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The History of Huntsville, AL

The city of Huntsville is situated on the Tennessee River in Northern Alabama, approximately 100 miles north of Birmingham and less than 30 miles south of the Tennessee-Alabama state line. Originally founded by pioneer John Hunt in 1805, Huntsville held a prominent place in Alabama history as the location of the Alabama Constitutional Convention of 1819, which resulted in Alabama achieving statehood. At that time, Huntsville was the largest town in the territory and continued to grow as a strong cotton trading center for the Southeast throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. When local U.S. Senator John Sparkman invited a team of German rocket scientists to Redstone Arsenal to build rockets for the U.S. Army in 1950, Huntsville began to build a new reputation as an important engineering and science center that would eventually create the rocket that orbited America’s first satellite, and support some of the nation’s first space explorations.

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