Monte Sano: Mountain of Health

The name means mountain of health in Spanish, and it was not given ironically. In the decades before vaccines changed the arithmetic of infectious disease, people with diphtheria, cholera, and yellow fever came to Monte Sano looking for high ground and cleaner air. The mountain sits at just over sixteen hundred feet on Huntsville's eastern edge. The valley below held the heat and the river and, in summer, the diseases that traveled with both.

The Hotel Monte Sano opened in eighteen seventy-seven. It was a Queen Anne-style resort with two hundred and thirty-three rooms, positioned to catch the breezes that moved across the ridge. The rate was eleven dollars a week. That included bowling and tennis. A railway line ran from Huntsville up the mountain's face from eighteen eighty-eight to eighteen ninety-six, carrying patients and guests. Vaccines eventually closed the market for altitude cures. The railway stopped running. The hotel was gone by the early twentieth century.

What came next was the Civilian Conservation Corps. In the nineteen thirties, young men enrolled in the New Deal labor program constructed the park infrastructure that still defines Monte Sano State Park today: an amphitheater, a lodge, fourteen cabins built in the Arts and Crafts style with stone fireplaces, trails through the oak and hickory. The park opened on August twenty-fifth, nineteen thirty-eight. The CCC workers built it out of native sandstone and timber, durable in the way that hand work tends to be.

The mountain is still there, still at sixteen hundred feet, still cooler than the valley in July. What it is no longer is a place people go to get well. It is a place people go to feel good, which is not exactly the same thing, but close enough.