Cherokee Plantation: Alabama's Oldest House and the Ross Family

Reputed to be the oldest standing home in Alabama, Cherokee Plantation began as a two-story log cabin built around seventeen ninety in Willstown, the Cherokee settlement that would become Fort Payne. Oral history attributes the original cabin to Daniel and Molly Ross, the parents of John Ross, who was born at nearby Turkeytown and grew up to become Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation.

The home later passed to Andrew Ross, a judge on the Cherokee Supreme Court and John's brother. When the Treaty of New Echota was signed in eighteen thirty-five, Andrew was part of the Treaty Party, the faction that supported removal, even as his brother John fought it. The Nation was forced west in eighteen thirty-eight, when the federal government pushed the entire Nation west along the Trail of Tears. A portion of that march passed directly in front of this house. A later owner gave it a Greek Revival facade, and the structure still stands on the National Register of Historic Places, carrying the memory of a people who built a civilization here and were forced to abandon it.