In the broad central hall downstairs there is seen on the walls the celebrated pictorial wall paper, bought for the new house in 1836. Mrs. Rachel Jackson Lawrence, the General’s granddaughter, is authority for the statement that similar paper was used in the hall before the house was burned, and she was fond of recalling that the paper for this hall had to be bought three times: The first time from Paris, during Mrs. Rachel Jackson’s lifetime; and the two purchases that had to be made to get the paper on the walls in 1836. In the refurnishing of the new Hermitage most of the purchases were made in Philadelphia by Mrs. Sarah York Jackson; acting, of course, under the General’s suggestions when he had any to make. Accordingly in January, 1836, a shipment of furniture and furnishings was made from Philadelphia, the invoice covering which included the pictorial paper ordered from Paris: “3 sets of fine paper hanging, Views of Telemachus, @ $40, $120.” But the steamboat on which these furnishings were being transported, the _John Randolph_, was burned at the wharf at Nashville on March 16, 1836 (with the loss of three lives); and only a part of the boat’s cargo was saved. At a sale of the salvage, probably through error, the crate containing the paper, along with a lot of other stuff, was sold to Mr. W. G. M. Campbell who had just finished building a new home on his farm on the Lebanon Road near Nashville. Surviving members of Mr. Campbell’s family state that he did not know what was in the crate when he bought it, simply buying it “sight unseen” along with other salvage from the burned steamboat. The inescapable inference from the preserved correspondence is that Jackson’s Nashville factors, Yeatman and Company, who owned the _John Randolph_, tried to recover the paper after they discovered that it had not been damaged by the fire so as to render it unfit for use; but, it seems, they were thwarted by Mr. Campbell who resorted to the expedient of pasting the paper on the walls of the parlor of his new house before starting to argue about it. The Campbell descendants today affirm that they never heard that there was any argument about it, and that all there was to it was that Mr. Campbell bought it at public sale, paid for it and used it—a strictly legitimate and above-board transaction. But on May 27, 1836, Colonel Armstrong wrote General Jackson in some heat as follows: