We had stayed in Florence as a way to split the journey from Oxford to Huntsville which meant that the journey today was only a couple of hours. We had originally planned to visit the Fame museum which is in Muscle Schoals, Florence but unfortunately they only do 2 tours a day during the week and we missed the first one and didn’t want to wait until the second one this afternoon. The Fame (Florence Alabama Music Enterprise) studio was founded in 1959 and was one of the only recording studios in Alabama that Black artists could record alongside white song writers and session musicians, considering what was happening down the road in Mississippi regarding segregation. As we couldn’t visit this we just headed for Huntsville where there were a couple of things we wanted to see. There is a historic area which was originally called Twickenham and contains one of the largest concentrations of antebellum homes in the South. The town was called Twickenham when it was first chosen as the county seat in 1810. Each of the houses have been carefully researched, identified and detailed plans of the structures are on file with the Library of Congress. The description of the Area was ‘A living village commemorating Alabama’s entry into the Union at the 1819 constitution convention, unfortunately what this meant was houses that are still lived in that you can walk round the outside of! So after we drove through the district we went to the visitor centre to see if we had missed something which we evidently hadn’t! We did however find out some of the history of Huntsville. The area that is now Madison County Alabama was a part of the Mississippi Territory from 1789 until 1817, and a part of the Alabama Territory from 1817 until statehood in 1819. Madison County was created in a county of the Mississippi Territory in 1808. The name Twickenham was reported to honour the English poet Alexander Pope’s hometown and the city plan determined the streets should be laid out in rectangles creating 20 squares or blocks. In 1811 the name was changed to Huntsville because of anti british sentiment and the city was incorporated making Huntsville the first incorporated town in what is now Alabama. The streets are named after Revolutionary war Generals, US Presidents, US Vice Presidents and statesmen. A lot of people in Huntsville are of German descent as at the end of WWII the 120 scientists that designed the V2 bombs were given the choice of coming to America or going to Russia they chose America and were originally settled in Carolina but didn’t like it so moved to Huntsville because it reminded them of home. Not to be deterred we went to the Depot which provides guided tours of the restored 1860 passenger depot. We joined the tour into the ticket office and just as we were sitting in the waiting room a train went through which was very impressive as the track was literally just outside the window, but possibly more impressively there wasn’t actually a lot of noise or vibration due to the fact that they had built the building with 18 inch walls. We had a tour of the building looking at the ticket office and what would have been the ladies waiting room, then we went upstairs where the railway offices would have been. There are two safes in cupboards in the main offices, these have doors that are steel lined with concrete between making the door about 6 inches thick interestingly they even painted the doors to make them look like wood to try and fool anyone that came up looking for money. Huntsville was occupied early in the civil war by the Union Troops and because of this there wasn’t much damage to the buildings which is why so much of it remains. After we finished walking round the Depot we drove up to Burritt on the Mountain which the lady in Visitor information had told us had great views which we couldn’t actually see but may have been evident if we had gone into the house, however we decided to head to the hotel as we have chores to do tonight (laundry) and we have to plan our assault on the space centre tomorrow. The signs on the interstate say it is the biggest space museum on the planet and they do have some great rockets parked in the grounds as we could see them as we were driving in!
