alt="11th President James K. Polk (1845-1849): Ancestral Home in Columbia, TN"/>
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 back into the front hall and climbing the steep staircase up to the bedroom areas, we saw three modestly sized rooms, one decorated as a study, which comprised the remainder of the home.
The study had several items from Polk’s presidential years, including a desk/chair piece of furniture where he had often sat both to read and to write. Nestled near the wall of the room was a rather uncomfortable looking day bed which, our docent informed us, had been placed in the President’s office in the White House so that he could rest momentarily when the rare occasion to do so had arisen. There was also a small desk and selected legal volumes behind glass doors. But there was nothing particularly personal here, with perhaps the exception of a pair of dime-sized eyeglasses. Everything else could have been found in many mid-19th century American homes.
The bedchambers bore more evidence of Sarah’s presence than of her husband’s. Her sewing table was on display, as well as two golden lounge chairs that she had purchased for the White House and had brought back with them to Tennessee when the couple had left Washington after their four tumultuous years there. But here in Columbia, in a setting for which they had never been intended, these furnishings seemed sedate, mute, and curated rather than eloquent.
Leaving the upstairs, our docent pointed out the anachronism of a large, dark oil painting of Cortez, hanging over the stairway.
“This was a gift to the President from one of his generals at the conclusion of the war with Mexico,” she intoned with the same sonorous Southern inflection with which she had conducted our entire tour. The painting seemed a completely incongruous addition to the simple home in which it was displayed.
In fact, nothing here in the ancestral home gave evidence of the determined persistence, expansive aspirations, and tireless management which characterize the descriptions of President Polk forwarded by so many of his biographers. Rather than reflecting the grandiose vision of a President determined to extend the territory of his country as an expression of divinely authorized “Manifest Destiny,” the overall feeling of this beautiful but modest home was one of graceful, unpretentious comfort in a small country town. Polk himself remained an elusive presence, associated
