Jefferson Oil Company Tanks (Location Key)

Between them The Town and The Reivers use this location to indicate how the history of Faulkner's fictional world reflects the real world outside it. According to The Reivers, a few years before 1905 the advent of the automobile led the oil company to add "a special tank of gasoline, with a pump," to its oil tanks "on the side track at the [train] depot" (48). This is the first 'gas station' in Yoknapatawpha. About four decades later, according to The Town, a "tremendous explosion, the loudest sound at one time that Jefferson ever heard" occurs at this location (114). The town "all knew it couldn't be anything else but that German bomb come at last," but it is in fact one of the tanks blowing up, killing the night watchman Eck Snopes.