Sinkfield's Tavern

Sinkfield's Tavern was the crude inn at the junction of two pig-trails that determined the location of Maycomb, the seat of Maycomb County. Its proprietor, a man named Sinkfield, was no patriot but a pure opportunist who served and supplied ammunition to both Indians and settlers alike, neither knowing nor caring whether he was part of the Alabama Territory or the Creek Nation so long as business was good. When Governor William Wyatt Bibb, seeking to promote the newly created county's domestic tranquility, dispatched a team of surveyors to locate its exact center and establish its seat of government there, those surveyors became Sinkfield's guests. They told their host that he was within the territorial confines of Maycomb County and showed him the probable spot where the county seat would be built. Had Sinkfield not made a bold stroke to preserve his holdings, Maycomb would have sat in the middle of Winston Swamp, a place totally devoid of interest. Instead, Sinkfield reduced his guests to myopic drunkenness one evening, induced them to bring forward their maps and charts, lop off a little here, add a bit there, and adjust the center of the county to meet his requirements. He sent them packing next day armed with their charts and five quarts of shinny in their saddlebags—two apiece and one for the Governor. Because its primary reason for existence was government, Maycomb was spared the grubbiness that distinguished most Alabama towns its size. In the beginning its buildings were solid, its courthouse proud, its streets graciously wide. Maycomb's proportion of professional people ran high: one went there to have his teeth pulled, his wagon fixed, his heart listened to, his money deposited, his soul saved, his mules vetted. But the ultimate wisdom of Sinkfield's maneuver is open to question. He placed the young town too far away from the only kind of public transportation in those days—river-boat—and it took a man from the north end of the county two days to travel to Maycomb for store-bought goods. As a result the town remained the same size for a hundred years, an island in a patchwork sea of cottonfields and timberland. Although Maycomb was ignored during the War Between the States, Reconstruction rule and economic ruin forced the town to grow. It grew inward. New people so rarely settled there, the same families married the same families until the members of the community looked faintly alike. Occasionally someone would return from Montgomery or Mobile with an outsider, but the result caused only a ripple in the quiet stream of family resemblance. Things were more or less the same during Scout's early years. There was indeed a caste system in Maycomb, but to Scout's mind it worked this way: the older citizens, the present generation of people who had lived side by side for years and years, were utterly predictable to one another; they took for granted attitudes, character shadings, even gestures, as having been repeated in each generation and refined by time. Thus the dicta No Crawford Minds His Own Business, Every Third Merriweather Is Morbid, The Truth Is Not in the Delafields, All the Bufords Walk Like That, were simply guides to daily living: never take a check from a Delafield without a discreet call to the bank; Miss Maudie Atkinson's shoulder stoops because she was a Buford; if Mrs. Grace Merriweather sips gin out of Lydia E. Pinkham bottles it's nothing unusual—her mother did the same. Aunt Alexandra fitted into the world of Maycomb like a hand into a glove, but never into the world of Jem and Scout. The town's isolation, born from Sinkfield's tavern-centered manipulation, created a community where family reputation and inherited traits governed social standing, where the Finch family's long tenure on one patch of land was considered the measure of its fineness, and where the arrival of an outsider like Aunt Alexandra was a notable event. The tavern itself, long gone by Scout's time, left its mark on the town's geography and its social character, making Maycomb a place where the past was always present, where the same families intermarried until they looked alike, and where the community's judgment of its members was shaped by generations of shared history rather than by any external standard.