Location: SR 1511 (Old Plank Road) east of Lincolnton
County: Lincoln
Original Date Cast: 1953
Confederate General Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson was born in 1824 in Clarksburg, Virginia, to Jonathan and Julia Beckwith Jackson. He entered West Point in July 1842 with little previous education but worked diligently and graduated seventeenth in the class of 1846. After graduation he fought in Mexico where he earned the rank of major. Back in the states, he served at various forts before accepting a position in 1851 as professor of artillery tactics and natural philosophy at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington. He resigned from the army on February 29, 1852. Two years later, in 1854, his first wife, Eleanor Junkin, died.
On July 16, 1857, Stonewall Jackson married Mary Anna Morrison at “Cottage Home,” the Lincoln County home of the Morrison family. The two were introduced by Mary’s sister, Isabella, who was married to Major D. H. Hill of the faculty of Washington College, also in Lexington, Virginia. She was the daughter of the Reverend Robert Hall Morrison, a Presbyterian minister and one of the founders of Davidson College. The couple was separated by the Civil War in 1861. Jackson had taken little part in the public dispute preceding the war and described the conflict as the “sum of all evils”. Nonetheless, he responded to his order to Richmond and went on to become one of the best-known generals to serve the Confederacy.
Jackson’s wife joined him at his headquarters in Winchester during the winter of 1861. On November 23, 1862, she gave birth to their second child, Julia Laura Jackson (their first daughter, Mary Graham, lived only a few weeks). Jackson was wounded during the Battle of Chancellorsville and died on May 10, 1863. His body lay in state at Richmond before he was buried in Lexington, Virginia. Mary Anna and Julia returned to “Cottage Home” to live with Reverend Morrison. They moved to Charlotte in 1873 so that Julia could attend Charlotte Institute for Young Ladies. Mary Anna, who never remarried, died in 1915 and was buried beside her husband in Lexington.
References:
William S. Powell, ed., Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, III, 184-185—sketch of Mary Anna Morrison Jackson by Elisabeth Ann Bowles
Dumas Malone, ed., Dictionary of American Biography, IX
Noel Yancey, “The Venerable Mrs. ‘Stonewall,’” (Raleigh) Spectator Magazine, September 19, 1991