Cottage Home

Cottage Home. "We marched down to the parlour...". Near here stood Cottage Home, the farmhouse of the Rev. Robert Hall Morrison, a Presbyterian minister and one of the founders of Davidson College. He and his wife, Mary Graham, had ten children; three of their daughters married men who later become Confederate generals. Eugenia Morrison married Rufus Clay Barringer, Isabella married Daniel Harvey Hill, and Mary Anna married Thomas Jonathan Jackson. The wedding of Mary Ann Morrison and Thomas J. Jackson took place at Cottage Home on July 16, 1857. At the time, Jackson was a professor of natural and experimental philosophy, and of artillery tactics, at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington. Separated in April 1861 by the war, Jackson and his wife were reunited that November when she joined him at his headquarters in Winchester. One November 23, 1862, Julia Laura Jackson, their only child was born. She and her mother were with Jackson when he died on May 10, 1863, after he was wounded during the Battle of Chancellorsville., Mary Anna and Julia Jackson returned to Cottage Home, where they lived with the Rev. Morrison and where Julia was educated until 1873, when she was enrolled in the Charlotte Institute for Young Ladies. Mrs. Jackson, who wore mourning black the rest of her life, toured the South with Julia as the widow and only child of Gen. Stonewall Jackson, appearing at ceremonies such as statue unveilings. Julia married William Christian on June 2, 1885. She died on August 30, 1889, of typhoid. Mary Anna Jackson died in 1915., The Greek Revival-style Cottage Home (ca.1840) burned in 1911., “The room into which we were put to prepare for the ceremony was upstairs and had been heated by the western sun so that dressing was hot business. The Major (Jackson) undertook to put on a new collar, a ‘stand up,’…and he called on me to help him adjust it. By the time I had got it buttoned it was limp.… He produced another somewhat different in shape and …we managed to get him rigged out. … We marched down to the parlour where we he was married by Dr. Lacy.” , Clem Fishburne, a Jackson fiend, describing the July 16, 1857 wedding, (captions) , (upper center) Cottage Home, before 1911 Courtesy Davidson College Archives , (upper right) Thomas J. Jackson, attributed to H.B. Hull, August 1855 Courtesy Smithsonian Institution , Mary Anna and Julia Jackson Courtesy Virginia Military Institute , Julia Laura Jackson, photographed in Richmond, VA., 1875 Courtesy Virginia Military Institute