Earliest Yoknapatawpha Families

Reflecting on the history of Yoknapatawpha, Gavin creates two sets of the original white inhabitants: "the proud fading white plantation names" who owned the "rich plantation earth," and the lower class families who lived in the "hill-country" (332). In the first group he lists: "Sutpen and Sartoris and Compson and Edmonds and McCaslin and Beauchamp and Grenier and Habersham"; in the second: McCallum and Gowrie and Frazier and Muir" (332). He characterizes the first group mainly in terms of their social roles: "generals and governors and judges, soldiers . . . and statesmen"; the second, in terms of their Gaelic background (332). These families often occupy central roles in other Yoknapatawpha novels, though Muirs are not mentioned elsewhere. The white Beauchamps with who own a plantation live outside Yoknapatawpha; the only Yoknapatawpha Beauchamps are descended from the white planter Carothers Edmonds and Tomey, his enslaved daughter.