Ben AngelThis 1st day of #RocketCity (Sept. 2, 2025) … I had to ask, so who is it that Trump is ordering us to forget by eliminating the name Huntsville, Alabama, from American maps. Should that change be resisted like his moronic proclamation renaming the Gulf of Mexico? Should we care who John Hunt was?
(Short answer, probably not worth the trouble. He did serve as a militiaman and fought for American Independence in Virginia, putting far more on the line than Captain Bonespurs and his paternal ancestors ever did for any cause, and helped represent North Carolina in the Constitutional Convention…)
(... but after that… well, let’s see, flipped tons of properties in what is today eastern Tennessee, squatted on indigenous lands - Cherokee and Chickasaw in particular - and owned at least five slaves. He was also a prodigious rattlesnake hunter.)
(He had a feud with a guy named Leroy Pope, who apparently registered under his name the land Hunt was squatting in northern Alabama, and sought to have the settlement that he started, then called Hunt’s Spring, renamed Twickenham but the other settlers overruled him.)
(Because French names were preferred during the period this all happened, the fledgling town was eventually named Huntsville (coincidentally, most “-ville” towns in the South are reputed to be more right-wing). John Hunt continued to help break trails in the region until he died in 1822 at age 72.)
(I mean, John Hunt was certainly more significant than the average slave-owning property flipper at the start of America’s spread westward, but I guess Rocket City is easier for MAGA hat wearers to remember. And I guess at some point in the future they’ll need a rocket launch pad…)
(... once the Blue States split off, much of Texas is hostility retaken by the Mexicans they were trying to evict, and Florida drowns under ever-growing waves resulting from the rising ocean level “hoax.”)