Little Sorrel

CBar

Cadet
Joined
Mar 8, 2005
Location
Mobile, AL
LEXINGTON, VA., BIDS FOND FAREWELL TO A WAR HORSE
By Peter Finn
Washington Post Staff Writer​
Monday, July 21, 1997; Page B01​
©The Washington Post. All rights reserved.​
LEXINGTON, Va., July 20--Along with handfuls of dirt from the Civil War battlefields where he served, the cremated skeletal remains of Gen. Stonewall Jackson's unflappable war horse were buried in the Virginia Military Institute Parade Ground today, 111 years after the steed's death.​
The bones of Little Sorrel had been languishing unheralded in a storeroom at the VMI Museum when, earlier this year, the Virginia Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and VMI decided to inter the remains with full honors -- just as Traveller, Gen. Robert E. Lee's horse, was ceremoniously buried a few hundred yards away on the campus of Washington and Lee University in 1971.​
"How many things can you do with bones?" asked Keith Gibson, director of the VMI Museum. "This is a fitting and appropriate commemoration."​
And so, in matters grave, Lexington no longer can be called a one-horse town.​
At 3 p.m., a processional emerged from Jackson Memorial Hall, where another part of Little Sorrel -- his brown hide -- is mounted over plaster of Paris and on permanent display in the basement museum. A VMI cadet, Adam Pool, 19, carried the 18-inch-tall walnut box holding the ashes. He was accompanied across the grass of the parade ground by an honor guard, a mounted escort, an infantry escort and a fife and drum corps of Confederate reenactors.​
In front of the lifesize bronze statue of Jackson at the head of the parade ground, a narrow plot, three to four feet deep, had been dug for Little Sorrel. It is to be the final resting place for part of a horse who was so popular in his day that he had to be protected from swooning Southern ladies who tried to cut hair from his mane and tail to make bracelets.​
And today a crowd of 300, some dressed in period costumes, bade farewell to Little Sorrel with prayers and a rousing rendition of "Dixie." The Fincastle Rifles, a Roanoke-based reenactment group, fired three volleys as the box was slowly lowered into the grave by four men dressed as Confederate soldiers. And as the 45-minute ceremony ended, the crowd was invited to pitch dirt gathered from battlefields, such as Manassas and Fredericksburg, into the grave.​
"I'm here to honor Jackson and a part of American history you don't often hear about -- what Little Sorrel meant to the general," said Donna Rykowski, 29, of Easton, Pa., who came to the ceremony in a reproduction 1860 black mourning dress. When asked why someone from a place north of the Mason-Dixon line was at such a ceremony, Rykowski said: "I'm highly insulted by that question. My forebears fought for the Confederacy. This is American history, and I'm an American.​
"But," she added, "never a Yankee."​
Little Sorrel was no aristocratic charger. "The horse's chunky lines were made awkward by an unusually large neck and an undistinguished head," Louise K. Dooley wrote in a 1975 historical article on the horse.​
But Jackson loved Little Sorrel, whom he also called Fancy, because the horse was a tireless campaigner, sometimes carrying the general 40 miles in a day, and because he was fearless in the heat of battle, rarely spooked by gunfire. For Jackson, only a fair horseman, Little Sorrel's gait was as easy "as the rocking of a cradle." Indeed, Jackson occasionally slept on the horse.​
Jackson was riding Little Sorrel at Chancellorsville on May 2, 1863, when he was shot by friendly fire; he died a few days later. After Jackson's death, Little Sorrel lived in North Carolina with the general's widow.​
"His eyes were his chief beauty, being most intelligent and expressive and as soft as a gazelle's," Mary Anna Jackson wrote in the "Life and Letters of Stonewall Jackson."​
In 1883, Mary Anna Jackson felt she could no longer care for the horse, and she asked VMI, where her husband had been a professor of natural philosophy and artillery tactics, to stable Little Sorrel. On the journey north to VMI, crowds of veterans came out to salute the horse as he passed by on rail.​
Little Sorrel grazed on the VMI parade ground where he was buried today, and he apparently relished the institute's martial atmosphere. A doctor on post in the 1880s later wrote that "when the cadets, during practice, began firing rifle or cannon, Old Sorrel would come running onto the parade ground, sniffing the air and snorting loudly, head and tail up, running up and down in front of the parade line." And, Dooley wrote, when the old horse heard "Dixie," he got a pep in his arthritic step.​
After falling and injuring his back, Little Sorrel died in March 1886. The horse was 36, three years younger than Jackson at his death.​
A Pittsburgh taxidermist, Frederick Webster, was on hand to preserve and mount the horse's hide, and Webster took his bones as payment. The bones were sent to VMI in the late 1940s, but they never found a proper home, moving from a biology classroom to a storeroom. Earlier this year, the United Daughters thought the time had come to unbox and inter those forgotten bones. "It is a sign of respect for all the horses of the Confederacy," said Juanita Allen, of Mount Vernon, president of the Virginia Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. "They are long overdue a tribute from the descendants of their masters."​

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I have heard that Little Sorrel's skin is now full of mothholes(?).... yuck! Can anything be done to save it? He is at the VMI Museum, where, I believe, is also the gum coat that Jackson wore the night he was shot.
 
yankeewoman said:
I have heard that Little Sorrel's skin is now full of mothholes(?).... yuck! Can anything be done to save it? He is at the VMI Museum, where, I believe, is also the gum coat that Jackson wore the night he was shot.
Little Sorrel's hide is indeed ratty looking. Moth-eaten would be a good description. Both Jackson's horse and raincoat are among some of the famous items currently displayed in the George C. Marshall Museum at VMI while the VMI Museum is undergoing extensive renovation. Here is further information from the UDC about Little Sorrel and plans to improve his condition if not his appearance. This link includes photos so I couldn't just copy and paste it.
http://vaudc.org/sorrel2.html
VMI is raising funds to pay for construction of a "climate-controlled display case" for Little Sorrel. I don't know the date of this 2004 article but it appears that the fund-raising may still be in progress.
 
Barbara:

Thank you for this wonderful story...I'm truly speechless.

Dawna
 
dawna said:
Barbara:

Thank you for this wonderful story...I'm truly speechless.

Dawna
I'm honored to have rendered you speechless, Dawna. JUST kidding.

Seriously, I thought many people at these boards were already aware of Little Sorrel's continuing existence in Lexington.

When I found the 1997 Washington Post article about his burial, I wasn't sure where to post it, but then I saw that there was a whole forum here dedicated to CW horses. I also saw, after I had made my Little Sorrel thread, that there were already separate threads for Old Sorrel and Fancy, all the same horse. However, I suppose most of us know him as Little Sorrel, especially after the movie Gods and Generals.

Here is what I didn't know: that Sheridan's Rienzi had been renamed Winchester and was also preserved by a taxidermist.
 
I have visited him...

at VMI and yes, Little Sorrel looks a bit tattered. I absolutely got chills down my spine however, when I saw General Jackson's raincoat, with the holes in the sleeve. It is truly amazing to me when you read a lot about an incident, then even see it on the screen in a movie, then see the 'real deal' is preserved in a museum.

Lexington is worth the trip for any board members who have not visited there!
 
Know how you feel, Miss Markie ...
... am somewhat agog with the prospect of seeing Wade Hampton's saber in Columbia, SC, real soon.
Ole
 
Oh, that is cool!

We stayed in Charleston a few years back and stayed at a B&B on the Battery. The owner's great-great grandfather had been a cadet at the Citadel, and then did join up with the regular army. Imagine my having to choose between going out to visit Fort Sumter (I had never been there) or getting to sit with her as she showed me the letters written by this ancestor!! It was so difficult, but I went with the fort trip. *sigh* what a tough choice. However, she did let me hold a small cup like item, and it was a gift to her gg grandfather from his regiment. It was made out of wood from the Star of the West!! So at least I got to touch that!!
 
Little Sorrel might be moth eaten but its well worth the visit to see it!

There was a very interesting article in the Civil War Times Illustrated in July 1977 concerning what happened to Jackson's raincoat after his death. I have scanned the article if anyone is interested.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v227/Reb_Al/Reb_Al%20Video/Rain1.jpg
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http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v227/Reb_Al/Reb_Al%20Video/Rain5.jpg

A photo I took on my last visit there:

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