Meet the Mayor Who Used Millennials to Revive Her Small Town

Governing:For more than a century, the small town of Erwin, Tenn., has had a strange and rather morbid claim to fame: In 1916, a five-ton circus elephant named Mary was publicly executed there after killing her trainer during a parade. Thousands of people gathered to watch as Mary was brutally hanged from one of the huge derricks used to move equipment near the railroad.

“That event has been a stigma on this county for more than 100 years,” says Erwin Mayor Doris Hensley. “[But] the young people living here decided it was time to change our image.”

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