The Hermitage, though it has gained world-wide fame as Andrew Jackson’s home, was not his dwelling place when he first settled in the Nashville community in 1788. At that time the danger of attacks by Indians had not yet entirely disappeared, and residents of the outlying districts still frequently lived in “stations”—groups of houses gathered about a central habitation, thus offering the opportunity for protection against attack. At such a station near Nashville lived the widow of John Donelson, who had been one of the founders of the original Nashborough, and it was in one of the cabins adjacent to her home that Andrew Jackson lived when he settled in the new country. With him lived his friend, John Overton, later his law partner and his lifelong confidant and advisor. The two young lawyers hung out their shingle together, with their office in the cabin where they lived, taking their meals with the widow Donelson. Living with Mrs. Donelson at this time was her daughter Rachel, the estranged bride of a high-spirited and jealous Kentuckian named Lewis Robards. The young couple had gone to Kentucky to live when they married, but the jealous husband made life with him intolerable and Rachel soon returned to her mother’s house, where Jackson found her when he went there to live. Largely through the pacific efforts of John Overton, an old friend of the Robards family, and at the instigation of Lewis Robards’s mother whose sympathies were with Rachel in the affair, a reconciliation was patched up and Captain Robards came to the widow Donelson’s home late in 1788 to live again with his wife. Soon, however, Robards created a new crisis by charging Jackson with undue attentions to his wife. The fiery young lawyer challenged Robards to a duel, but the challenge was declined and in the spring of 1790 Robards returned to Kentucky with the avowed intention of getting a divorce. In the fall of that year the news drifted down to Nashville that the divorce had been granted, and about a year later, in the latter part of 1791, Jackson married Rachel. The wedding ceremony took place in Natchez, Mississippi, whither she had fled to escape from her husband’s threats. “I’m going to haunt you!” Robards told her when he left her; and she, not knowing exactly what that threat implied but well knowing her moody husband’s erratic disposition, feared bodily harm and thought it safest to get as far away from him as possible. The home of relatives in Natchez provided a pleasing asylum in this emergency; and so it was there that the marriage ceremony was performed.