Andrew Jackson was born on March 15, 1767, somewhere in the Waxhaws settlement that straddled the modern North Carolina/South Carolina line. His father had died weeks earlier. His mother, Elizabeth, gave birth in the home of a relative - and which relative, and on which side of the line, has been disputed since the early nineteenth century. North Carolina claims his birthplace at the McKemey home in present-day Union County. South Carolina claims it at the Crawford home in present-day Lancaster County, where this state park sits. Jackson himself said, late in life, that he was born in South Carolina. The Daughters of the American Revolution placed a marker here. Both states still claim him. The truth is that the boy's family network straddled both, and the modern boundary cuts through the answer.

By 1780, the American Revolution had come to the Waxhaws. On May 29, the Battle of Waxhaws happened a few miles from the Jackson home - Banastre Tarleton's British Legion overtook Colonel Abraham Buford's retreating Continental Patriots and slaughtered men who had surrendered. The phrase Tarleton's Quarter, meaning no mercy, entered American political vocabulary. Andrew Jackson, thirteen years old, helped tend the wounded who reached the Waxhaw Meeting House. Three months later, on August 6, Andrew and his older brother Robert fought at the Battle of Hanging Rock under General Thomas Sumter. The boys served as couriers and possibly auxiliary fighters. The war took both of Andrew's brothers and his mother before it ended - Robert and Andrew were captured the next year, ordered to clean a British officer's boots, refused, and were both struck with sabers. Andrew carried the scar on his face the rest of his life. Robert died of smallpox and his wounds shortly after. Elizabeth Jackson died nursing American prisoners on a British ship in Charleston Harbor. Andrew was left orphaned at fourteen. He did not forget.

Andrew Jackson State Park was established in 1952 on 360 acres of the rolling Piedmont where Jackson grew up, nine miles north of Lancaster on U.S. Highway 521. The park includes a 20-acre lake with an island in the middle and trails around the perimeter, 25 paved camping sites with water and electrical hookups, a museum focused on the colonial-period boyhood of Jackson and life in the eighteenth-century Carolina backcountry, a replica one-room schoolhouse, and an amphitheater. The museum rooms recreate a colonial dining room, bedroom, textile room, and the tools of frontier farming. The schoolhouse interprets eighteenth-century rural education. Hiking, boating, fishing, and picnicking fill the park's regular offerings. Wildlife is abundant - white-tailed deer, wild turkey, the usual Piedmont mix. The amphitheater hosts seasonal living-history programs.

Andrew Jackson became the seventh President of the United States in 1829. His presidency reshaped American politics - the Jackson coalition became the modern Democratic Party. He fought the Second Bank of the United States and won. He defied the Supreme Court when it ruled in favor of the Cherokee Nation in Worcester v. Georgia. And on May 28, 1830, he signed the Indian Removal Act. The law authorized the federal government to negotiate treaties to relocate Native nations from their homelands east of the Mississippi to lands west. What followed was not negotiation. The Choctaw Trail of Tears began in 1831. The Creek were forced west in 1836. The Cherokee, under armed military escort, were driven west in 1838 - roughly four thousand of them died on the march. Jackson did not invent the policy of Indian removal. He gave it the law that made it federal, mandatory, and final. Tens of thousands of Native people died as a result of policies he championed and signed.

Andrew Jackson State Park, established in the early 1950s during a period when Jackson was remembered primarily as a frontier hero and democratic president, treats his complications more carefully now than it once did. Interpretive materials acknowledge what came after the boy on the horse grew up. Modern visitors arrive with the full context of Jackson's presidency, the Indian Removal Act, and the Trail of Tears in mind - and Catawba descendants, whose ancestors survived in the very region Jackson grew up in, walk the trails with that knowledge intact. The Anna Hyatt Huntington sculpture remains. So does the museum. So does the question every presidential memorial in the United States now must answer: how do you honor a complicated person without erasing what they did to people who were not in the room?