Huntsville: Rockets, Antebellum History & Monte Sano

Huntsville sits 90 miles north of Birmingham in the Tennessee Valley and holds the most concentrated cluster of cultural institutions in Alabama outside Birmingham itself. The US Space and Rocket Center is the largest space museum in the world — the Saturn V on display is an actual flight vehicle, and the Space Shuttle Pathfinder orbiter mock-up gives a sense of the shuttle program's scale that photographs cannot. Downtown Huntsville's Courthouse Square is one of the best-preserved antebellum commercial districts in the Deep South; the Harrison Brothers Hardware Store has operated continuously on the square since 1879. Burritt on the Mountain, a 1930s mansion and historic village on Monte Sano Mountain east of downtown, adds a panoramic view across the Tennessee Valley and a collection of 19th-century Alabama vernacular buildings that were dismantled from their original sites and reassembled on the mountain.