State ALABAMA

HUNTSVILLE
(airport) (regional info)
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Huntsville is a city in Limestone and Madison Counties in the U.S. state of Alabama, and the county seat of 
Madison County.

Huntsville is the largest city in northern Alabama in a region of a half-million people, with the city proper having 
168,132 residents (2006 estimate).

Started with a single cabin in 1805, the city was incorporated six years later as Twickenham. 

However, it was renamed "Huntsville" (after first settler John Hunt) during the War of 1812, and has grown across 
nearby hills and along the Tennessee River, adding textile mills, then munitions factories, to become a major city, 
hosting the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center and Redstone Arsenal.

Huntsville is the largest core city of the four-county large Huntsville-Decatur Combined Statistical Area.

read full wikipedia reference about Huntsville, Alabama

Many Southern cities aspire to blend the old with the new; few achieve it as dramatically as HUNTSVILLE , 
a hundred miles south of Nashville just inside the Alabama border. Its sleepy center still recalls the days when 
it was dominated by cotton merchants and railroad owners, a history absorbingly recounted in the Huntsville 
Depot Museum , 320 Church St (Tues-Sat 9am-5pm; closed Jan & Feb; $7). Twickenham - the community's 
original name in 1808, before anti-British sentiment in the run-up to the 1812 War dictated that it should be 
renamed for its first settler, a Virginian named John Hunt. 

Time was when Huntsville was content to be the "Watercress Capital of the World"; the great leap forward 
came after World War II, when the army consolidated its rocket and missile research efforts in the city. 
Spearheading the project were Dr Wernher von Braun and 118 other German scientists, who came to 
Huntsville after a token period of rehabilitation. Von Braun's contribution of the V-2 ballistic missile to the 
Nazi war effort is ignored by the city, which prefers to laud his later space-age achievements, such as 
Explorer I , the nation's first satellite, and the mighty Saturn V . 

The giant US Space and Rocket Center , five miles west of downtown on Hwy-20, off I-65 (summer daily 
9am-6pm; $15), contains a mind-boggling array of technological exhibits, hands-on displays and 
weightlessness simulators, as well as a giant IMAX cinema. Outdoors, in the surreal Rocket and Space 
Shuttle parks, redundant rockets protrude skywards in the blazing Alabama sunshine; the 120-yard, 
four-story Saturn V rocket is laid on its side to emphasize its immensity.




OTHER POPULAR DESTINATIONS IN ALABAMA

Athens
Auburn
Bessemer
Birmingham
Cullman
Decatur
Dothan
Eufala
Florence
Foley
Gadsden
Greenville
Gulf Shores
Huntsville
Madison
Mobile
Montgomery
Opelika
Orange Beach
Oxford
Pelham
Prattville
Scottsboro
Selma
Thomasville
Troy
Tuscaloosa