Deep South Sweet home Alabama in the footsteps of legends Hank, Rosa, Scott and Zelda

AGOLD star marks the spot where Jefferson Davis took the oath of office and became the first and last president of the Confederate States of America in 1861. A lot of bad things have happened in Montgomery, Alabama. But many good things too.

The 1965 civil rights marches from Selma to Montgomery, and those who died in support of voting rights, are commemorated in Alabama’s historic state capital.

Dr Martin Luther King was pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery. His red brick and white wood church is built on the site of a former slave trader’s pen.

A museum in the city serves as a memorial to Rosa Parks, who began the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955. The bus stop, near the Court Square Fountain, where she boarded the bus is commemorated.

Now you can visit the home of one of the darlings of the Roaring Twenties. And a member of the Lost Generation.

A two-storey, clapboard Georgian vernacular house at 919 Felder Avenue, Montgomery, is available on airbnb.com, offering a museum sleepover, for less than £160 a night.

Fitzgerald House, built in 1910, was the residence of The Great Gatsby author F Scott, Zelda and their daughter Scottie (Frances) from 1931 to 1932, after Zelda had been released from various French and Swiss sanatoriums.

The house was saved from demolition in 1986 and is the only surviving home of the iconic couple and the only museum dedicated to them.

Zelda Sayre was the youngest child of Alabama Supreme Court justice Anthony Dickson Sayre and Minnie Buckner Sayre.

Judge Sayre’s uncle William was a prominent Montgomery merchant whose home eventually became Jefferson Davis’s first White House. Mrs Sayre’s father was a Kentucky senator in the Confederate Congress.

Minnesota-born Scott was a young army lieutenant stationed at nearby Camp Sheridan. He was waiting on orders to go to war in France and, while he waited, was writing a novel based on his Princeton college days .

Scribner’s rejected the first draft of his novel, The Romantic Egotist, but accepted a rewritten version, under the title This Side of Paradise, a year later.

Montgomery-born Zelda had graduated from Sydney Lanier High School in 1918. The couple met over afternoon tea at the Winter Palace mansion, near the family’s house at 6 Pleasant Avenue, which is now a car park.

The couple became engaged, but Scott had to make several frantic visits to Montgomery when Zelda kept breaking if off. But they eventually married in New York in 1920 following the publication of This Side of Paradise.

The Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum’s curator Sara Powell, who has been responsible for much of its interior design, says: “Her father was so against the marriage he didn’t attend the wedding. He didn’t believe Scott could afford to keep his daughter in the lifestyle to which she was accustomed.”

The continuing restoration of the museum has been funded through private donations. The seven-room house contains some of Zelda’s sketches and paintings (most of her artwork was burnt by her mother), beaded purses, her paper dolls and her senior yearbook, as well as Fitzgerald’s Princeton honorary diploma and Esquire magazines featuring his Pat Hobby stories, which he wrote largely to pay for his wife’s frequent hospitalisations and treatment.

There are also letters between Fitzgerald and his close friend and literary critic Edmund White. There are no letters from Ernest Hemingway – Zelda loathed him, considering him “bogus”.

Powell says: “Zelda’s record collection is also one of my favourite pieces in the museum – but it’s difficult to pick a favourite.”

F Scott Fitzgerald, his wife Zelda and daughter Scottie