The Hermitage

Slept in since I was out late last night at the Grand Ole Opry and still tired from the Smoky Mountain hikes. Wrote some postcards (about 20) and posted them. Went to President Andrew Jackson’s home – The Hermitage – on Wednesday. They advertise him as the “people’s President.”

The Hermitage is owned by the Ladies’ Hermitage Association, which was started by Mrs. Andrew (Amy) Jackson III, and her cousin Mary Dorris (a Donelson relation) in 1889. The Ladies’ Association owns the property and operates it as a museum. They have spent many, many years acquiring original Jackson family furniture and papers, and claim to have the most original furnishings of any Presidential home. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1961. I took several photos of the front and the grounds.

Andrew and Rachel Jackson are both buried in a tomb on the property. As is Andrew Jackson Jr., Andrew Jackson III and the IV and their wives. All of them had military careers.

You pay your entrance fee at the museum, and are given a self-guided tour for the grounds. But you are required to take a guided tour of the interior of the house, even though all the interior doors are barricaded

by a glass covering screwed in place from the rooms’ interiors. The house guides are excellent and really know their history. They are all dressed in period costume and the outside greeter was kind enough to pose with me for a photo. The fellow who took the photo also took one to show my sweatshirt saying to his mother, who I must assume is a woman of taste and refinement.

We had 3 guides inside The Hermitage – one for the living and parlor rooms – one for the private bedrooms of Andrew and his adopted son Andrew (and Sarah) Jackson, Jr. – and one for the children’s rooms upstairs. Junior had 4 children, 2 of whom lived to adulthood (Andrew III and the President’s favorite Rachel). Andrew Jr. was Mrs. Jackson (Rachel’s) nephew; his name is sometimes written as Andrew Jackson Donelson.

The rooms are beautifully decorated and not flowery as I expected. Rachel’s tastes ran more to geometrics. She ordered wallpaper of The Odyssey and Ilaid from The Louvre in France for the downstairs and upstairs lobbies (or vestibules). The house was decorated in a unique style. The living room was decorated with a lot of military stuff like guns and sabers. We saw Jackson’s bedroom with all the furnishings exactly as he left them on the day he died in 1845, at the age of 71. His study is about half the original and half reproduction furnishings and is attached via a communicating door to his bedroom. His son Andrew Jr’s (and Sarah his wife’s) bedroom is right across the hall, connecting via communicating door to the farm management office. The guide talked about the bound newspapers lying around on the floor and how the President preferred the New York papers because they were very pro-Jackson.

We had to revert to self-guided tour of the kitchen (separated by a covered porch from the house after the 1834 fire), and the dining room with its painted cloth flooring. The audio guide said it was rare for there to NOT be guests for dinner at The Hermitage – mostly military buddies of Jackson’s or local Nashville friends, but occasionally distinguished visitors from afar. Betty was the Jackson family cook in the detached kitchen for decades. She was also the mother of Alfred, who maintained Jackson’s horse livery. Both were slaves. Andrew purchased Grace Bradley, a noted steamstress to D.C. hostesses, and brought her back to the Hermitage as his daughter-in-law’s dressmaker. Grace married Alfred, and had children. Their slave quarters are still there at the Hermitage, but because all 3 of them were favored slaves, their quarters are bigger and better equipped than the field slaves’ quarters would have been. Alfred stayed on after emancipation and even into the years when the mansion was turned into a museum. He guided tours.

Quite some distance behind the Jackson mansion on the property is the first Hermitage that Andrew and Rachel lived in when they came to Tennessee. It is essentially a 3-room log cabin. There is a slave quarters just a few yards from this original house. The printed materials inside the cabin said that even the original Hermitage was later used as a slave quarters.

There were no photos allowed inside so I took some outside and bought postcards of the inside in the gift shop, where I left my camera tripod.

It started to rain as I was exploring the log cabin that was Andrew & Rachel’s first home on the estate. So, I left. I spent the rest of the day (about 6 hours) at Panera Bread on Old Hickory Boulevard working on my blog and photos. Entered the blog post on the Appalachian Trail hike (having trouble with one html tag), and the day I left the Smokies for Nashville. Paneras always have internet – and good food.