Forks of Cypress Plantation

Standing on this ground is a ring of tall brick columns, the ghost of one of the most striking houses ever built in Alabama. This was the Forks of Cypress, a cotton plantation begun in eighteen eighteen by James Jackson, an Irish born immigrant who helped found Florence. His Greek Revival mansion, finished around eighteen thirty, was the only Greek Revival house in the state wrapped entirely by a two story colonnade, twenty-four Ionic columns marching all the way around it.

Jackson was also the first great importer and breeder of thoroughbred racehorses in the United States, and his bloodlines ran through American racing for generations. The mansion stood for well over a century until the sixth of June, nineteen sixty-six, when lightning struck and burned it to the ground. Only the columns survived, rising from their limestone foundations like a Roman ruin in the Alabama woods.