Huntsville, Alabama. City and Business guide.

Welcome to Huntsville, Alabama.

Huntsville is the county seat of Madison County, Alabama. As of the 2000 census, the population of Huntsville was 164,570. Huntsville is included in the Huntsville-Decatur Combined Statistical Area, which, in 2004, had a total population of 510,088.

View of downtown Huntsville, Alabama from Big Spring International Park.
Huntsville is named after John Hunt, the first settler of the land around the Big Spring. However, Hunt did not properly register his claim, and the area was purchased by Leroy Pope, who imposed the name Twickenham on the area to honor the home city of his distant kinsman Alexander Pope. Twickenham was carefully planned, with streets laid out on the northeast to southwest direction based on the Big Spring. However, due to anti-English sentiment during the War of 1812, the name was soon changed to Huntsville to honor John Hunt, who had been forced to move to other land south of the new city. Both John Hunt and Leroy Pope were Freemasons and charter members of Helion Lodge #1. In 1811, Huntsville became the first incorporated town in Alabama. However, the recognized "birth" year of the city is 1805, the year of John Hunt's arrival. The city's sesquicentennial anniversary was held in 1955 and the bicentennial was celebrated in 2005.

Huntsville is thus home to both Redstone Arsenal and the Marshall Space Flight Center, and is nicknamed "the Rocket City" for its close history with U.S. space missions. Huntsville has been important in developing space technology since the 1950s.

Huntsville is fast becoming a regional retail center. There are many strip malls and "power centers" throughout the city. Huntsville has two malls- Madison Square Mall, built in 1984, and Parkway Place, built in 2002.

The inland Port of Huntsville combines the Huntsville International Airport, International Intermodal Center, and Jetplex Industrial Park. The intermodal terminal transfers truck and train cargo. The port has on-site U.S. Customs and USDA inspectors and is Foreign Trade Zone No. 83.

The Huntsville Museum of Art, North Alabama's leading visual arts center, moved to its beautiful facility in Big Spring International Park in March 1998. The nationally-accredited Museum fills its seven galleries with a variety of exhibitions throughout the year, including prestigious traveling exhibits and the work of nationally and regionally acclaimed artists.

The Huntsville Botanical Garden 112 acres (453,000 m²) is a young botanical garden located at 4747 Bob Wallace Avenue, Huntsville, Alabama, near the U.S. Space & Rocket Center. It is open year-round for a fee. The gardens include a seasonal butterfly house, and aquatic, annual, daylily, fern, herb, perennial, rose, and wildflower gardens, as well as a nature path and collection of flowering dogwood trees.

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