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.


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