Along a quiet stretch of US 301 in coastal Georgia stands a lonely white farmhouse, the last surviving remnant of a place that once claimed to be a thriving frontier town. Locals say it is all that remains of Jacksonboro, Georgia, a community that rose with promise and then collapsed into nothing, leaving only the Seaborn Goodall House behind. For nearly two hundred years, the reason for Jacksonboro’s disappearance has been the subject of whispered stories, old newspaper columns, and roadside folklore. Most roads lead back to one man: the fiery evangelist Lorenzo Dow, a preacher whose wild appearance and thunderous sermons drew enormous crowds across the early American South.

According to legend, Jacksonboro was already notorious for violence, whiskey, and frontier lawlessness when Dow arrived in 1820 to deliver a sermon that the town wanted no part of. What happened next became one of the most enduring supernatural tales in Georgia history, a story involving a mob, a dramatic act of defiance, and a curse said to have doomed the entire settlement. In the years that followed, fires, storms, economic collapse, and unexplained disasters seemed to swallow Jacksonboro whole until nothing remained but the Goodall home and a memory of what used to stand there.

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