South Toward Home by Margaret Eby

Author:Margaret Eby
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

THE CENTERPIECE OF To Kill a Mockingbird is the lone architectural landmark of Monroeville: the county courthouse. The courthouse square sits at the center of town and is really the only way that you would know that you had entered Monroeville. The opening pages of Mockingbird describe Monroeville’s downtown, loosely disguised as the hamlet of Maycomb, as it was in the 1930s:

In rainy weather the streets grew to red slop; grass grew on the sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square . . . bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men’s stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o’clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and talcum.

By the time Mockingbird came out, the court square had lost some of the leaky-molasses pace that Lee described in her book. Gone were the mules, and even the live oaks. When art director Henry Bumstead, tasked with adapting the quiet town of Maycomb to the screen for the film version of Mockingbird, came to Monroeville in 1962, his crew found the square too modernized to use for their exterior shots. No mules, no Hoover carts. (They ended up re-creating much of Monroeville on a back lot in Hollywood, including a painstaking replica of the inside of the courthouse.)

Today, the square is the liveliest place in town. Monroeville remains, as Lee wrote about Maycomb, “an island in a patchwork sea of cotton fields and timberland,” a government town in the countryside of southwest Alabama prevented from much growth by its location far away from the closest ports. Around the courthouse, a perimeter of faded brick buildings keep guard. Chipped, faded signs advertise long out-of-business dry-goods companies, but the occupants of the buildings are mostly banks, county offices, and boutiques specializing in monogrammed canvas totes and college football team–themed hair ribbons. The corner hardware store, now out of business, was once the town’s all-purpose shopping stop; couples would register for their weddings there. Outside the store stood large birdhouses painted with references to Mockingbird and the square; nearby is Radley’s Fountain Grill, named after Lee’s fictional shut-in, Boo, and the Maycomb Mall. The offices of Barnett, Bugg, Lee & Carter, where Harper Lee’s father, Amasa Coleman Lee, and sister Alice Finch Lee both practiced, is a block away.

The museum itself is a small one, mostly run by volunteers. Three years after the publication of Mockingbird, county employees moved out of the building and into the offices scattered around the square. In 1968, still riding the wave of Lee’s publication fame, the courthouse reopened as a local attraction.

The first floor has the gift shop and a small exhibit about the history of Monroeville, which began, like so many Alabama towns, as an agricultural crossroads for exporters of timber and cotton. One room is devoted to a re-creation of a country lawyer’s office, a nod to Lee’s description of the nook

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