You may think I am foolish to call him religious, but be patient. A man is born religious or not. And if born so, all his wildness and fighting and bloodshed and profanity will not eliminate it. No man had more of it than Jackson. He was naturally religious. Whenever the passions and fightings of his combatitive trend and nature gave him a breathing spell he fell back in every deed and act on the Scotch-Irish predestination of his breeding. Mr. Eaton walked one night into President Jackson’s bed room. He was preparing to retire. The miniature of the dead Rachel Jackson, which he wore next to his heart, with a silk string around his neck, underneath his clothes, lay on the table by her open Bible. He was reading the Bible, with tears in his eyes, and by him he had her picture to help him interpret it. Some may not think this is religion. But it is religion of the deepest kind. Florence is full of history, and history that counts. John Coffee, Jackson’s right-hand general at New Orleans, and who married Rachel Jackson’s niece, was one of the founders of the town, a corporation known as The Cypress Creek Land Company. The old hero lies buried in a nearby hill. A gallant man he was, sturdy and true, and Jackson often said that but for him at New Orleans he knew not what he would have done. Old Hickory said that, but, rely upon it, he would have done something just the same. Another incorporator was Col. James Jackson, whose old colonial home still stands at the Forks, the original plantation covering several thousand acres of as goodly land as ever felt the pressure of a race horse. For here it was that many famous race horses lived and bred their kind. Col. James Jackson imported Glencoe, a horse, to my mind, greater than any that Old Hickory or any of the Tennesseeans ever imported. Often James Jackson would meet the Tennesseeans in fierce contests of the turf, in the Tennessee valley or at the old Clover Bottom, and the laurels were more often with the Alabamian. In going through the court records, back to the old books in search of early history of this beautiful town, I find some queer and quaint documents. I did not search closely, but what little I did see convinced me that James Madison must have come very near going broke on Florence. People who are used to booms in these days of cities, railroads, mines, spindles, furnaces and a fast-increasing population don’t know what a pioneer boom really was. Here in the heart of a wilderness a roadless territory, the land still flecked with the blood of the white and the red, the nearest town a village on the Cumberland, one hundred and fifty miles away, and only a few settlers along the bluffs of the river, with savage Indians lurking in the interior—no peoples, no cities, no industries—nothing but a yoke of oxen and a wilderness of uncleared land upon which to base coupons for the future—here was a boom to make one smile.