This entirely imaginary and erroneous picture of the Hermitage was used extensively and for a long time despite its inaccuracy. This and similar pictures were based on a view printed in The Jackson Wreath in 1829 which was admittedly drawn “from a description furnished by a friend at Washington.”
The Hermitage as it appeared after the wings and portico were added to the original house in 1831.
Plat of the 500 acres of the Hermitage plantation as acquired by the State from Andrew Jackson, Jr.
An old print (circa 1840) showing the young cedar trees planted by General Jackson. The artist has distorted the true lines of the guitar-shaped driveway. The house in the distance, on the right, is Tulip Grove, home of Andrew Jackson Donelson.
So the creditors of Jackson & Hutchings and of “our A. Jackson” were satisfied; but so the Hunter’s Hill estate, in which he and Rachel took so much pride, passed into other hands, being sold on July 6, 1804, to Colonel Edward Ward. “Necessity (as security for Thomas Watson and John Hutchings) compelled me to sell the Hunter’s Hill tract” Jackson wrote in after years, with just a trace of bitterness. The $10,000 received for the place helped put Jackson back on his feet; but there must have been a tear in Rachel’s eye as she looked back over her shoulder at the home where she had been so happy as the bride of the coming young man.
And even the financial relief did not come immediately, for Colonel Ward made the purchase on long and involved terms. He delivered to Jackson the bond of a Mr. Lew Jones for £1670, Virginia currency, (equivalent to $5,566.67 in Tennessee money), due on December 15, 1804. He paid $1,794.91 in cash in January, 1805; $463.71 in cash in February; and in March $666.67 in cash and 6,899 pounds of cotton, worth $1,000.35 at the then price of 14½ cents per pound. Payments then ceased, and on May 7th Jackson wrote Ward a strongly worded dunning letter insisting on the payment of the balance of $1,721.88 still due. “When you recollect,” he wrote to Colonel Ward, “that I turned myself out of house and home, by the sale of my possessions to you, purely to meet my engagements, you must know that the anxiety must be great in my mind to meet them, with the sacrifice of ease and comfort that I made upon that occasion. I need only to add that my creditors are growing clamorous and I must have money from some source.”