Q. What retirement home provided ex-Confederates a rocking chair, medical care and George Dickel?

When I was a child growing up in Old Hickory during the '30s there were two bus routes from Old Hickory to ''town.'' One went through Madison, the other through Donelson passing through some of the Hermitage property. There was a large white house with a porch running its width. Weather permitting, a few elderly men were sitting in rocking chairs on the porch. I was told it was a home for Civil War veterans. The house has been gone for years. I imagine it was torn down after the last veteran died. Is there any documentation of the home? — Joyce Huffines, Old Hickory.

I heard my mother talk so much about her grandfather, William Winfield Smith. He lived at the ''Old Soldiers Home'' which I think was near the Donelson cemetery where he was buried. Would you do a story on that home? — Dorothy Taylor, Nashville.

Civil War veterans — in Nashville's case, Confederate veterans — were once as rare and revered as World War II vets have now become.

The state gave those ex-Confederates who needed care in their latter years an honored spot on the grounds of the Hermitage, President Andrew Jackson's former plantation.

In fact, the first notion among state officials was to make the vacant Hermitage mansion itself into a Confederate veterans' retirement home. Opposition to that proposal helped give rise to the Ladies' Hermitage Association and make the Hermitage into a presidential historic site treasured to this day.

The state in 1891 built the Tennessee Confederate Soldiers' Home on land near where the gate to the Hermitage is now. In 1901, the large brick building was housing 126 disabled veterans of the War Between the States. Verandas stretched along two levels, giving the residents space for rocking and recollection.

Vets got medical care as needed in a hospital wing and a daily dose of George Dickel whiskey at state expense.

In 1935, the state legislature deeded the site to the Ladies' Hermitage Association. The main entrance to the home and its largest wing were demolished in 1935-36 as a depression-era Works Progress Administration federal project.

The veterans had been moved by the state in 1933 into living quarters at the Tennessee Industrial School, from which remaining ones were moved again in 1937 into private homes. One such home, on Glencliff Avenue near Antioch Pike in south Nashville, was still functioning in 1940. Another on Nolensville Road reportedly closed after the last local veteran died in 1941.

The last section of the 1891 home was demolished in 1953, after serving for a while as an apartment residence for Hermitage employees, including ''farm hands.'' Its bricks became part of the Hermitage gift shop, built in 1954 and now part of the education building.

Many of the home's veterans were buried in a cemetery on the Hermitage grounds at the former Presbyterian Church there, built in 1824 on land donated for a church by Jackson himself. This Confederate cemetery has about 500 graves. Among them is that of W.W. Smith, who died Nov. 28, 1934, at age 86.

Even more interesting in some ways than the veterans home was the way those war survivors were held in public esteem. The state paid veterans $50 monthly, their widows $25 and their ''body servants'' — blacks who had served them during the war — $9.50.

As veterans aged, newspaper accounts chronicled their dwindling numbers and the longevity of the last few. A sampling of Nashville headlines: ''Gray Veterans' Ranks Thinned to 31 in State'' (July 11, 1941), ''Veteran 96 Today'' (Aug. 4, 1941), ''Only Seven Confederate Vets Left in State'' (Oct. 27, 1943), ''Three Confederate Vets Die During Month'' (Oct. 28, 1943).

The survivors' organization, United Confederate Veterans, held its 52nd and apparently final reunion — ''due to thinning ranks'' — in October 1947 in Chattanooga. A 96-year-old from Oklahoma was elected commander in chief for the group.

Only four members, ranging in age from 96 to 102, were able to attend the convention. All had been wartime privates, but a news report said they were in later years ''raised to the rank of general, by courtesy.'