Calling on the Presidents: Tales Their Houses Tell. Clark Beim-Esche
soldiers had thrown into the front hall and had rushed to the back door to throw them away from the house. (Harrison would later point out on the hall floor the clear evidence of charred floorboards to substantiate his story.)
When Julia had returned to Virginia after the conclusion of the war, Harrison told us, she had continued to live at Sherwood and had then happily paid for the labor of those who once had been her slaves (here he showed us her actual account book, indicating each worker's terms of employment). He also rather gleefully confirmed, when questioned, that the Tyler family were descendants of John Rolfe and Pocahontas, and, as we got up to view the Grey Room (complete with its resident ghost) and the parlor President Tyler had had specially constructed for Julia as a venue in which to dance the Virginia reel, our heads were positively swimming with the tales told by our incomparable host.
After about an hour and a half, Carol and I thanked Harrison Tyler for his fascinating tour, and we went back outside to take a few photographs and familiarize ourselves with the outlying buildings of the estate.
But even more importantly, it gave us the chance to try to assess everything we had been hearing for the last hour or so.
"All this is almost hard to believe," I found myself thinking, "yet his memories are so clear and detailed that it's equally hard to call them into question." Upon further research after I returned home, I found evidence of the probability of the Rolfe/Pocahontas connection to the Tyler family. Perhaps all the stories were just as real as their narrator.
Sherwood Forest was the perfect name for this beautiful place for, like the more famous original in medieval England, this Virginia Sherwood had housed an almost mythic man of firsts, and the tales surrounding both him and his descendants simultaneously defied and inflamed the imagination. The stories we had been told seemed as tall and long as the home itself, yet those one hundred yards of white clapboard siding were undeniably real. We could see them before our eyes and photograph them with our cameras. If we had reached out our hands, we could have touched them. Although we had gained few new historical perspectives here at Sherwood, our visit had been an experience never to be forgotten: a delightful party replete with fascinating narratives, hosted by the grandson of a President.
James K. Polk: “Who is James K. Polk?”
Just North of Columbia, Tennessee, by the side of State Highway 31, near a grassy and tree-lined field, there stands a historical marker indicating the approximate location of the first Polk Tennessee homestead where the future President would spend his adolescent years. There is nothing here that remains from those days of the Polk family residence. Even the rather dilapidated house nearby, nestled in a grove of unruly and overgrown scrub brush, dates from a later era.
“I wish they would take down that sign," complained our docent at the Polk ancestral home Visitor's Center. “It just confuses people." Maybe so, but as a metaphor of our 11th President, it's not a bad match.
“Who is James K. Polk?" was the belittling Whig slogan adopted for the election of 1844, intending to suggest that the adversary of the Whig candidate, Henry Clay, was a nobody, out of his league when pitted against one of the most well-known politicians in the United States. Of course, when the votes were finally counted, this “nobody" had won the Presidency. But that fact alone had not made the answer to the taunting campaign slogan any clearer. In like fashion, when Carol and I paid a visit to Polk's ancestral home, it left us with many more questions than answers about this intriguing man, sometimes known as “Young Hickory."
For many, it is that appellation that stands as the passageway into a more full comprehension of the man. “To understand James K. Polk," a presidential video proclaims, “one must understand Andrew Jackson." But as simple a suggestion as that appears to be, the plain truth is that, both culturally and temperamentally, Jackson and Polk were almost polar opposites. Their goals were similar: both valued the increasingly democratic politics of their times, and both were dedicated to the expansion of the United States, but Jackson was a commander, a “general" in almost every sense of the word, whereas Polk was subdued and measured. Jackson was passionate. Polk struck many people as distant and cool, though his wife, Sarah, so loved him that she would spend more than forty years in mourning over his memory. Most significantly, Jackson was adored by the majority of the American people, winning the national popular vote in three consecutive presidential elections, while Polk would not be able to prevail in two of his three gubernatorial contests in Tennessee and failed to carry his state in his one campaign for the Presidency.
Although over the years I have often found presidential homes to offer revealing insights into the men who lived in them, Polk's ancestral home, while providing several helpful pieces of visual and historical data, would leave its most famous resident still swathed in mystery.
For one thing, the house is only tangentially a presidential home. As a helpful, and quite honest, sign identifies near the front door, Polk was 21 years old when his parents built the home in 1816. Upon his return from college in 1818, he lived here until his marriage to Sarah Childress in January of 1824. Of course, this house was the home of his parents, and, as such, both James and Sarah would have been frequent visitors. But this house cannot be said to have been formative or really indicative of Polk's tastes or character as he had had no real part to play in its construction or articulated ground plan.
Nevertheless, the home does stand as a memorial to the Polk family. It is “… the only surviving original residence of the eleventh president," a guidebook states—beside, of course, the White House itself.
It is located on a busy corner of downtown Columbia, Tennessee, though set back slightly from the bustle of traffic. The exterior is brick, sporting a rather pleasant coat of pale green paint, and a specimen tulip tree spreads its luxurious foliage to the right of the house. After entering the nearby Visitor's Center and seeing an introductory video on Polk's presidential accomplishments, Carol and I were led to the front door of the home.
We ascended the front stairs into the entrance hall, and I noted the spaciously high ceiling and the simple, straight staircase leading to the second floor. Just inside the front door was an elaborate wooden umbrella stand/coat hanger which housed an old mirror. It was hard not to be struck by the fact that, as I gazed into the mirror's depths, I was seeing myself reflected in the very glass that President Polk would have looked into when he had entered or exited this house.
Overall, the home was quite small. Aside from the front hall and staircase, there were only two rooms on its lower floor. Yet each contained a valuable collection of personal belongings from the Polks' White House years, objects that had never been housed here when the home was being used by the rest of the Polk family. Several pieces of vibrantly red upholstered furniture that James and Sarah had brought to the White House, an elegant dress worn by the diminutive First Lady, and an impressive circular table, picturing the American eagle sculpted from Egyptian marble, were among the most notable treasures of the front sitting room. Sarah's pianoforte stood close to one of the windows, and both James's and Sarah's White House portraits—the originals—stared down on us from the walls. All these artifacts were elegant and tasteful, but not particularly revelatory.
This large sitting room gave onto a comparably sized dining room that featured a display of some of the Polks’ presidential china. More interesting to me, however, was a glass fronted sideboard in which was to be seen a chipped red and white ornamented china coffee cup. Here, for the first time, I became aware of the man as well as the President. The cup seemed to speak of the hours of labor (“16 to 20 hours a day,” the docent informed us) that had made President Polk, in his own words, “… the hardest working man in the country.”
Passing