4th Annual Baton Rouge Civil War Round Table Symposium, Nov. 5-7,2021

I thought I finished posting all the new material I had yesterday but I forgot that I didn't finish this thread. Other activities in November and December bumped it aside for awhile. Before I headed to Jackson on Friday afternoon, I did some quick research to see what else might be there besides the museum where the Symposium was kicking off and Centenary State Historic Site. Just the name alone piqued my curiosity...Old Jackson Cemetery.

 
To get to Old Jackson Cemetery, you have to drive into new Jackson Cemetery first. I got there right at 5:00pm. When I pulled up to the cemetery sign and was still in my truck, I spotted the Confederate gravestone in the center-left of the picture.

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Pvt. William C. Mattingly, Co. I, 3rd Battalion Louisiana Cavalry . That's what it says on his gravestone. The 5 pages of fold3 records for him say he was in Co. D, 9th Battalion Louisiana Cavalry. His records jump from an Index Card to 4 pages of POW records that say he was captured in Jackson, Louisiana on May 24, 1863, sent to New Orleans on May 26th and paroled in June. The last POW Roll says he was part of 460 Confederate POWs paroled in New Orleans in June and sent by steamer to City Point, VA for exchange on July 6, 1863. I couldn't find a Headstone Application. I was hoping there would be one that might explain the discrepancy between his gravestone and fold3 records. It was too late in the day to scrape or scrub stones, but I did spray his before I left.


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I didn't have time to scroll through all the burials at Old Jackson Cemetery before going, so when I saw Pvt. Mattingly right in front I thought there'd be a lot more Confederate veterans there. There are 499 memorials on the cemetery FindAGrave page but less than half are photographed. I believe there are a lot of unmarked graves. Anyway, I walked to the opposite side of the cemetery and didn't see another Civil War military gravestone, but there was a historical marker on the other side.

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I didn't have time to scroll through all the burials at Old Jackson Cemetery before going, so when I saw Pvt. Mattingly right in front I thought there'd be a lot more Confederate veterans there. There are 499 memorials on the cemetery FindAGrave page but less than half are photographed. I believe there are a lot of unmarked graves. Anyway, I walked to the opposite side of the cemetery and didn't see another Civil War military gravestone, but there was a historical marker on the other side.

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On louisiana-cemeteries.com for East Feliciana Parish, Old Jackson City Cemetery shows 26 for CSA graves.
 
I found Lt. Col. John McKowen's gravesite in a fenced plot with an identical historical marker and a civilian gravestone. I couldn't find any information on him in fold3. The only John McKowen I found in the 1st Louisiana Cavalry was a Private.


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On louisiana-cemeteries.com for East Feliciana Parish, Old Jackson City Cemetery shows 26 for CSA graves.
I am quite certain that some of the civilian gravestones I saw are Confederate veterans and that some are there in unmarked graves.
 
I kept running across this in Ancestry for Lt. Col. John McKowen but kept drawing a blank in fold3 and quite frankly got tired of looking.

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I was losing daylight pretty quickly. I walked around Old Jackson Cemetery and looked around a bit more and took a few more pictures. Really interesting place. Hard to put it into words. I was only there about 40 minutes. It felt longer.

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Nothing in a search for John, John C., and John Clay McKowen in Louisiana Confederate Pension Applications. I will call a local Jackson historian next week.
I couldn't find anything under the alternate spelling "McKewen" found in Ancestry either.
 
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