Ancestral Home of James K. Polk — Columbia, Tennessee

We finished touring The Hermitage a lot quicker than we had anticipated, so we decided to detour 60 miles out of our way to visit James K. Polk’s house. The house was owned by Polk’s parents, and was Polk’s residence for only a couple years while he was in college, but it’s the only house he lived in that still exists. The house next door, once owned by Polk’s sister, is the visitor center.

Unfortunately, it was the only house we could enter on this day. Polk’s house was closed for repairs. There was a filmstrip and a display, and some of the furniture had been moved over, but that was it. As sparse as all this was, both my wife and I felt like we learned more about Polk than we had about Andrew Jackson at The Hermitage. The tour guides only charged us half price. How kind.

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