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Huntsville is a city in northern Alabama and seat of Madison County, near the Tennessee River. Long a trade and distribution center for agricultural products, Huntsville developed into a major aerospace and military research, development, and manufacturing center after 1950. Other manufactures include computer hardware and software, automotive electronics, vehicle tires, and electronic transmission devices. Facilities in Huntsville and the Redstone Arsenal, situated just outside the city, include 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 in 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 with a large collection of missiles, models, working simulators, and the Mercury 7 and Apollo 16 spacecraft, is located nearby and hosts the U.S. Space Camp, devoted to teaching children about space exploration.
European settlement began in 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. In 1819 the Alabama Territory constitutional convention met in the city, as did the first state legislature. In 1862, during the American Civil War, Union troops occupied the city.
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