the girls took delight in adorning
the tables with lovely flowers, arranging boutonnières for all the
plates, and afterwards serving fired chicken, coffee with Jersey cream,
hot buttermilk biscuits and other toothsome viands prepared by our good
cook. After tea all gathered on the lawn under the old pine trees and
held an open air service."
Cost to these young women was just $1.00 per week, plus one cent per
mile for transportation. And placed on the looking-glass of every room
was the following sentiment from Jennie Casseday printed on dainty card
board:
"I expect to pass through
this world but once. Any good thing therefore that I can do or any
kindness I can show to any human being let me do it now. Let me not
defer it, nor neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again."
The Rest Cottage continued operations into the 1940s at which time the
property was purchased by Mrs. Mary Crain, who turned it into a nursing
home. The photos below, from “The Land of the Little Colonel,” published
in 1974 by Mrs. John S. (Katie) Smith, show what it looked like at that
time.
Beechmore: Mary Crain’s Nursing Home, exterior
Beechmore: Mary Crain’s Nursing Home, interior
After Mary Crain’s death, Beechmore fell into decay and had to be
demolished. The 64-acre property is now the site of The Woods of Pewee
Valley subdivision.
Return to Beechmore: The
Little Colonel Years
Page by Donna Russell
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