Maycomb is a small town in southern Alabama, probably much like author Harper Lee's hometown of Monroeville, Alabama. The outskirts of the town lie alongside the Alabama River.
Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it... People moved slowly then... There was no hurry, for there was nothing to do, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with.
There was little for the children to do aside from attending church and school. There was no movie theatre, and most of the businesses were situated around the town square. Change had not yet come to Maycomb, and there were still survivors of the Civil War to remind the townspeople of better days.
Much of Scout's description comes as a retrospective from her youth. The Great Depression was still raging, and times were hard. Blacks and whites were still separated, not only by boundaries but also by the town's social institutions. The trial of Tom Robinson was a big event in Maycomb, in part because the charges against Tom could mean the death penalty; but it also symbolized the division of the times. In the end, as Atticus had predicted, a black man's word could not be expected to be believed over that of a white man's, even if the white man was a Ewell, "the disgrace of Maycomb for three generations." Times in Maycomb had probably changed a bit by the time Scout became an adult, retelling her tale of the three important summers she spent over the course of the book. But during the story, Maycomb was a town full of a typical Southerners of many types--white and black, common and eccentric, but mostly poor, all of them trying to ride out the bad times while looking ahead to better days ahead.
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