Alfred’s Cabin

Alfred Jackson, born at The Hermitage to Betty, the cook, and Ned, the carpenter, was unique among the enslaved there. He became the wagoner in charge of Hermitage vehicles and horses, married Gracy Bradley, Sarah Jackson’s personal maid, and had two children, Augustus and Sara. Living nearly his entire life at The Hermitage, he witnessed its growth into a bustling cotton plantation, its decline before and after the Civil War, and its rebirth as a shrine to Jackson. After the Civil War, he worked for the Jackson family and rented 24 acres from them, where he raised food and produced a small amount of cotton and butter for sale. By the 1880s he had moved into the log dwelling that became known as Alfred’s Cabin. When the Ladies’ Hermitage Association took over The Hermitage in 1889, he worked for them as caretaker and guide for visitors. In 1848, after Roeliff Brinkerhoff pointed to what he saw as the benefits of Alfred’s situation and said that freedom had its burdens as well as slavery, Alfred asked him, “How would you like to be a slave?”

Nashville-Davidson metropolitan government (balance), Tennessee · United States