The name Honey Hole doesn’t appear to have been a common reference to this community until the early 1950s. Some anecdotal information suggests that the name became a common moniker for the area then because the locals during this time often mused “that one could go down in that hole to get some honey.”  Still other anecdotal information suggests that the area received the Honey Hole moniker because a septic system servicer named Honey Dippers would often come to the community to dump the sewage the servicer would remove from other areas in the city.

Perhaps the reason the Honey Hole became one of the most ill-kept and disease-laden communities in Huntsville and was known as a “slum” and the worst among all the blighted areas in the city is because of the possibility that the community was a sewage dumping ground for the city.  Newspapers articles during the 1940s and 1950s also indicate that the Honey Hole was a high crime area, particularly along Depot Street, which was an extension of Washington Street to Patton Street (later renamed Pratt Avenue).

The Honey Hole community was demolished as part of the Winston Street Urban Renewal Project approved by the federal government on July 10, 1957.  The top section of the Honey Hole community was bordered by Pinhook Creek to its north and west (bumping up against the present day Lincoln Hills Housing Project); Josephine Street (later renamed Washington Street) to its east; and Patton Street (later renamed Pratt Avenue) to its south.  The bottom portion of the community was bordered by Patton Street to its north; Yarbrough Avenue to its west; and the Southern Railroad tracks to its south and east.  Families were moved out of the neighborhood, and the Huntsville Housing Authority began burning the houses down in the Honey Hole community on December 16, 1958. 

Huntsville underwent massive population growth during the late 1950s and 1960s mainly due to the establishment of the U.S. Army Missile Command at Redstone Arsenal and NASA Marshall Space Flight Center.  The concept for I-565 was approved in 1968 – even though actual construction of I-565 didn’t begin until 1987 and officially opened on October 26, 1991 – by the Federal Highway Administration as the proposed Spur Interstate route to connect the then massively growing city of Huntsville with I-65.   That proposed spur route was planned right through the heart of what was once the Honey Hole community while bypassing the hearts of both the Lincoln Mills community (added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2010) and Dallas Mills community (added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2011), which were both former southern mills communities in very close proximity with the Honey Hole, all sharing the same Southern Railroad track on one side of each of their borders.