A passerby can’t see the cemetery until he is in Jackson City Park. We walk down the gentle slope toward the playground. The iron fence around the graveyard finally comes into view. Around the corner, gates are open. Stonewall is buried in Lexington, Virginia, but…Read More

A passerby can’t see the cemetery until he is in Jackson City Park. We walk down the gentle slope toward the playground.

The iron fence around the graveyard finally comes into view. Around the corner, gates are open. Stonewall is buried in Lexington, Virginia, but this visit provides insight into the land-owning, Indian-fighting, civic-minded, somewhat wealthy and connected family he hailed from.

His father Johnathan Jackson is here, and his marker indicates that he was born in 1790 and died (of typhoid fever) in 1826--lived only 36 years and died when Stonewall was only 2. Stonewall’s sister Elizabeth was an infant and died of typhoid, too, at the same time, but his mother gave birth to his other sister Laura the next day after the death of her husband. (Stonewall was particularly fond of his sister Laura and grew up with her at Jackson’s Mill, near Jane Lew.) After recovering from the death of her husband and baby daughter, Stonewall’s mother, Julia Beckwith Neale, made a meager living teaching and sewing for three years and then married a man who made not much of a living and didn’t like her children.

She died at age 33 during childbirth when Stonewall was 6, and some say that her malnutrition that she suffered during her second marriage may have caused the lung ailment that killed her. She had sent all her children to live with relatives before she died, and one might speculate that her home with her second husband wasn’t safe for her children or herself. Her emaciated body was buried in Amsted, West Virginia in an unmarked grave until a sympathetic patron later bought her a marble marker. Her absence here in the Jackson family cemetery and the tragic details of her life serve to illustrate the difficulties of the isolated frontier life, especially for women, who were estranged here from their parent families, who might have intervened. (Julia came from a wealthy family.)

Other difficulties, too, become apparent in the graveyard.

Captain John Jackson is labeled as "INDIAN FIGHTER, REVOLUTIONARY SOLDIER," and I understand that these were one and the same in these parts, where Delaware Indians were instigated by the British to attack settlements. He must have been a very successful indian fighter, for he lived to age 85! Born in Ireland, he was the first of the family to immigrate. (His brother, Dr. Joseph Jackson may have been the grandfather of President Andrew Jackson, but there are problems with this genealogy.) John’s wife, Elizabeth Cummins Jackson, has a marker indicating that she was born in London and lived to be 105! If that is accurate, then a good family could prosper here. These Jacksons, Stonewall’s great-grandparents, had a better life than did Stonewall’s parents and provided "good stock" for the Jackson family here in West Virginia.

Another sign tells us that this land was the original Jackson family farm, an "outpost of pioneer Clarksburg and scene of Indian raids." Another sign near Dolly Madison’s sister and mother (Mary Payne Jackson and Mary Coles Payne) explains that this particular spot was the orchard and that the land was deeded as a public cemetery by George Jackson--he appears to have been a brother of Stonewall's grandfather Edward, who started the plantation farm at Jackson's Mill, farther south, where Stonewall was raised by Edward's son Cummins.

Most of the Jackson men outlived their wives, so many of them had two wives in their long lifetimes. Some of these grand sires had as many as fifteen children. Looking at the family tree, I see a James Madison Jackson, and I notice that a number of the Jacksons married members of the Brake family. One Brake woman (Elizabeth Weatherholt Brake) was married to Edward, so we'll learn more about her and her relatives at Jackson's Mill.

I rarely dabble in genealogy, but the Jackson family is rich in research. Many books have been written about the descendants of Captain John Jackson and the Jackson family tree. This particular branch of history would drive me mad, I’m sure, with a steady diet of it, but it is friendly enough for mastering just one early local family with a perfectly clear lineage: Captain John Jackson (original Jackson stock and Stonewall’s great-grandfather), Col. Edward Jackson (grandfather, who started the plantation farm at Jackson’s Mill near Jane Lew), Jonathan Jackson (Stonewall’s father and brother of Cummins, inheritor of their father Edward’s farm and uncle who raised Stonewall).

This much, we have straight before we head to Jackson’s Mill, Stonewall’s boyhood home. That’s another journal that includes two Civil War sites south of here--Jackson's Mill and Bulltown. These figures here in the Jackson family cemetery turn up again at Jackson's Mill in the tourguide's narrative, so we're glad we've stopped here first to get to know them.

A sure sign of their European past, early residents of Clarksburg buried their dead in town and lived among them. (Perhaps they were inspired by their greatness!) Their old cemeteries aren’t elaborate or whimsical, like those of the French, for early settlers here weren’t wealthy.…Read More

A sure sign of their European past, early residents of Clarksburg buried their dead in town and lived among them. (Perhaps they were inspired by their greatness!) Their old cemeteries aren’t elaborate or whimsical, like those of the French, for early settlers here weren’t wealthy. On the frontier, they were busy repelling Indian attacks until the Treaty of Greenville in 1795 and hadn’t time for whimsy or creating new burial customs, and so they carried on with life as they had known it in the old country. Founded in 1785, ten years before the Treaty of Greenville, the early city interred their notables in church yards or family plots.

We find Daniel Davisson DAR Cemetery on W. Main Street beside Go-Mart. After circling the block twice, we see the sign.

Several dozen graves are scattered about what used to be the yard of Hopewell Baptist Church, first church in Clarksburg, now gone. Most markers are natural stone with names and dates scratched in them, long ago faded and unreadable, but I learn at Waldomore that the old Baptist church kept and preserved good records! In the book there, I see that Forbes Britton, first newspaper man in Clarksburg, is buried here. Some markers have been supplied by the Veterans Administration and are like those we see in national cemeteries.

Here is Daniel Davisson, one of the first recorded settlers.

I learn at the genealogy research center at Waldomore that DAR (or Veterans Administration?) has got details wrong. Davisson was never sheriff or in the Revolutionary War! He was awarded the title of "Major" in 1799 because he had lived on a dangerous frontier where homesteaders were attacked by Delaware Indians--encouraged, of course, by the British (following the lead of the French in the French and Indian War). Nobody here fought Redcoats. As colonists in the East complained to England about taxation without representation, Harrison County, Virginia expressed to Richmond their indignation about the meager help they got from any central government to repel Indian raids! With the patronage title of Major, Davisson was given the paid position of sweeping the courthouse floor. One other interesting tidbit concerns his being accused of stealing chickens.

David Houchin, Secretary of Harrison County Genealogical Society, regrets that he can’t prove whether Davisson was a chicken thief: "But he was in the chicken house!" He confirms that most of Clarksburg’s downtown--Main St. and Pike St.--is on property that Davisson donated. I am impressed with the knowledge available about early settlers and with the amount of frustrating work needed to verify details. Even so, Houchin stresses, you can never be sure. He adds that his head is so full of details that he longs to retire so that he can empty his brain and "find out if I still have one." Working on Civil War research, I can empathize, but I must consider myself lucky. When research won’t give up the missing link, who ya gonna call? Genealogy.

Another marker in the cemetery is almost accurate.

Major Thomas Preston Moore was a legitimate participant in the War of 1812, but not in the American Revolution. His daughter, Harriet Moore, who married Waldo Potter Goff, lived in the antebellum mansion of Waldomore, built in 1839.

That’s where Harrison County Genealogical Society is housed on the third floor--where I am sitting when I discover this link to the markers I have found in the graveyard.

Eighty-five years after its charter as a city in Virginia, Clarksburg was hardly even a town with only 895 residents in 1860, just before the Civil War’s preliminary skirmishes in West Virginia. Although this is a Revolutionary-era graveyard, I find clues here about the appearance of the town as it existed at Stonewall Jackson’s birth. From the tombstones I can read, I gather that most of the luminaries here now were here before 1824 and certainly before the Civil War. This Baptist church and graveyard were on Main Street near the courthouse in the isolated frontier village in Virginia. Bragging rights included operating more grain mills than any other settlement around, so land was dedicated to farming.

The Army Corps of Engineers and West Virginia University have been dismantling and moving some of those mills that are still in existence. We’ll see two of them later today at Jackson’s Mill, Stonewall's boyhood home. An effort is also being made to preserve early farming, logging and woodworking methods. I see folk heritage sites in the making all along the Civil War Heritage Trail. Everywhere I go, guides explain what has been saved, moved, restored and, more interesting to me, what I can expect to see when I return.