Huntsville

Huntsville is the most populous city in Alabama and the county seat of Madison County, in the Appalachian region of northern Alabama south of Tennessee. It was founded within the Mississippi Territory in 1805, became an incorporated town in 1811 and, when Alabama was admitted as a state in 1819, served for a year as its first capital. Cotton textile mills shaped its late nineteenth century economy, and major growth after World War II came from Redstone Arsenal, where rocket research led to NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center and other federal facilities. The city was founded around the Big Spring on karst limestone terrain, has a humid subtropical climate, and had 215,006 residents at the 2020 census.