Sweetwater Mansion

Sweetwater is one of the great antebellum mansions of the Tennessee Valley, and it began in tragedy. General John Brahan, a War of eighteen twelve veteran who owned more than four thousand acres of Lauderdale County, started building the brick Federal-style house in eighteen twenty-eight using the labor of enslaved people who made the bricks right here by Sweetwater Creek. But Brahan died of pneumonia before it was finished, with the walls only risen to the windowsills.

The unfinished house passed to family and was completed around eighteen thirty-five by his son-in-law, Robert M. Patton. Patton went on to become governor of Alabama at the very end of the Civil War, serving from eighteen sixty-five to eighteen sixty-eight, though Congress stripped most of his authority once Reconstruction began.

By eighteen sixty, Sweetwater spread across some thirty-eight hundred acres, one of the largest plantations in the South.