peanuts, weevils and Miss Nelle
The Wiregrass grows peanuts and monuments to insects: Dothan paints golden goobers on every corner and Enterprise built the world's only statue thanking an agricultural pest, the boll weevil that forced the region off cotton. US 84 rides the story west through Conecuh sausage smoke to Monroeville, where Harper Lee and Truman Capote grew up next door to each other and the old courthouse became the most famous courtroom in American fiction.
📍 Literary Capital of Alabama markers own Monroeville's square; peanut statuary owns Dothan.
Golden peanuts and murals, the weevil on her pedestal, and Elba's courthouse inside its levee bowl.
The Peanut Capital's decorated goober statues and giant downtown murals; the National Peanut Festival lands each November.
A classical maiden hoisting a boll weevil, erected 1919 in gratitude to the pest that forced diversification into peanuts. The only monument of its kind on earth.
A courthouse town sitting inside a levee ring on the Pea River, twice nearly drowned and stubbornly still here.
Opp and Andalusia's squares, then hickory smoke at the Conecuh plant in Evergreen.
Hickory-smoked cult sausage since 1947; the factory store sells it by the armload and Alabama tailgates run on it.
West to the square where Atticus argued and Miss Nelle watched from the balcony in her mind.
The 1903 courtroom Harper Lee wrote into Mockingbird, replicated for Peck's film; the town stages the play here every spring.
Soft-serve stand on the lot where Lee's childhood home stood; the Capote house marker is next door. Order a burger, read the plaques.
More in the Deep South: The Blues Highway · Natchez Trace Parkway · Grant's Vicksburg Campaign · The Civil Rights Trail · The Hill Country Ramble · Hank's Lost Highway · Sherman to the Swamp · US 11: The Valley South · The Shoals · The Black Belt & Gee's Bend · The Old Federal Road · The Free State of Jones · US 49: Jackson to the Sound · Sherman's March to the Sea · US 41: Dixie Highway & the Atlanta Campaign · The Chattahoochee Trace · Plains & Andersonville · US 341: The Golden Isles Highway · North Georgia Gold & Apples · The Trail of Tears: Georgia to Kentucky