Huntsville is a city in northern Alabama and also seat of Madison County, close to the Tennessee River. Long a trade and distribution center for agricultural products, Huntsville progressed into a leading aerospace and military research, development, and manufacturing center after 1950. Other manufactures comprise of computer hardware and software, automotive electronics, vehicle tires, and electronic transmission devices. Facilities in Huntsville and the Redstone Arsenal, found just outside the city, are the United States Army Missile Command; the U.S. Army Space and Strategic Defense Command; the Army Corps of Engineers; and the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The area is served by the Huntsville International Airport-Carl T. Jones Field.
Huntsville is the site of the Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University (1875), Oakwood College (1896), a campus (opened around 1950) of the University of Alabama, a junior college, and a technical college. The Von Braun Civic Center houses the Huntsville Museum of Art. The U.S. Space and Rocket Center, a complex having a significant collection of missiles, models, working simulators, and the Mercury 7 and Apollo 16 spacecraft, is found nearby and hosts the U.S. Space Camp, dedicated to teaching children about space exploration.
European settlement began around 1805 when John Hunt of Virginia arrived. The community was called Twickenham until 1811, when it incorporated and was renamed Huntsville for its original settler. During 1819 the Alabama Territory constitutional convention met in the city, as did the first state legislature. Around 1862, during the American Civil War, Union troops occupied the city.
Ljao/jan/1v21