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Many Southern cities aspire to blend the old with
the new; few achieve it as dramatically as HUNTSVILLE
, a hundred miles south of Nashville just inside the Alabama border.
Its sleepy center still recalls the days when it was dominated
by cotton merchants and railroad owners, a history absorbingly
recounted in the Huntsville Depot Museum , 320
Church St (Tues-Sat 9am-5pm; closed Jan & Feb; $7).
Twickenham - the community's original name in 1808, before
anti-British sentiment in the run-up to the 1812 War dictated
that it should be renamed for its first settler, a Virginian named
John Hunt.
Time was when Huntsville was content to be the "Watercress
Capital of the World"; the great leap forward came after
World War II, when the army consolidated its rocket and
missile research efforts in the city. Spearheading the
project were Dr Wernher von Braun and 118 other
German scientists, who came to Huntsville after a token period
of rehabilitation. Von Braun's contribution of the V-2 ballistic
missile to the Nazi war effort is ignored by the city, which prefers
to laud his later space-age achievements, such as Explorer
I , the nation's first satellite, and the mighty
Saturn V .
The giant USSpace and Rocket Center
, five miles west of downtown on Hwy-20, off I-65 (summer daily
9am-6pm; $15), contains a mind-boggling array of technological
exhibits, hands-on displays and weightlessness simulators, as
well as a giant IMAX cinema. Outdoors, in the surreal Rocket and
Space Shuttle parks, redundant rockets protrude skywards in the
blazing Alabama sunshine; the 120-yard, four-story Saturn V rocket
is laid on its side to emphasize its immensity.
