The Twickenham District and Its Houses

The neighborhood east of downtown still carries the name the planters gave the town before it was renamed in eighteen eleven, amid anti-British feeling ahead of the War of eighteen twelve. Twickenham. The district holds the densest concentration of antebellum homes in all of Alabama, a fact that tells you something about the wealth that flowed through this city during its cotton decades.

The architectural styles arrived with a single person. A Virginia-born architect named George Gilliam Steele came to Huntsville around eighteen eighteen and introduced Federal and Greek Revival design to a town that was growing fast and had money to spend. Cotton factors, lawyers, and planters hired him to build the homes they wanted. The results line the streets for several blocks in every direction: low fanlights over doorways, columns drawn from classical proportion, brick laid in patterns that still hold together after two centuries.

The Weeden House, built in eighteen nineteen, became home to Maria Howard Weeden, an artist and poet whose work documented the lives of formerly enslaved people with unusual attention. Her paintings and verse portrayed the elderly Black residents of post-Civil War Huntsville at a time when most of their contemporaries were not considered subjects worth preserving. The Weeden House is open to the public.

What the district also preserves, in its unspoken way, is the economic system that financed every column and every brick. Federal architecture in the antebellum South was not built by independent artisans alone. The city around you was shaped in equal measure by the labor of people who had no share in what they built.