Don't Pass it to Stonewall!

Apologies for the one day hiatus. It appears that when you spend a weekend in a car on the interstate, you can have a real difficult time trying to maintain a wireless internet connection. One day, when Microsoft and Dell merge and buy the Eastern seaboard from the government, then I will be able to blog from the road. Until then, I’ll just have to wait or try and use the internet capabilities of my new cell phone. Let’s see, I just have to press this button here…and…

…a digital picture of the floor, half-obscured by my lens-covering thumb. Grand.

It’s a real shame, too, since the road provides so many good post ideas. Most of them are fleeting; I rarely can recall them when I sit down to the YAB Desk. But as I drove back from a wonderful wedding evening in Williamsburg Saturday night, something stuck me as strange.

The drive between DC and Williamsburg can take anywhere between 2 and 6 hours, depending on speed, traffic, and pace-crippling blizzard. (Mattias you still owe me for that one.) It has its highlights (Wawa in Fredericksburg), its lowlights (Mixing Bowl), and its weird SHS connections (towns named Stafford and Lightfoot). There are probably other notable landmarks, but when you’re risking being late for a wedding, sightseeing doesn’t exactly make the docket.

However, YAB will take this opportunity to question a roadside mystery just south of Fredericksburg. When driving back north on Saturday night, I passed the brown national park sign for Exit 118, home of the Stonewall Jackson Shrine.

Or is it?

Sure, the “Stonewall Jackson Shrine” part of the sign was glowing with reflective lettering, but it appears that the Virginia Department of Transportation has place brown metal over the section where “Exit 118” had been. For those who have never been (ok, all of you), Jackson Shrine has been erected in honor of Civil War Confederate general Thomas Jonathan Jackson, who was known better as Stonewall. What a name. Apparently, he wasn’t very handsome.

Well, the details are fuzzy, but apparently when Stonewall was returning from a recon mission on I-95 he returned to camp on horseback. Sadly for him, his own troops helped him dismount – he was mistakenly shot. An attempted revival occurred at a nearby farmhouse. When said revival failed, they figured that it’s shrine-in’ time and contacted the National Park Service. Wayward travelers and lost motorists would get to visit a house where a guy died all the way until…NOW.

Exit 118 apparently no longer services the Stonewall Jackson Shrine. And I have no idea why. Maybe there’s a road outage and you can no longer get to that old farmhouse. Perhaps the annual visiting population of 14 people has declined to single digits, forcing a hasty closing. There is even a chance that someone, somewhere, built a COOLER Stonewall Shrine, that held more than a bed where a fallen soldier passed away. Heck, maybe they even have a stone wall. That would be ironic.

But what reason do I fear the most?

Stonewall Jackson isn’t dead.

Think about it. You cannot have a shrine for a man centered on his death if he hasn’t died, right? Is it possible that Virginia historians have found out that he is alive and well, 147 years after his supposed slaying by his own men? I always thought that story had a few holes, anyway. If this IS the case, doesn’t the National Park Service need to be tried for fraud? Lawyers, please comment.

Now excuse me while I hide from a newly-discovered Civil War general. If he figures out the Internet, I’m cooked.