Architect Heinz Hilten helped design Germany's V-2 rocket program in World War II, and he helped design America's Saturn rocket program that took humans to the moon.

Hilten, whose papers have just been donated to the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), also helped design modern Huntsville at a time Washington doubted an Alabama cotton town could handle a modern moon shot program.

Hilten, who died in 2013 at 103, also helped start Huntsville's symphony and design a church, a concert hall and even Point Mallard Park on the Tennessee River.

Putting that life's work in context will be a job for history, and historians are expected to benefit the most from the Historic Huntsville Foundation's decision to give Hilten's collected papers to UAH.

Hilten's family had given the collection to the foundation, but HHF Executive Director Donna Castellano said she realized they needed a bigger home when she saw they included site plans for the research institute that would become UAH - arguably the critical building that kept NASA in Alabama.

People say modern Huntsville's history started when Wernher von Braun and his German rocket team came to Redstone Arsenal from Ft. Bliss, Texas, in 1950. But an equally important day came in 1961 when von Braun spoke about his challenge to the Alabama Legislature. Hilten's personal copy of that speech is part of the collection.

Von Braun told Alabama lawmakers that Washington was doubting the wisdom of spending more money on NASA in Alabama, considering the area's problem attracting top minds. We need good schools and a research institute in Huntsville, von Braun said, or this big opportunity could pass by.

"If the Legislature hadn't responded," Castellano asked, "where would Huntsville be?"

The Legislature did respond by appropriating money for a research institute that became the University of Alabama in Huntsville. German architect Hannes Luehrsen designed it, but Hans Hilten reviewed and commented on Luehrsen's plans.

What else in Huntsville did Hilten's pen mark?

* Many of the elementary schools built in the 1960s

* St. Mark's Lutheran Church, where the German team and their families worshipped

* The Von Braun Center's concert hall, where Hilten also helped found the Huntsville Symphony Orchestra

* Memorial Parkway

* Point Mallard Park

* The personal homes of many German team members including von Braun

There's also Hilten's greatest personal Space Age achievement. He was architect of record for the national landmark Saturn V test stand on Redstone Arsenal.

Castellano and UAH library Director David Moore are like all Huntsvillians - proud of the city's Apollo program history. But they're also fascinated by what happened outside the gates of Marshall Space Flight Center in the cotton fields of Madison County. That's a huge change Hilten's papers also illustrate.

"You think about this little town that existed in 1950, and all of a sudden you have these new forces coming in," Castellano said.

A much bigger city had to be built - quickly - by locals and newcomers with sometimes different visions and motives. Choices were made, and they weren't always unanimous.

"It's obviously the life work of one individual," Castellano said of the collection, "but I think it's documenting the transition of Huntsville in a very broad sense from a cotton-oriented ... era into the Space Age period and all the changes Huntsville had to make to adapt."

"This is very significant," Moore said last week, "because of the significance to the history of Huntsville, the history of UAH and of NASA, and how it all ties together. It's perfect for us, the UAH library, to preserve it and make it accessible forevermore to whoever wants to access it."

UAH will organize and index the collection and publish a guide for scholars. The work will be digitized and put online, and some will be showcased on campus.

"We want people to use these papers...," Castellano said. "To ask the serious questions here that could be asked, and to fill in this period that we all agree is very important to Huntsville, our nation and, really, internationally."

(Updated Jan. 26 at 9:15 a.m. to correct a first reference to UAH Library Director David Moore)