The Hermitage, Home of Old Hickory

by Stanley F. Horn

The front gate and entrance driveway, bordered with native cedar trees planted by General Jackson in 1837.

The garden as seen from the window of one of the guest rooms, showing the east field beyond.

To the left of the hall are the double parlors, separated with folding doors, and each with its doorway into the hall. Each of the parlors has a handsome marble mantelpiece, the one in the front being made from marble quarried in Italy while that in the rear is made from native Tennessee marble. The crimson damask curtains at the windows were ordered by General Jackson in Philadelphia in 1836 when the Hermitage was refurnished, the color being specified because his wife had always preferred it. The piano in the back parlor is one bought by General Jackson for his little granddaughter, Rachel, soon after he retired from the Presidency. “Would my baby like to take music lessons?” he asked her one day; and when she answered in the affirmative he sent her mother to town to buy her a new piano—the old one wasn’t good enough for his little pet. The old piano was sold in 1865 when the adopted son’s widow disposed of some surplus furniture, the purchaser being a neighboring farmer who confided that he expected to use it to hive bees. There is also to be seen in the back parlor a handsome mahogany center table which has an interesting history. When General and Mrs. Jackson were entertained in New Orleans in 1815, following the battle, the handsome furnishings of the room where they were entertained were presented to them and shipped up the river to the Hermitage when they returned. Most of this presentation furniture was burned in 1834, but this old table survived. On the mantel in the back parlor is General Jackson’s favorite clock, with its hands stopped at the hour of his death. All the furnishings of the parlors—the chairs, mirrors, chandeliers, draperies, carpets, vases, divans, etc.—are part of the Hermitage’s original furnishings, and are in the places they occupied when General Jackson was alive. The crystal chandeliers are especially impressive. They seem to hang rather low—but they were placed there in the days when candles were used for lights, even before the later days when the primitive tapers were replaced with the modern sperm-oil lamps.

A doorway leads from the front parlor into the dining room wing, and there is also a door into the dining room from the broad front portico. To the rear of the dining room are the pantry and storeroom, with a passage leading to the semi-detached old-fashioned kitchen in the rear.

In the dining room is to be seen the massive mahogany sideboard purchased by Mrs. Jackson in New Orleans when she and the General were returning from Florida, together with the table, chairs and other original furnishings of this room. Here also is displayed most of the Hermitage silverware, including the silver formerly belonging to Commodore Decatur, engraved with his coat of arms, which was purchased from his widow by Jackson in 1833 when she was in reduced circumstances. The General bought from Mrs. Decatur for $350 her china and silverware, but he presented the china and two silver fruit baskets to Mrs. Emily Donelson, giving the remainder of the silver to “my daughter, Sarah Jackson.” When Commodore Decatur was killed in his duel with Captain Barron it left his wife in financial distress. One of her impatient creditors brought suit against her which, to use her own words, “frightened all the trades people with whom I have any little dealing and makes them more pressing for payment;” and the General’s check for $350 gave her very welcome relief.

The dining-room fireplace is featured by the celebrated Eighth of January mantelpiece, a rustic affair built of pieces of rough hickory by one of Jackson’s veterans of the Battle of New Orleans who made it as a monumental labor of love, working on it all by himself and working only on successive anniversaries of the battle until he got it finished on January 8, 1839. The General entered into the spirit of the thing and installed it in this room, with suitable ceremonies, on January 8, 1840. It is now in a rather dilapidated condition, thanks to the depradations of souvenir hunters in the early days before the present iron railing was built.

The floor in the dining room is a reproduction, the only floor in the house not original. This room, however, had been used for years as a storeroom when the association took over the property and the flooring was ruined. An oak floor was laid to replace it; but in 1931 this was removed and a floor of wide poplar boards was built to correspond with the original. All the floors in the house are made of poplar, except the porch floors which are native Tennessee red cedar and which constitute a striking tribute to the durability of this wood.

In the broad central hall downstairs there is seen on the walls the celebrated pictorial wall paper, bought for the new house in 1836. Mrs. Rachel Jackson Lawrence, the General’s granddaughter, is authority for the statement that similar paper was used in the hall before the house was burned, and she was fond of recalling that the paper for this hall had to be bought three times: The first time from Paris, during Mrs. Rachel Jackson’s lifetime; and the two purchases that had to be made to get the paper on the walls in 1836. In the refurnishing of the new Hermitage most of the purchases were made in Philadelphia by Mrs. Sarah York Jackson; acting, of course, under the General’s suggestions when he had any to make. Accordingly in January, 1836, a shipment of furniture and furnishings was made from Philadelphia, the invoice covering which included the pictorial paper ordered from Paris: “3 sets of fine paper hanging, Views of Telemachus, @ $40, $120.” But the steamboat on which these furnishings were being transported, the John Randolph, was burned at the wharf at Nashville on March 16, 1836 (with the loss of three lives); and only a part of the boat’s cargo was saved. At a sale of the salvage, probably through error, the crate containing the paper, along with a lot of other stuff, was sold to Mr. W. G. M. Campbell who had just finished building a new home on his farm on the Lebanon Road near Nashville. Surviving members of Mr. Campbell’s family state that he did not know what was in the crate when he bought it, simply buying it “sight unseen” along with other salvage from the burned steamboat. The inescapable inference from the preserved correspondence is that Jackson’s Nashville factors, Yeatman and Company, who owned the John Randolph, tried to recover the paper after they discovered that it had not been damaged by the fire so as to render it unfit for use; but, it seems, they were thwarted by Mr. Campbell who resorted to the expedient of pasting the paper on the walls of the parlor of his new house before starting to argue about it. The Campbell descendants today affirm that they never heard that there was any argument about it, and that all there was to it was that Mr. Campbell bought it at public sale, paid for it and used it—a strictly legitimate and above-board transaction. But on May 27, 1836, Colonel Armstrong wrote General Jackson in some heat as follows:

“I send you enclosed a note addressed to me by the Messrs. Yeatman after a conversation I had with them this morning. They have always been ready and willing to do all in their power to get back the paper from those who purchased it. When I called on Campbell I expected to get the paper; that night he cut it and put it on the walls. Williams is not at home. I saw Shelly, who will do nothing. He is not disposed to restore it. Williams dare not, as his wife claims it; so I called on the Messrs Yeatman and stated the facts, who willingly proposed to purchase another set. I did not present Andrew’s note to them enclosed to Colonel Love, but suggested in their letter to draw on them for the amount. My dear sir, when you have this whole matter explained it will give you a pain to find men so lost to all honorable feelings as to retain that which does not belong to them. It is a theft. The person who you got the other set from will draw on Messrs. Yeatman or myself on sight and the draft will be paid. Send it out as soon as possible, so that we may complete the house. Major Eaton will be with you in a few days and will explain this unpleasant affair and the treatment received. Yeatman will sue for the real value of the paper. He thinks he has been badly treated by Williams and Campbell. He offered them any profit in advance if that was their object. Let me request you to send out the other without delay, as I want to see the house complete before Mrs. Jackson and yourself get out.”