It is this conception of Jackson that the Hermitage perpetuates. The little museum which was once the nursery of his grandchildren houses relics of his military career and a rare collection of his state papers. Of this side of his life the nation is already well informed. The house itself speaks eloquently of the life which once vibrated its now quiet rooms. His office is filled with books which knew the frequent touch of his hands; his dressing gown lies across a chair in his bedchamber, and the miniature of Rachel is in its accustomed place on the table at his bedside. In the parlors the portraits of his “military family” look down upon silent rooms which, when they knew them, were full of music and laughter. The dining room, once the center of a lavish hospitality, is quiet, and the kitchen is no longer filled with negroes, bustling about and singing before a great open fire. It requires no great powers of imagination to people these rooms again. The inanimate objects are there. They have been carefully preserved by a patriotic group of women who realized their value in time to keep them in their original setting. Down through the years they will be guarded jealously by women who follow in the footsteps of the founders of the Ladies’ Hermitage Association, and so will be preserved the home of one of the greatest of all Americans and the setting of one of the most beautiful love stories of all times. “The Hermitage—a thing we hold in trust, As true men guard their forbears’ swords from rust. Forbid it, God, that there should ever come In length and breadth of this fair land of mine, Such dearth of patriots that a warrior’s home Should come to seem less holy than a shrine....” (From “The Hermitage,” Will Allen Dromgoole, _Nashville Banner_, Jan. 6, 1935.) ANDREW JACKSON’S HERMITAGE “Beginning at a Hickory tree....” There is something prophetic in the description of the tract of land which Andrew Jackson bought from Nathaniel Hays on August 23, 1804. Nothing had yet happened in the career of General Jackson which even hinted that his wiry strength of body and of will would some day win for him the enduring title, “Old Hickory.” The long, weary, homeward march from Natchez with his loyal Tennesseans was a decade ahead of him. The battles of the Horseshoe and New Orleans and the fame which followed them were undreamed-of events of a shadowy, uncertain future. No one foretold that the hickory tree would become symbolic of the man, nor that the tract of land he was buying would some day be one of the nation’s most important shrines. Certainly no one saw in the purchaser the future idol of the nation and the ruler of its destinies during a period which called not only for superior statesmanship, but for unconquerable will and determination.