Groups to re-create Stonewall Jackson's funeral procession
Darrell Laurant
Lynchburg News & Advance
Wednesday, May 9, 2007
Even though their association was sad and short, the packet boat Marshall and Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson have been forever linked in Southern history.
It was the Marshall that carried Jackson’s body on the last leg of its journey from Chancellorsville, where he had been accidentally but fatally wounded by his own troops, to his waiting burial plot in Lexington.
The sendoff accorded Jackson was befitting his status as a military star, a tactician second only to Gen. Robert E. Lee on the Confederate side. After his funeral was held in Richmond, the casket was transported to Lynchburg by train, then via the James River & Kanawha Canal to his final resting place in Lexington.
“They had to take the canal,” said Sally Schneider of the Lynchburg Historical Foundation, which is helping to sponsor a re-creation of the events of May 13, 1863, this weekend, “because there was no railroad to Lexington. The line stopped in Lynchburg.”
Jackson wasn’t the only famous general to ride aboard the Marshall - Lee was also an occasional passenger. But it was as a floating hearse, bearing a fallen war hero into the surrounding darkness at a solemn four miles an hour, that the Marshall became synonymous with the Lost Cause.
Perhaps that’s why the boat was allowed to sit moldering in the defunct canal when it was bypassed by new railroad lines in the 1880s.
Prior to that, it had remained for a time in Lexington, where it was partially burned by the Union troops of Gen. David Hunter. Back in Lynchburg, it was repaired and returned to service, only to be rendered obsolete when the canal was finally shut down as a transportation route in 1880.
Eventually, the 90-foot, iron-hulled boat wound up as the residence of Corbin Spencer and his sister, who purchased it and hauled it up on shore. But a nasty James River flood in 1913 tore the wooden portion of the boat to pieces and buried the hull in more than two feet of river mud.
Two decades later, the Marshall was finally salvaged and hauled to Riverside Park. There it sat, as civic efforts to raise funds to repair it flickered and died, until 2003, when Schneider saw the pitiful state to which “Jackson’s boat” had descended.
“I saw it in the park and said, goodness sakes, this is history,” Schneider recently told the Civil War News.
Aided by the Lynchburg Parks & Recreation Department (and the city budget, which provided $40,000), the Foundation constructed a building around the Marshall to keep it out of the weather.
“It can’t really be restored as it was, ” said Schneider earlier this week. “There’s not enough left of it. But we can still save the hull.”
Much of the crowd that greeted Jackson’s casket when it pulled into the Lynchburg station consisted of injured Confederate troops being treated in local hospitals. The train had taken a roundabout route, first from Richmond to Gordonsville, then switching to the Orange & Alexandria for the next leg.
According to later accounts, it arrived in Lynchburg at around 6:30 p.m. on the evening of the May 13, whereupon Jackson’s casket was transferred to a horse-drawn hearse from the Duiguid Funeral Service (still operating today) and driven the length of Main Street from 12th to Fifth as the curious and the mournful lined the street. Saturday’s re-enactment of the procession will follow the same route.
“The fact that this happened at night made for a better painting,” said New York historical artist Mort Kunstler, who will unveil his “Going Home” on Friday night at a dinner to benefit the Marshall recovery effort and the Civil War Chaplains’ Museum at Liberty University. “The torches and the moonlight must have been very dramatic.”
The remains of the canal still exist on the Lynchburg riverfront, as does the old Ninth Street bridge over the manmade waterway. In the backdrop of his painting, Kunstler also included the Amazement Square building, which housed a dry goods company in 1863.
Doug Harvey, head of the Lynchburg Museum System, became fascinated by Stonewall Jackson during previous jobs at the Manassas Museum and the Museum of the Confederacy. “He went out a winner,” Harvey has said. “In that sense, he was luckier than Lee and Ewell and Longstreet and the other major Confederate generals who wound up tasting the dregs of defeat.”
The Stonewall Procession FRIDAY
6:30 p.m. Unveiling of the Lynchburg print, ‘Going Home: Stonewall Jackson Procession, Lynchburg, Va., May 13, 1863,’ by Mort Kunstler at the Arthur S. DeMoss Learning Center, Grand Lobby, Liberty University.
Tickets are $55; seating is limited. Tickets available at Dixie Outfitter, Madison Heights, 846-3006; The Framery on Memorial Avenue, 846-2844; and Lynchburg Historical Foundation, 528-5353.
Proceeds from this event will benefit the National Civil War Chaplains Museum and Research Center and the Lynchburg Historical Foundation. For more information call the foundation at 528-5353 or visit
www.lynchburghistoricalfoundation.org.
SATURDAY
10 a.m. to 4 p.m.: Mort Kunstler and Rod Gragg print and book signing at the Depot Plaza off Jefferson Street
11 a.m.: A reading of the City Proclamation by Mayor Joan Foster at the Confederate Monument at the top of Monument Terrace.
1:30 p.m.: Memorial procession for General Thomas ‘Stonewall’ Jackson, beginning on Jefferson Street and following procession route when Jackson’s body came through Lynchburg on the way to Lexington on May 13, 1863. The procession will end at the bottom of Ninth Street, where there will be a cannon fired and a 21-gun salute.
There also will be a Civil War encampment, children’s activities and bus tours to historic sites. Old City Cemetery will have its Antique Rose Festival and Historic Sandusky will sponsor a Jackson exhibit.
SUNDAY
11 a.m.: Church service at the encampment by the Re-enactors Mission for Jesus Christ, Riverfront Park. More information:
www.lynchburghistoricalfoundation.org
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John W.
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Groups to re-create Stonewall Jackson's funeral procession 
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