Small town, southern life
Most of the houses and buildings in Maycomb are falling down
The town is controlled by seasons
Racism, typical for a town like Maycomb in the 1930's
Everyone knows each other
Close knit community
To an extent, the young Scout and Jem are right: Maycomb is a small, safe, peaceful, intimate community. Yet as Scout and Jem grow up, they come to see another side to their small town. They discover that the town has a fiercely maintained and largely illogical social hierarchy based on wealth, history, and race; ensures its safety through a communal insistence on conformity that subjects anyone who does not conform to dislike and mistrust; and gains its peace by resisting change and ignoring injustice. This is not to say that To Kill a Mockingbird is a condemnation of small town life in the South. Rather, the novel sees the town in much the same terms it sees individuals: as containing wisdom and blindness, good and evil, and for all of that possessing its own special dignity. In a way you could say that Maycomb is the epitome of a small, southern town.
Quotes:
"Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. . . . There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County. But it was a time of vague optimism for some of the people: Maycomb County had recently been told that it had nothing to fear but fear itself."
-scout
'being southerners, it was a source of shame to some members of the family that we had no recorded ancestors on either side of the battle of Hastings'
-scout
Everybody in Maycomb knew each other and gosip got around quickly making judgment high.
"Everybody in Maycomb, it seemed had a Streak: a Drinking Streak, a Gambling Streak, a Mean Streak, a Funny Streak." p141