Places of interest

The domed Capitol is a National Historic Landmark. Another building of note is the first White House of the Confederacy, where Confederate President Jefferson Davis lived. The Alabama Department of Archives and History contains one of the largest collections of historical material on the South. The collection of the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts includes 19th- and 20th-century paintings.

The Maxwell and Gunter Air Force bases are located in Montgomery. Maxwell is the headquarters of the Air University system. The city is the seat of Huntingdon College, Alabama State University, and Auburn University Montgomery.

Economy

After the Civil War, Montgomery became a trading center for cotton, livestock, yellow pine, and hardwoods. The chief manufactured products are commercial fertilizer and furniture.

History

Prehistoric American Indian mound builders were early inhabitants of the site of present-day Montgomery. Later other Indian tribes set up villages in the area. In 1819 white settlers combined two of their towns on the Alabama River to form Montgomery. They named the town for Richard Montgomery, a general in the American Revolution. Montgomery replaced Tuscaloosa as the state capital in 1847.

On February 4, 1861, two months before the start of the Civil War, representatives of states that had left the Union met in Montgomery. There they formed the Confederate States of America. Montgomery was the Confederate capital until May 1861. The city fell to Union troops in 1865.

In the 1950s the city became a center of the civil rights movement under the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr., who was a minister there. After Rosa Parks was arrested in 1955 for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger, King led a boycott of city buses. A year later, a court order said that blacks and whites should be allowed equal access to the buses. In 1965 King led a five-day protest march from Selma, Alabama, to the Capitol in Montgomery. Population (2000 census), 201,568.