The Forks of Cypress

The Forks of Cypress was a Greek Revival plantation house near Florence in Lauderdale County, Alabama, built in 1830 to a design by architect William Nichols for planter James Jackson and his wife Sally Moore Jackson. The mansion was distinguished by a two-story colonnade of twenty-four Ionic columns and stood on a cotton plantation worked by enslaved people; it was later linked through Jackson family descent to the ancestry of author Alex Haley. The house was destroyed by a lightning-caused fire in 1966, and the site was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1997.