The Forks of Cypress plantation was established in 1818 by James and Sarah Jackson near Florence, and its house, believed to have been designed by William Nichols, became one of Alabama's great houses, perhaps featuring America's earliest peristyle colonnades. Built by skilled enslaved African-American artisans, it stood until June 6, 1966, when lightning struck it and it burned to the ground, leaving its surrounding brick porch with twenty-three brick columns, once plastered with lime, horsehair, and molasses and topped by cypress Ionic capitals, on limestone foundations. James Jackson, an Irish-born engineer, turfman, merchant, financier, planter, statesman, member of the Cypress Land Company, and founding father of Florence, was a major figure in establishing the local textile industry and, as president of the Alabama Senate, a key advocate of the 1832 Treaty of Cusetta. His most enduring contribution was to the thoroughbred horse industry: to improve American bloodstock he imported some of England's finest horses, notably Leviathan, Gallopade, and Glencoe. Horses bred at the Forks included Peytona, which in 1843 won the Peyton Stakes, the flushest purse ever, and the Race between the North and South after walking 1,200 miles to Long Island, and Reel, the leading American broodmare of the 19th century. Both were daughters of Glencoe, as was Pocahontas, England's pre-eminent broodmare, and Glencoe himself led the Stud Book for eight years; by the mid-20th century, virtually no thoroughbred in the world could be found that did not descend from Glencoe of the Forks of Cypress.