Before Andrew Jackson moved to the Hermitage, he lived on a near-by estate known as “Hunter’s Hill.” It is well, however, before going into the history of his home on this property, to trace briefly his residences from the time of his arrival in Davidson County in the fall of 1788. We are legally informed of his presence and the beginning of his professional duties by the statement in Minute Book A, Davidson County Court, under the date of January 5, 1789, to the effect that “Andrew Jackson Esquire produced a licence to practice as an attorney at law in the Severall County courts in this State: and now in this court has taken the Oath of an Attorney.” Young Attorney Jackson, then in his twenty-first year, had come West to make his fortune. With him was John McNairy, who had but recently been appointed judge of the Superior Court of North Carolina’s western district. John Overton, another young lawyer, had come West from Virginia by way of Kentucky, and it soon happened that he and young Jackson found common quarters at the home of the Widow Donelson. The young men were fortunate, for fare in such a home as Mrs. Donelson’s was far better than that in the few stations or military posts which offered the only other shelter for young unattached men. Many of the families still lived in the stations and, in the most severe periods of Indian hostilities, every home which was not a well-manned fortress was abandoned. Mrs. Donelson had come to the Cumberland settlement in 1780 with her husband, Col. John Donelson, commander of the pioneer flotilla which brought the families of the first settlers to the site of Nashville. They arrived April 24, 1780, with their large family and slaves, and settled on the now famous “Clover Bottom” tract on Stone’s River. Summer and autumn of that year, however, brought serious difficulties. Indians had attacked the settlement, food was scarce, crops had been lost in an overflow, and Col. Donelson was faced with the necessity of returning to the east on business for himself and other settlers. His large family was a serious responsibility and, rather than leave them without his protection he took them, in the fall of 1780, to the Kentucky settlement, where food was more plentiful, and where they would not be such a burden to the other settlers. The residence of the Donelson family until 1785 was in the neighborhood of Harrodsburg, but Col. Donelson, his older sons, and his sons-in-law, were engaged in various activities which kept them in motion up and down the western frontier from Natchez to the Cumberland and Harrodsburg. They were preparing, however, to take up a permanent residence in the Cumberland in 1785 when Col. Donelson, on his way from Kentucky to the Cumberland settlement, met a mysterious death, either at the hands of the Indians or two young white men who were, for a part of his journey, his companions.