Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 2.djvu/258

50 ley and assumed command of that district, his only regret at the assignment being that his Stonewall brigade was not ordered at first to accompany him. This separation was so painful as to cause him to say, "Had this communication not come as an order, I should instantly have declined it and continued in command of the brave old brigade."

Jackson was a descendant of a sterling western Virginia family, which first settled in Hardy county and then moving across the Alleghany ridge made their home in Buckhannon. He was born at Clarksburg, and his mother's grave is in the soil of the new State. The spot where reposes the venerated woman who gave this hero birth is thus described: On the top of a wooded hill near the mining village of Anstead, Fayette county, W. Va., is an old graveyard still used as a burying place by the dwellers in this mountainous region. It is greatly neglected, and many graves are scarcely to be found, though a few are protected by little pens of fence rails. The location is so beautiful and the view it commands is so extensive and exquisite that it is worthy of being well cared for. Among those who lie buried here is the mother of that Christian soldier, Thomas Jonathan Jackson. The grave, or spot, for the grave is scarcely to be recognized, has been kindly cared for by Stephen M. Taylor, formerly of Albemarle county. But no stone was erected until a gentleman of Staunton, Capt. Thomas D. Ransom, one of his old soldiers, seeing the neglected condition of the grave, had prepared a simple but suitable monument: a tall slab of marble with an inscription giving the dates of her birth and death, and adding that it is "a tribute to the mother of Stonewall Jackson by one of his old brigade." Among the valleys and hills of this romantic part of the Old Dominion, Jackson passed his boyhood and the greater part of his life until appointed to a cadetship at West Point. After his military life in Mexico he was elected to a professorship in the Virginia military institute, situated in the splendid valley which reposes in beauty and