I want to talk a little bit about my visit to the Thomas Jackson cemetery in Lexington a couple of weeks back. Tons of interesting things to talk about here -- beginning with the changing nature of the graves within the cemetery itself. It starts off as a typical early 19th century city cemetery -- all the graves close together in orderly rows. But as you move through the cemetery, it becomes more like a rural cemetery -- graves further apart, more variance in the kinds of monuments, fewer fences. In one place you can see the evolution of cemetery styles -- that's true for a number of cemeteries (Raleigh's Oakwood Cemetery has some of this, but to get the full sense of evolution in Raleigh, you'd want to start with the Old Raleigh Cemetery). But I had this sense more than at any other cemetery where I have been while I was wandering the Jackson cemetery.
For instance, at left is a picture of the old part of the Jackson cemetery. I failed to take decent pictures of the newer parts of the cemetery, but you can at least see in the background of the Jackson cemetery that even that part looks much less crowded than the earlier part that is at left.
But there's something else that I found most, most exciting -- the number of important people who're burried in the Jackson cemetery. One of my favorite antebellum professors is Henry Tutwiler -- who taught at Alabama in the 1830s (where he delivered an important literary address), after he graduated from the University of Virginia. Tutwiler was from Harrisonburg -- so I was most excited to see several Tutwiler graves in the Lexington cemetery. And then there's James McDowell, a person who loomed large in the debates over slavery in 1832 in the Virginia legislature. But over time McDowell became more circumspect about the prospects for abolition of slavery -- and certainly quite skeptical of attempts to end it through advocacy from the North. In an 1838 address at Princeton and then in several speeches in Congress in the late 1840s and early 1850s, McDowell was critical of abolitionists and charged them with actually making the lives of enslaved people worse. Anyway, he's buried there -- as are a ton of other people of much interest to me -- like George Junkin (though I take it he was moved here in the early twentieth century) and his daughter Margaret Junkin Preston -- about whose art work I hope to have something to say later this summer -- and Junkin's son-in-law, one Thomas J. Jackson, along with Francis Henny Smith, who helped found the Virginia Military Institute and then taught there and ran it for decades. Then there's John Letcher (also a governor of Virginia). Heck, it's a veritable who's who of people I'm working on these days!
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