Madison County, Alabama: History
=== Mississippi Territory ===
Madison County was established on December 13, 1808, by the governor of the Mississippi Territory. The land was ceded by the Cherokee under the Treaty of Washington signed 1806, ratified 1807. The county was named for James Madison. There were 2,223 whites and 322 enslaved blacks resident in the county in 1809. The lands were surveyed in 1809 and initially sold out of the land office at Nashville, Tennessee. In 1811 the town of Huntsville was incorporated within the county and the General Land Office was relocated there from Nashville.
Madison County is recognized as the "birthplace" of the state of Alabama, which was admitted to the Union on December 14, 1819. Huntsville was designated as the first capital of the new state.
For much of the county's history, its economy was based on agriculture, particularly cotton plantations, which were established across the uplands. These plantations and their owners' profits were dependent on the labor of enslaved African Americans before the Civil War. Madison County was one of the largest cotton-producing counties in the state.
Madison County was the largest county in Alabama in population from 1810 to 1840. In the 1810 census alone, Madison County made up nearly half of the population in what would become Alabama, though this did not include Native American tribes and their people. By 1850 however it would lose the title and be the 7th due to its population growth having slowed down. The likely reason was due to Madison County having mainly relied on cotton with little to no other industries.
Cotton remained important after the war. Most labor for cultivation was still provided by African Americans, but they worked as sharecroppers and tenant farmers. By the late 19th century, textile mills had been established around the county; they were restricted to white workers by the Jim Crow practices of racial segregation. During the early 20th century, the economy continued to be largely agricultural, although textile mills expanded their production.
During World War II, the Army established Redstone Arsenal here as a chemical weapon manufacturing site, and the county attracted related industries. After the war, it became a center of new weapon and rocket development. In 1950, a group of exiled German rocket scientists, led by Wernher von Braun, came to Redstone Arsenal from Fort Bliss, Texas in order to conduct research and development of new types of rockets.
By the 1960s, research expanded to rockets for space exploration. The Redstone rocket was modified to launch the first two Americans into space. The US began to emphasize investment in the Space Race, in order to compete with the Soviet Union during the Cold War years and to increase scientific gains. This work in the defense and space industries has generated tens of thousands of jobs in the area, most of them private contractors working in these fields. The population of Madison County has risen from 72,903 in 1950 to an estimated 403,565 in 2022.