Thomas J. Jackson was born on January 21, 1824, in a house that stood across the street and halfway down the block to the right. His father struggled to make ends meet, and poverty marred Jackson’s childhood. Both parents died by the time he was seven, and he and his sister Laura lived with an uncle, Cummins Jackson, at Jackson’s Mill about fifteen miles south of here. Congressman Samuel L. Hays, a kinsman and Lewis County resident, appointed Thomas Jackson to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1842, and Jackson graduated in the celebrated class of 1846. He served as an artillery officer in the Mexican War and later taught at the Virginia Military Institute. At the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, Jackson joined the Confederate army and commanded a brigade at Harpers Ferry. On July 21, 1861, he led his unit at the First Battle of Manassas, where he received his famous nickname, “Stonewall.” His tactical victories in the Shenandoah Valley in 1862 made him the Confederacy’s foremost military hero, and he later became the most aggressive and dependable corps commander in Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. On the night of May 2, 1863, after a flank attack at Chancellorsville, Jackson reconnoitered the Union lines by moonlight and was accidentally shot by his own men. His left arm was amputated, and he died of complications eight days later. Among the most revered Confederate military leaders, Stonewall Jackson is buried in Lexington, Virginia.