POWERGRAMS

24 as a former member of the VF family, having moved from Greensboro, North Carolina, as a fourth-grader when her father took a job at the once-booming Alabama facility. Smith le Monroeville aer high school, never thinking she would return. But she did, in 1983, when Vanity Fair was still the engine that made the local economy run. She was the chamber executive director in 1996 when the sewing plant closed, leaving 660 people out of work. She watched with everyone else for several years as most of the remaining aspects of the business were closed or moved out of town. County unemployment soared a decade ago to nearly one in four people, but now is near the national average of about 5 percent. Today, the once-vibrant VF operation that employed 2,500 is owned by Fruit of the Loom and employs about 250. "I think we're finally coming out of that situation," Smith says from her desk in the restored former First National Bank that is nearing a century of holding down the corner of Alabama Avenue and Pineville Road. The building that retains its huge Mosler vault now doubles as a visitors center and Main Street headquarters. As crucial to the city as Vanity Fair was for 70 years, the Courthouse Square where the chamber offices are "has been a big part of Monroeville since the very start," Smith says. While the town is growing in every direction, the original economic district remains the anchor, including City Hall and the new county courthouse. Recently opened businesses are thriving in renovated century-old brick structures. Monroe County has always had a large wood products presence, which has grown to employ more than 900. Monroeville has an ever-expanding medical cluster that includes more than 750 workers and Smith says is unsurpassed for a community its size. And Coastal Alabama Community College brings in more than 600 students, scholarship athletes and faculty to its campus, which since 1998 has hosted the annual Alabama Writers Symposium. The Monroe County Public Library is just down Pineville Road from the chamber, hanging its hat on the historical footnote that Gregory Peck slept there for a week when it was the LaSalle Hotel. The Academy Award-winning actor stayed in town in 1961 researching his role as Aicus Finch. Smith says the building continues to play an important role for people researching family histories. It offers free computer use and has a popular summer reading program for children. Monroeville is similar to most American cities in that it has lost many of its oldest buildings to fire or "progress" demolitions. Many of the homes that Harper Lee knew as a child – including those previously belonging to her parents' and Truman Capote's aunts – are gone. Smith is encouraged by the trend of the remaining homes built a century or more ago being renovated by millennials. "A lot of them are still in the same family, being kept up by a new generation," she says. Reach Out and Touch Portrait artist Johnna Bush smiles and greets admirers as she signs limited-edition prints that will benefit Monroeville's Main Street program. The 11-by- 14-inch color renditions based on Truman Capote's "A Christmas Memory" pale in comparison to the 15-by- 20-foot matching mural she will paint this fall on the side of a building across from the Finishing Touches shop where late one aernoon she is the center of aention amid a wine-and-cheese crowd. Ten years ago, Bush painted a 92-by-16-foot wildlife scene that is one of several murals on buildings in the old town square. "I know how hard it's going to be," Bush says of her next commission. "I tried to talk myself out of it." As Bush talks, Emilie Oglesby listens in the crowded shop she restored three years ago. The former auto repair garage had an 18-inch slope from front to back that required major renovations. But when she saw the brick walls, original glass windows, wood ceilings and floors inside, Oglesby thought the restoration Historic downtown square includes building where Capote's aunt had business. Large mural recreates a scene from 'To Kill A Mockingbird.'

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