Our Story

We are Annie Jo and Jackson Richard, we met in high school at a church retreat, that both of us almost did not go on. Our story is amazing to us and if you are as sappy as we are, keep reading. We started dating about a year after we first met in 2010, after a couple of dates we shared our first kiss and later that night my husband recalls hearing the song "History in the Making" by Darius Rucker. In the song you will find the line "maybe this could be our last first kiss." We didn't realize it at the time how true this would come to be, we still called it our song. We graduated high school and were trying to decide on colleges. The University of North Alabama was not really on either of our radars, but we went to look there just to say we gave it a shot. When we got there, we fell in love with the quaint little town of Florence and the beautiful campus. However, that wasn't the deciding factor for us. On our tour they handed up a flyer and on it read the words "History in the Making" and we decided to commit to going to UNA and taking a step closer to our future together. We got engaged on that beautiful campus in the fall of our senior year under the string lights near the fountain (We are suckers for some good string lights). We had joked around for a while about building a wedding venue, and after we got engaged some very complicated pieces to the puzzle came together and we decided to build our dream. We searched and searched for land until we found our spot out off Harvest Road. We knew immediately that this property was perfect for what we wanted. We decided to call it Harvest Hollow because it seemed to fit perfectly with the land. We got all of the plans together and with a very short timeline we raced through the summer building our dream. It was a wild ride that summer, wondering if we would have the place built in time for our wedding. And after a long and hard 6 months it came time for our wedding. The week of our wedding was a blur, we didn't have final power until two days before our wedding. We had rehearsal with scissor lifts inside still hanging lights. Even before walking down the aisle, Jackson still laughs that before the doors opened and we saw each other, he remembers noticing that one of the front doors didn't even have a door handle. It was perfect to us though knowing all of the hard work from our friends and family to help pull together our greatest accomplishment. It is funny and inspiring to look back at our story and see how many struggles and roadblocks we ran into along the way and to see how God provided us with those wonderful people in our lives to help us get to where we are.