sentences:  Houston was noted for reducing the debts incurred to benefit private railroad speculators and others by his Reconstruction Republican predecessors.During Reconstruction, Athens was the home of the Trinity School, a school founded for the children of former slaves by Mary Fletcher Wells and funded by the American Missionary Association.Athens was traditionally a cotton and railroad town, but since the local aerospace boom of the 1950s and 1960s, it has increasingly entered the orbit of nearby industry center Huntsville as the area's cotton production has steadily declined.