Qualla: Andrew Johnson National Historic Site

Andrew Johnson National Historic Site: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Riis2602, CC BY-SA 4.0. Every May 26, visitors to the Andrew Johnson National Historic Site in Greeneville, Tennessee, are handed a replica admission ticket to the 1868 impeachment hearings and asked to vote on whether the seventeenth president should have been removed from office. The actual Senate, in May 1868, fell one vote short of conviction. The visitor tally rarely runs the same way. That this is the central interactive exhibit at a presidential historic site — a roughly annual re-trial of its honoree — tells you something about how the National Park Service has chosen to interpret Andrew Johnson. The site preserves his tailor shop, two of his homes, and his grave. It also preserves the question he never quite answered: what was he doing there?

Image: Riis2602 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Andrew Johnson National Historic Site: From Tailor Shop to White House

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NPS Photo, Public domain. Johnson was born poor in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1808, lost his father at three, and was apprenticed to a tailor as a child. He arrived in Greeneville around 1826 and set up his own one-room tailor shop, which still stands at the center of the visitor complex — preserved insi...

Image: NPS Photo | Public domain

Andrew Johnson National Historic Site: The Homestead and the War

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NPS Photo, Public domain. Johnson bought a two-story Greek Revival brick house on Main Street in 1851. He and his wife Eliza McCardle Johnson lived there before and after the presidency, from 1869 to his death in 1875. During the Civil War, the house sat in occupied territory and was used as quarters by s...

Image: NPS Photo | Public domain

Andrew Johnson National Historic Site: The Impeachment Vote They Hold Every Year

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NPS Photo, Public domain. The May 26 visitor vote is a genuine piece of pedagogy disguised as a gimmick. It gets people to actually engage with the question the Senate decided in 1868: had Johnson committed impeachable offenses by firing Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, in apparent violation of the Tenure ...

Image: NPS Photo | Public domain

Andrew Johnson National Historic Site: What the Site Asks You to Hold

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brian Stansberry, CC BY 3.0. The Andrew Johnson National Historic Site totals sixteen acres across three units — the visitor complex with the tailor shop, the homestead, and the national cemetery on Monument Hill. It became a National Monument in 1935, was formally established April 27, 1942, and was redesig...

Image: Brian Stansberry | CC BY 3.0