Huntsville, Alabama: The Town That Started Out as Twickenham

For its first two years on paper, Huntsville, Alabama, was named Twickenham, after the English home of the poet Alexander Pope. In 1811 the territorial legislature threw that name out and called the town Huntsville, for John Hunt, the man who’d built the first cabin by its Big Spring.

John Hunt and the Big Spring

Hunt came down from Tennessee around 1805. Edward Chambers Betts, who wrote the town’s early history in 1909 and revised it in 1916, passes along the memory of Isaac Criner, a settler on the Mountain Fork of the Flint River. Criner said Hunt and a man named Bean stopped at his cabin for a night. They’d heard about the Big Spring and the big game around it. A few weeks later Bean came back alone and said Hunt was going to stay at the spring and fetch his family later.

On the first settler question, Betts doesn’t hedge: “That John Hunt was the first white man to build his hut on the banks of the ‘Big Spring,’ is historically settled.” You’ll see 1805 in some books and 1806 in others. Thomas McAdory Owen’s 1921 History of Alabama says Hunt settled there in 1805, while Willis Brewer’s 1872 state history says he founded the place in 1806.

Hunt never got to own the spot. Owen writes that while he was away in Tennessee bringing his family, the government sold the land around the spring. Leroy Pope ended up with it at $23 an acre, which Betts says was four times what any of the neighboring land brought.

Leroy Pope’s favorite poet

On December 22, 1809 (Owen and Brewer give the 23rd), the legislature of Mississippi Territory, which then included this corner of Alabama, set up commissioners to lay out a county seat for Madison County. The act said the new town “shall be called and known by the name of Twickenham.”

Betts says there’s no mystery about that choice. Pope was the most powerful man in the settlement, and he “was a great admirer of the poet Alexander Pope, though no relation, so far as the author has been able to ascertain.” The poet’s English home was at Twickenham, and the frontier town got the same name. Owen agrees that the name came “at the suggestion of Leroy Pope.”

Castor oil and the War of 1812

Here’s where the town’s own folklore comes in. Betts repeats a legend about two factions: a “Royal Party” led by Pope, who wanted to keep Twickenham, and a “Castor-oil Party” led by Hunt, who supposedly ran a castor-oil shop and wanted Huntsville. Betts calls it “but mere fiction.” His reason is simple: Hunt had already gone back to Tennessee after the 1809 land sales, before the town was ever named Twickenham.

So why the change? Betts admits that “what the real reason for the change was must remain the subject of conjecture,” then makes his own case. People still called the spring, and sometimes the whole settlement, “Hunt’s Spring.” Plenty of them felt Hunt deserved the honor. And Twickenham was an English name at a time when the country was sliding toward the War of 1812. On November 25, 1811, the legislature declared that the town “shall be called and known by the name of Huntsville.” Owen says the new name was “in honor of its first settler.”

The other name never quite left

Huntsville kept its place in the state’s story. Owen notes that the convention that wrote Alabama’s first constitution met there in July 1819, and the first state legislature met there that November. That same legislature gave Montgomery its name, and one of the convention delegates was William Rufus King, the man who named Selma. If you think Twickenham disappeared in 1811, though, Owen has a small surprise. In 1910, when a group placed a stone marker at the site of the convention building, it was the Twickenham Town Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Sources & further reading

• Edward Chambers Betts, Early History of Huntsville, Alabama, 1804 to 1870 (revised 1916). Isaac Criner’s account of Hunt and Bean, and Hunt as first settler (pp. 7-8); the act of December 22, 1809, and the name Twickenham (pp. 14-15); Leroy Pope and the poet, the $23-an-acre land (pp. 23-24); the “Royal Party” legend, Hunt’s Spring and the act of November 25, 1811 (pp. 25-26).
• Thomas McAdory Owen, History of Alabama and Dictionary of Alabama Biography, vol. 1 (1921). The Huntsville entry: Hunt in 1805, the land sale, Pope’s suggestion, the change “in honor of its first settler,” the 1819 convention and legislature (pp. 718-719); the convention delegates and the Twickenham Town Chapter marker (p. 368).
• Willis Brewer, Alabama: Her History, Resources, War Record, and Public Men (1872), p. 347. Hunt as founder in 1806 and the dates of both name changes.
• GNIS feature 151827 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record for Huntsville; county seat of Madison County in 1808.