Edward Jackson built the original sawmill and grist mill on the east bank of the West Fork River in 1809, three years before he would build the family house on a knoll across the river. The site sat on a peninsula formed where Freeman's Creek joins the West Fork - a natural choice for water power, with both streams contributing flow. The current mill structure is a three-story wood frame building with weatherboard siding and a wooden shingle roof, much of it dating to the early nineteenth century. Inside, large cog wheels turn the original gears; an original millstone and feed hopper sit on the second floor; the interior woodwork is mostly the woodwork that the Jackson family knew. Some elements have been replaced - the flooring is oak similar to the original but not original itself - but the mill works essentially as it worked in 1830.

The Jackson family had its share of nineteenth-century catastrophe. Jonathan Jackson, the future general's father, was an attorney in Clarksburg when he died of typhoid in 1826, leaving his wife Julia Neale Jackson with three young children and significant debt. Julia struggled to support the family for four years and remarried in 1830. The new household could not absorb all the children: in late 1830, Julia sent six-year-old Thomas and his younger sister Laura Ann to live with Thomas's paternal uncle Cummins Jackson at the family mill. Julia died the following year of complications from childbirth. The two children, now fully orphaned, remained with Cummins Jackson on the West Fork through Thomas's adolescence. Thomas worked the farm - tending sheep with a herd dog, driving oxen teams, harvesting wheat and corn - and attended school when he could, which was not often.

Cummins Jackson held a small number of enslaved people on the farm. One of them, whose name is not preserved in the historical record, became a participant in one of the more striking episodes of young Thomas Jackson's boyhood. The teenage Thomas had developed an intense, self-directed reading habit and was always short of light to read by. The enslaved man offered to bring him pine knots - resin-rich pieces of pine that burn slowly and brightly, an effective improvised lamp - in exchange for being taught to read. Virginia law of the 1830s forbade teaching enslaved people to read or write; the penalty was a fine and possible imprisonment. Thomas accepted the arrangement and kept his end of it, teaching the man as promised. The episode is recounted in James I. Robertson Jr.'s 1997 biography Stonewall Jackson: The Man, The Soldier, The Legend, the standard reference work, where it is presented as documented family tradition. It complicates the standard portraits of the future Confederate general in ways that historians have argued over since.

In 1842, Thomas Jackson received an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point. He was poorly prepared by his irregular education and arrived behind the other cadets; he graduated four years later in the middle of his class only by sustained, disciplined effort - the trait that would define him as an officer. He served in the Mexican-American War, then taught at the Virginia Military Institute, where his stiff lectures earned him the nickname Tom Fool among his cadets. When the Civil War came in 1861, he chose Virginia. As Confederate brigadier general at First Manassas, his brigade's stand earned him the nickname Stonewall. Through 1862 he became one of the most respected battlefield commanders on either side. He died on May 10, 1863, of pneumonia following the amputation of his arm - which had been shot by his own troops in the dark at the Battle of Chancellorsville eight days earlier. He was thirty-nine.

In 1921 the owners of the Jackson farm deeded the property to the State of West Virginia. The mill was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972, and the site now operates as the centerpiece of the Jackson's Mill Center for Lifelong Learning and State 4-H Camp - a special campus of West Virginia University, also the home of the first state 4-H camp in the United States. Visitors can tour the working mill, the relocated McWhorter Cabin from 1793, the 4-H camp's Craftsman-era buildings, and a small museum that interprets Jackson's boyhood and the broader pioneer settlement of the West Fork valley. The site does not whitewash Jackson's role in the Confederacy or the family's slaveholding, but it does present the boy who lived there alongside the general he became - including the secret reading lessons in the loft, which point toward something more complicated than the marble pediment Stonewall Jackson became after his death.