Huntsville, AL news and local guide

Cotton from surrounding plantations built the town's early wealth, worked by enslaved people who also ran textile machinery at the Bell Factory; an 1822 census counted 448 enslaved people among Huntsville's 1,300 residents. In 1819 delegates met in Walker Allen's cabinet shop to write Alabama's first constitution, and Huntsville served briefly as the first state capital. The Memphis and Charleston Railroad, the first rail link between the Atlantic coast and the lower Mississippi, reached the city in 1855. Huntsville at first opposed secession but sent many men to the Confederacy, and nine Civil War generals, five Confederate and four Union, were born in or near it. On April 11, 1862, Union troops under General Ormsby M. Mitchel seized the city to cut the Confederacy's rail lines. In the 20th century Redstone Arsenal grew from a wartime chemical weapons plant into a center of rocket research, and it is home to NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. Sources Wikipedia: Huntsville, Alabama