Shaping History
The University of Alabama Huntsville Foundation
by
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In every community’s history, there are moments and choices that forever shape its future. For some communities, those choices have been ruinous, relegating them to dismal fortunes that seem to inextricably spiral downward.
For other communities, luck and good judgment have created opportunities that bear unlikely fruit and set new directions. Huntsville, Alabama found itself at a crossroad mid-way through the last century, when opportunity knocked hard at its front door. In 1949, Huntsville was the thirteenth largest Alabama city, outranked by Birmingham, Mobile, Montgomery, Anniston, Selma, Gadsden, Dothan, Florence, Decatur, Phenix City, and Tuscaloosa.Madison County was the seventh most populous Alabama county, behind Jefferson, Mobile, Montgomery, Calhoun, Etowah, and Tuscaloosa Counties. The city’s population stood at 16,406; the county’s at 73,032. Huntsville and Madison County’s economies were unspectacular in perhaps every regard. Its surviving cotton mills were marginally performing. The end of World War II had prompted the closure of the area’s largest employer, one of Huntsville’s two U.S. Army Arsenals. Fast forward to 2005: Huntsville’s population outstrips all but three other Alabama cities and Madison County’s population ranks third.In terms of “place of employment” Madison County ranks behind only Jefferson County in the state. Why has Huntsville prospered as other Alabama communities have seen their fortunes stall or decline? To be sure, Huntsville was dealt some very lucky and unlikely cards. The fateful decisions to locate two U.S. Army Arsenals in Madison County in 1941 were certainly future-altering opportunities, not entirely within the control of local leaders. Undoubtedly, though, other communities faced with similar fortunes on the eve of the United States’ entry into WWII have not enjoyed such follow-on success.' Community leadership and vision have proved to be the magic ingredients propelling Huntsville’s growth. The inspired decisions by a relatively small group of people, beginning in the mid-1940s, transcended the good fortune of having the Arsenals in Madison County. This is the story of a group of community leaders who made critical choices through a variety of related and unrelated organizations and helped change Huntsville’s fortune. The names of these leaders are perhaps not as well known as they should be. The organizations through which they worked and their histories are all but unknown today. Men like Patrick Richardson, Carl T. Jones, George Mahoney, Charles Shaver, Louis Salmon, Beirne Spragins, Robert K. “Buster” Bell, Tom Thrasher, Kenneth Noojin, and Vance Thornton provided the inspired leadership at critical moments. Key partner organizations included the local Chamber of Commerce, the Huntsville Industrial Expansion Committee, the City of Huntsville, and Huntsville Industrial Sites. Later, those efforts included the University of Alabama and the University of Alabama in Huntsville. At the heart of accelerating Huntsville’s growth were the University of Alabama Huntsville Foundation and its predecessor organizations. The middle of the last century was a period of great change for a community that had seen very little change for the previous 100 years. Like much of the rest of the South, the foundations of Huntsville’s economy were based largely on the meager living that its people could scratch from the earth and earn at the local textile mills. Huntsville had been among the leading cotton-producing and milling communities in the southern United States in the 19th century. Manufacturing was dominated by the textile mills that first located out in the County in the early 1800s. Later, in the 1930s, Huntsville would boast of being the “Watercress Capital of the World,” a tribute perhaps more to the marketing skills of the exotic industry than the economic impact that cress had on the region. As the decade of the 1940s was drawing to an end, only three of the area’s nine cotton mills were still operating. The Huntsville Arsenal, one of the two WWII arsenals located in Madison County, had been closed and declared surplus by the federal government. Virtually all of the 11,000-15,000 people who had worked there making chemical munitions during the years of the war effort had lost their jobs. Against this bleak backdrop, two unrelated but very important opportunities emerged. In 1949, the Army decided to use the arsenals’ nearly 40,000 acres for its rocket research program and to relocate the German V2 rocket team from Fort Bliss, Texas. The second significant decision would come just a couple of weeks later when the University of Alabama announced plans to open an extension office in Huntsville. Both decisions would be implemented in 1950. Ultimately these two unrelated events would create a demand for an institution of higher education and, as businesses interest in the region heightened, a demand for ready industrial property on which businesses could locate their operations. Those two interests would later find common ground in the University of Alabama Huntsville Foundation.
Luck, timing, perseverance, hard work, political muscle, and a healthy concern about the community’s future ultimately would carry the day for Huntsville.
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About the Book
This book chronicles the creation, evolution, and multifaceted impact of the University of Alabama HuntsvilleFoundation (UAHF). It traces the growth of the city of Huntsville and the area surrounding it as an internationally acclaimed center for research and development in science, engineering, and technology. The author describes the concurrent evolution of The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) as the pre-eminent academic center in Alabama for research in engineering, physical science,environmental science, and computational science. He recounts theseminal contributions that the UAH Foundation, and the outstanding men and women who have constituted its members, has made in helping to make some very good things to happen in Huntsville,Alabama. The UAHF is a rarity among university-related foundations in that the UAHF existed even before the university it now serves was created. The books chapters detail how Huntsville leaders came together to form the predecessor of the UAHF as a landholding operation supporting the orderly development of Cummings Research Park, of which UAH occupies the easternmost extremity. Later chapters describe how the UAHF gradually took on greater and greater responsibility for the support of UAH itself, becoming, ultimately, UAH’s independent, university-related foundation.
About the Author
Michael D. Ward
After graduating from the University with a business degree, Ward began his career in government affairs, working for the Medical Association of the State of
Ward has written numerous articles for state and local business periodicals. This is his first book. He and his wife and children live in