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Old Monroe County Courthouse

Monroeville, US

Old Monroe County Courthouse

The Old Monroe County Courthouse is a historic courthouse building in Monroeville, Alabama that served as the Monroe County courthouse from 1903 to 1963. It is significant as an Alabama literary landmark due to its association with Harper Lee and Truman Capote, both of whom spent their childhood in

Monroeville and featured the courthouse in their work. Capote mentions it in his A Christmas Memory and it inspired the fictional courthouse in Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird. The film adaptation of Lee's novel was heavily influenced by the courthouse, with production designers measuring and photographing the building and then recreating a close duplicate of the interior on a sound stage for filming of the courtroom scenes. The producers originally wanted to use the actual courthouse in Monroeville as the movie set, but due to the modernization of the town since Lee's birth in addition to the poor audio quality in the courthouse, they made the backlot in Hollywood instead. Due to the accuracy of the recreated courthouse in Hollywood, many Alabamians still believe that the film was shot in Monroeville. The Old Courthouse in Monroe County is now a theater for many plays on "To Kill a Mockingbird...

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