General John Coffee, Founder of Florence

Florence owes its existence to General John Coffee, a soldier who fought alongside Andrew Jackson in the War of Eighteen Twelve. In March of eighteen eighteen, Coffee and his partners in the Cypress Land Company bought a large tract on the north bank of the Tennessee River, and from that purchase the town of Florence was born. His fellow investors were a who's who of the young state, including Andrew Jackson himself, a future Alabama governor, and a future justice of the United States Supreme Court.

Coffee had the new town laid out by a young Italian engineer named Ferdinand Sannoner, who had once surveyed for Napoleon. Sannoner chose the name Florence, after the great city in his Italian homeland. Coffee settled at a plantation he called Hickory Hill and died there in eighteen thirty-three, buried in the family cemetery nearby.