The city fathers keep trying to make my hometown out as something awesome, but really it is just a tiny speck out in the boonies far from really anything of interest these days. It was legitimately once the cotton capital of the world, though, and they actually did a special edition of the New York Times when a fire in a hotel in town resulted in the deaths of 35 prominent cotton buyers there for the yearly sale.
If you really want to know what the place is know for, it had serious national media attention three times in the last 30 years. Once for the Klan trying to raise the last major Klan Rally in my state on the town square which thankfully never materialized, once for railroading an innocent black engineer who's workmates managed to get 60 Minutes to do a piece that finally got him a chance at a fair trial which Don Hewitt often cited as their finest hour thanks to Safer's investigative report, and once for our village idiot managing to somehow convince one of the Manson Family women he was a millionaire with Senatorial connections who could get her out of prison. For the record, he was never a millionaire, no Senator in his right mind would have admitted knowing him had there actually been one that knew him, and she wound up dying in prison in 2008. I think folks in town were just too flabbergasted to tell the news people how far off they were.
The thing my hometown is really known the world over for is "The Sign". Back when I still lived there, I had people in Europe, Asia, and South America find out where I was from and say "Oh! The town with the racist sign!". The NAACP finally managed to force them to take down in the early 70's because it was racist. Now they have it at the county museum, though I don't know if they display it anymore.
Oh, and we tried to claim Audie Murphy. He wasn't actually from the town, but he did walk there to enlist because it was the nearest enlistment center. When they built the county historical museum on the edge of town they named it after him.
If you're a writer, I feel like there is a very dark book about our history in all that somewhere probably, so that could be fun.
