Space and Rocket Center and then for various sports tournaments sprinkled here and there. So to get to spend a full weekend in Huntsville earlier this summer as an adult was both nostalgic but also eye-opening.
Huntsville is growing at a rapid pace, meaning several new hotels have joined the fray in recent years, with more on the docket. We lucked out and arrived just weeks following the opening of the AC Hotel Huntsville Downtown , my first time staying at this boutique brand under the Marriott umbrella. The AC brand intentionally emulates a European hotel, meaning minimalist in design, and the Huntsville outpost occupies a prime locale overlooking Big Spring Park and is walkable to the downtown square, Huntsville Museum of Art and the Japanese Bridge.
The menu leans heavily into locally curated cheese, meat and bread selections, but there are also main dishes like salads, tacos and sandwiches on tap, too. From Domaine South, it was just a few blocks to our first attraction of our weekend in Huntsville.
The majority of the furniture is period specific and original to the home. Notably, paintings and poems created by Maria Howard Weeden are on display across the building and feature some of the most accurate depictions of freed slaves who were living in Huntsville at the time. There are multiple neighborhoods in Huntsville and Madison County containing historic homes, some dating prior to statehood, that are worth driving or walking through.
The Leroy Pope Walker home built in , for example, is the oldest documented mansion in the entire state of Alabama, and the Twickenham district is full of Federal, Queen Anne, Gothic, Greek and Italianate styles of architecture. You can download a printable map of the art walk here. Keeping to the theme of exploring historical preservation and revitalization efforts in the city, we dined at Cotton Row Restaurant inside a brick building built in as part of the cotton exchange.
