Picture Andrew Jackson at home here: this Greek Revival mansion, the Hermitage, ranks among Tennessee's most historically significant — and morally complicated — sites. Jackson built the original Hermitage in 1821, and the Greek Revival mansion you see today is a rebuilding after a fire in 1834. He died here in 1845.
Jackson was a genuine American paradox: a man of the frontier who reshaped American democracy by opening it to white men without property while simultaneously pursuing the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which forced the displacement of the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole peoples on the Trail of Tears. The Hermitage was also a working cotton plantation where as many as 150 people were enslaved. The site's interpretive program has evolved significantly in recent decades to present the full history of the property, including the lives of the enslaved people who built and worked it.
Their quarters, the field layouts, and oral histories recovered through research give those lives a presence on the grounds that was long absent.