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Huntsville was Alabama's first state capital in 1819 and a cotton town of Greek Revival mansions before it became something altogether stranger: in 1950, about 200 German scientists led by Wernher von Braun arrived here under Operation Paperclip, the wartime intelligence program that swept up the engineers who had built Hitler's V-2 rockets. They settled into the Redstone Arsenal, designed the Redstone missile, and then on January 31, 1958, launched Explorer 1 as America's first satellite into orbit. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center followed in 1960, and from Huntsville came the Saturn V rockets that carried humans to the Moon.

The Twickenham Historic District on the southern end of downtown holds some of the finest Federal and Greek Revival architecture in Alabama, built by cotton merchants whose wealth predates the rocket era entirely.

The U.S. Space and Rocket Center houses the only Saturn V rocket designated a National Historic Landmark, lying on its side in a pavilion that gives you a genuine sense of what it meant to build something that large. Harrison Brothers Hardware, operating since 1879 on the town square, is perhaps Huntsville's most charming detail: a hardware store that kept its original fittings through every transformation the city has undergone.