The Spring and the Name

The spring runs from limestone into a pool at the center of the park, just as it has for longer than anyone has been writing things down. The Cherokee and Chickasaw had named it before any European saw it. When a Virginia-born Revolutionary War veteran named John Hunt arrived in eighteen oh five, he settled on the bluff above it. The water was cold and clear and abundant, producing somewhere between seven and twenty million gallons a day. You did not pass up a spring like that.

The town that grew around it went through two names before it settled into its own. A planter named LeRoy Pope purchased the surrounding land, petitioned for county-seat status, and named the place Twickenham after the English village associated with his distant relative, the poet Alexander Pope. The residents, many of them veterans who had just finished fighting the British, wanted nothing to do with an English name. With anti-British feeling rising before the War of eighteen twelve, the town was renamed Huntsville in eighteen eleven to honor the man who had first settled the spring. John Hunt, who could not afford to buy the land he had settled on, gave his name to the city LeRoy Pope built. Hunt himself moved away. Pope stayed and grew wealthy.

The spring remained the city's primary water source for over a hundred and sixty years, until the Tennessee Valley Authority built a modern treatment plant on the Tennessee River in the late nineteen sixties. Today the water still rises through the limestone and collects in the park that rings it, calm and continuous, sustaining everything that came after.