Westlake Cemetery

Westlake Cemetery. Burial Place of Julia Jackson. , This is one of the earliest identified cemeteries west of the Allegheny Mountains. William Tyree, owner of nearby Tyree Tavern, and Confederate Col. George W. Imboden, brother of Gen. John D. Imboden, are buried here. The cemetery is best known, however, for the grave of Julia Beckwith Neale Jackson Woodson, the mother of Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson. She was born on February 28, 1798, in Loudoun County, Virginia, and moved with her family two years later to the Parkersburg vicinity. She married Jonathan Jackson, an attorney, on September 28, 1817, and the couple had four children, including Thomas Jonathan Jackson born on January 21, 1824. Jonathan Jackson died two years later, deeply in debt, leaving his family destitute., On November 4, 1830, Julia Jackson married Blake G. Woodson, a man fifteen years her senior, who in 1831 became the court clerk of newly created Fayette County. Mired in poverty despite his position, he resented his stepchildren. When Julia Woodson’s health began to fail in 1831, she sent her children to live with relatives, and Thomas J. Jackson moved to Jackson’s Mill in Lewis County. He returned here once, in the autumn of 1831, to see his mother shortly before she died., The exact date of Julia Woodson’s death is uncertain. Her tombstone, erected many years later, states that she died in September 1831. She gave birth to a son, however, on October 7, and other documentary evidence points to a death date of December 4, 1831. A wooden headboard or footboard once marked the site, but by 1855 it had disappeared., [Sidebar:] , > In August 1855, Thomas J. Jackson, later famous as Stonewall, came here in hopes of finding his mother's grave. He stayed at Tyree Tavern, and William Tyree escorted him here. Jackson wrote: "[Tyree] was at my mother's burial and accompanied me to the cemetery for the purpose of pointing out her grave, but I am not certain that he found it. There was no stone to mark the spot. Another gentileman, who had the kindness to go with us, state that a wooden head or foot board with her name on it had been put up, but it was no longer there." Years later, Capt. Thomas R. Ranson, formerly in Jackson's brigade, erected a marker for Julia Jackson.