Qualla: Andrew Jackson State Park

Andrew Jackson State Park: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chili555, CC BY-SA 3.0. A bronze boy sits on a bronze horse at the entrance to the park. The sculpture is called Andrew Jackson, A Boy of the Waxhaws, made by Anna Hyatt Huntington, who lived to ninety-seven and produced public sculpture across the American South well into her nineties. The boy in the bronze is barefoot, lean, looking at something out of frame. He has not yet fought at Hanging Rock. He has not yet captured New Orleans, become a national hero, or built the political coalition that became the Democratic Party. He has not yet signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830 or condemned tens of thousands of Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole people to the Trail of Tears. He is just a Waxhaws boy on a farm horse. Everything the man did came later.

Image: Chili555 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Andrew Jackson State Park: The Birthplace Question

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chili555, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 t...

Image: Chili555 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Andrew Jackson State Park: A Thirteen-Year-Old at War

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chili555, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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. Th...

Image: Chili555 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Andrew Jackson State Park: The Park Itself

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chili555, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 w...

Image: Chili555 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Andrew Jackson State Park: The President Who Signed

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chili555, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 fav...

Image: Chili555 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Andrew Jackson State Park: What a Memorial Carries

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chili555, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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...

Image: Chili555 | CC BY-SA 3.0