The Hermitage, Home of Old Hickory

by Stanley F. Horn

In a cabinet on one side of the room are a number of bound volumes of newspapers of Jackson’s day, which recalls the fact that he was an omnivorous reader of the newspapers and periodicals current in his time. His postage account with the Nashville postoffice in 1825 shows that he received regularly the following papers: Washington City Gazette, Florence Gazette, American Farmer, Louisville Public Advertiser, National Journal, National Chronicle (daily), Niles Register, Columbian, Louisiana Gazette, Kentucky Gazette, Baltimore Morning Chronicle (daily), Jackson Gazette, Knoxville Enquirer, Allegheny Democrat, Mobile Commercial Register, National Republican, Knoxville Register and Florida Intelligencer—all these in addition to the Nashville papers. One wonders how he had any time at all for reading books!

The little room to the right of the side entrance was originally designed for an overseer’s room, but was later used as a nursery for the children of Andrew, junior. Now it provides an admirable place for the display of the many interesting Jackson relics accumulated by the Ladies Hermitage Association. Here is a wonderful array of historical and personal relics—the General’s swords and pistols (also his prayer book and silver communion cup); his gold spurs, epaulettes and stirrups, and his dress suit; Mrs. Jackson’s lace cap and veil; specimens of the White House silver, china and cut glass; the famous candle taken from the tent of Cornwallis; medals; jewelry; letters and documents—an intensely interesting collection of memorabilia pertaining to the vivid career of the Hermitage’s master. Literally hours may be spent in this room profitably and pleasantly.

One of the garden walks, with original boxwood and crape myrtle.

View of garden from the house, showing the tomb in the corner in the background.

The hall between the library and museum was originally an open entry, but was enclosed when the rebuilding was done. The closet on the right-hand side of the hall, under the stairway, was added after General Jackson’s death, but the left-hand closet was original. This was used in the old days to store the cotton goods made by the plantation spinners before it was doled out to the sewing women. Every year in the late fall the negroes were called up to the overseer’s room to be given their winter clothing, and this occasion was always seized upon by the negroes for a big celebration. A plantation slave orchestra, composed of fiddle, tambourine and bones, would make music while the negroes were coming and going and everybody—black and white—always had a big time on these occasions.

Going upstairs by way of the back stairway there is to be found on the right a bedroom that was used by the boys brought up on the place—Andrew Jackson, junior; Andrew Jackson Donelson and Andrew Jackson Hutchings. On the left is the bedroom occupied so long by Ralph E. W. Earl, the artist who married one of the nieces of Mrs. Jackson and who, upon his wife’s early death, was taken in as a permanent member of the Hermitage household.

The arrangement of rooms upstairs is similar to the downstairs of the central part of the house—a broad central hall, running the full length of the house, with two bedrooms on each side of it. This hall has doors at front and rear opening onto the upstairs back and front porticos; and its walls are covered with a hand-painted duplicate of the scenic paper downstairs. This duplicate paper was painted by Miss Jennings for use in the replica of the Hermitage which stood on the exposition grounds at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904. After the exposition closed it was brought back to Nashville and placed in its present location, where it provides a pleasing complement to the original paper in the lower hall.

On the western side of the upstairs hall the back bedroom was used as a guest room (and it was seldom empty); and the front bedroom is officially labeled “The Lafayette Room,” probably because it was in the corresponding room in the old Hermitage that the Marquis de Lafayette spent the day when he visited Jackson in 1825, ten years before the present Hermitage was constructed.