An estimated 28 probable graves were identified at the seventh American president’s former property, called the Hermitage
December 17, 2024 2:09 p.m.
Upon Andrew Jackson’s inauguration as the seventh president of the United States in 1829, he owned 95 enslaved people and a sprawling plantation in Nashville named “the Hermitage.”
Last week, the Andrew Jackson Foundation, the group that owns and operates the Hermitage today, announced the discovery of gravesites where an estimated 28 enslaved people were buried on the plantation’s grounds. By the time of his death in 1845, Jackson enslaved around 150 people and had expanded the Hermitage to a vast 1,000 acres. He and his family enslaved more than 300 men, women and children from 1788 to the end of the Civil War in 1865.
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“Any time you have this large of a population of enslaved people at the site, there has to be a cemetery somewhere,” Tony Guzzi, the Hermitage’s chief of preservation and site operations, tells Annie Correal of the New York Times. “And we have found that piece of history that was missing.”
Advances in technology and a tip-off from a 1935 agricultural report allowed the foundation to make the recent discovery, along with a new source of funding. The historical report had identified an area of graves and large trees on the property, which was located in January 2024. The burial site is near a creek an estimated 1,000 feet northwest of the main house. It has been largely undisturbed for the last 180 years, overgrown and untouched by farming or infrastructure.
Archaeologists used ground-penetrating radar to identify possible and probable graves without damaging them, validating their hunches through cautious partial excavation that revealed “depressions oriented in rows” and “unnaturally placed pieces of limestone, all suggesting possible gravesites,” according to a statement.
Jackson first purchased the Hermitage from a neighbor on July 5, 1804, expanding the original 425-acre property into a cotton-producing plantation. The Hermitage’s website delves into the stories of some of the known enslaved people who toiled on the plantation. In October 1804, Jackson ran an advertisement in the Tennessee Gazette with a $50 reward for the return of an enslaved person who escaped the plantation earlier that year. The advertisement added: “ten dollars extra, for every hundred lashes any person will give him, to the amount of three hundred.”
When Jackson was elected president in 1829, he brought 14 enslaved people—eight women and six men—to labor in his new home at the White House. According to The White House Historical Association, Jackson’s enslaved household likely worked on many of the improvements to the White House during his administration, including adding running water to the building. Others served as domestic laborers and likely as jockeys in his hobby for racing horses.
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The Hermitage now joins other mansions owned by former U.S. presidents where visitors can observe burial sites of enslaved people. Historians at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, George Washington’s Mount Vernon and James Madison’s Montpelier have previously located cemeteries where enslaved people were buried.
“Locating the physical remains of these individuals is a strong reminder of what this landscape was and what it represented—historically, an elite white space, a plantation and a place of enslavement sustained by arduous labor and sacrifice of Black bodies,” Carlina de la Cova, a bioarchaeologist at the University of South Carolina who was not involved in the project, tells Live Science’s Kristina Killgrove.
The newly discovered gravesite has been fenced off, but beginning this week, the Hermitage is including the site in a new free tour, reports Travis Loller of the Associated Press. An advisory committee consisting of historians and descendants of some of the enslaved people at the Hermitage will decide on how to memorialize the site.
“It is historically significant, after decades of searching, that we are highly confident we have found the cemetery for people who were enslaved at the Hermitage,” Jason R. Zajac, president and CEO of the Andrew Jackson Foundation, says in the statement.
The foundation cautioned against sharing definitive numbers about how many graves were found, as not all possible sites may turn out to be graves, and there could be more yet to be identified.
