DATE: Friday, July 18, 1997                 TAG: 9707180673

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B7   EDITION: FINAL 

DATELINE: LEXINGTON                         LENGTH:   38 lines

REMAINS OF JACKSON'S HORSE TO GET A BURIAL AT VMI

The cremated bones of Stonewall Jackson's famous war horse, Little Sorrell, will be buried on the Virginia Military Institute parade grounds Sunday at the base of Jackson's statue.

The ceremony will be similar to the services given to war veterans, with a color guard, a fife and drum corps, and a eulogy of sorts by Virginia Tech professor Bud Robertson, a Civil War historian and Jackson biographer.

The articulated skeleton of Little Sorrell stood in a biology class at VMI for about 40 years until a new science building was completed in 1989.

The skeleton was then taken apart, and the bones were placed in storage at the VMI museum, where the stuffed hide of the horse, saddled and bridled, has been exhibited since 1948.

Jackson, a Confederate general in the Civil War and a former VMI professor, rode Little Sorrell throughout his celebrated Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1862. Jackson was riding the light-brown horse in 1863 when one of his troops accidentally shot the general, who fell from the saddle and died eight days later.

Little Sorrell lived on the VMI parade ground from 1883 until 1885, when he was sent to the World's Fair in New Orleans and then to the Old Soldier's Home, where he died in March 1886.

The hide was stuffed and exhibited in the Old Soldier's Home until the building was razed in 1948.

Lt. Col. Keith Gibson, director of the VMI museum, said the burial was planned because alumni felt it was more appropriate to have the revered horse's remains in a marked grave than stuffed away in storage boxes.

The cremated remains will be placed in a handmade walnut casket about the size of a filing cabinet drawer, buried and marked with a stone monument.

The United Daughters of the Confederacy, which recently landscaped the grave of Robert E. Lee's warhorse, Traveler, outside VMI's Lee Chapel, will landscape Little Sorrell's burial spot.

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