[Illustration: The log house on the right is one of the group constituting the original Hermitage residence from 1804 until the erection of the present building in 1819. The house on the left is the remains of the two-storied house which was the center of the original group.] [Illustration: The first Hermitage on the present site, as it appeared from the time it was built in 1819 until the wings were added in 1831.] But the Hermitage remains as an enduring and impressive challenge to that erroneous characterization of this many-sided and little understood statesman. This, it is plain to see, was the home of no mere backwoodsman or ruffian. A mansion when it was built more than a hundred years ago, it was obviously the seat of a man of genteel characteristics, of refined, though simple taste. It is no uncommon thing today for visitors to the Hermitage to express surprise that such a house should have been built by Andrew Jackson; but such surprise grows out of a misconception of the man’s true nature and characteristics. The usually accepted picture of Jackson in the public mind is largely the result of our American admiration of the primitive, a love for the so-called manly and rugged qualities which sometimes leads us into overdoing our humanizing of some of our early heroes. As a matter of fact, Jackson, though not a college graduate, was by no means a typical example of the popular conception of an illiterate frontiersman. He had had formal schooling, had studied law and had been admitted to the North Carolina bar when at the age of twenty-one years he crossed the mountains and came to the Cumberland settlements in what is now Tennessee. His standard of education was notably higher than the average of that day and locality. He came to the Cumberland country as the state’s attorney for the newly created Mero District, and we may be sure that an uneducated, uncouth man would never have been selected by the governor of North Carolina for this important post. Furthermore, although he was born in comparative poverty—a posthumous child—his widowed mother, soon to die of yellow fever while nursing wounded Revolutionary soldiers, had relatives with whom to leave him. These relatives were people of substance, ranking sufficiently high to entertain George Washington on his visit to South Carolina in 1791, and they gave the orphan Andrew the benefit of a boyhood spent amid the surroundings of a prosperous and cultured Southern family. So, while the youthful Andrew Jackson engaged in cock-fighting, horse-racing and dueling, these were by no means unusual pastimes for the high-spirited youths of that time. He had the innate qualities of a gentleman; and those qualities find their truest manifestation in the home he built for the declining years of his wife and himself. * * * *