Andrew Jackson's Hermitage

Andrew Jackson is buried here, in a tomb in his wife Rachel's garden beside the mansion. The 7th president's plantation, in Hermitage, Tennessee, runs as a museum today.

The plantation ran on enslaved labor. Jackson enslaved more than 300 people here, and the museum interprets their lives and keeps a cemetery for the enslaved on the grounds.

Andrew Jackson III moved his family out in 1893, and the Ladies' Hermitage Association took charge. Its regent and secretary stayed in the emptied house to guard it until a caretaker arrived.

Mary Dorris wrote that the 2 women woke to pans crashing in the empty pantry and chains rattling over the porticoes. She likened the din to Jackson riding his war charger down the hall.

Dorris says the younger woman searched closets, chimneys, and cellar the next morning and found nothing. The next night brought what she called “the same war horse tread,” at about the same hour.

Dorris co-founded the association that preserved the house, and she gave the account chapter 10 of her 1915 history. She dates the nights to July 1893, not the 1889 that later retellings give.

The museum opens daily except Thanksgiving and Christmas, with general admission from about $19 for the mansion, grounds, tomb, and enslaved-community sites. Ticketed ghost tours run on fall evenings.