The Hermitage

Andrew Jackson and his wife, Rachel, purchased the Hermitage property near Nashville in 1804 and lived for nearly two decades in a modest log farmhouse on the land while Jackson built his fortune through cotton and the labor of enslaved workers — a plantation that grew to hold as many as 150 enslaved people at its peak, among the largest holdings of any future president. Only in 1821 did Jackson build the first brick mansion on the property, a comparatively restrained Federal-style house that reflected his wealth without yet announcing the national stature he was about to acquire.

A fire gutted much of the mansion in 1834, while Jackson was in the White House, and the rebuilding that followed in 1835 and 1836 produced the grander Greek Revival house, with its columned portico, that stands today — a design upgrade that tracked Jackson's rise from frontier general to national political figure. Rachel Jackson never saw any version of the mansion as the president's wife; she died suddenly in December 1828, weeks after his election and months before his inauguration, after a brutal campaign had publicly exposed the technical bigamy of her first marriage. Jackson blamed the campaign for her death, buried her in the garden at the Hermitage, and was laid beside her there himself in 1845.

The wealth and land that built the Hermitage cannot be separated from the policies Jackson pursued as president: the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the forced removals that followed, including the Cherokee Trail of Tears, opened millions of acres of former Native land to the kind of cotton plantations Jackson himself ran. His financially strained descendants sold the property to the state of Tennessee in 1856, and since 1889 the Ladies' Hermitage Association — one of the country's earliest women-led historic preservation groups — has operated it as a museum, making it one of the oldest preserved presidential homes in the United States.