Major Yoknapatawpha Families

The "Appendix" lists "the oldest names in the county" as "Holston and Sutpen, Grenier and Beauchamp and Coldfield" (330). Alexander Holston was one of the first three white men to settle Yoknapatawpha, but a tavern owner rather than a planter. Thomas Sutpen was born in a cabin in West Virginia but at the beginning of the Civil War was the owner of the country's largest, most prosperous plantation; his story is the narrative at the center of Absalom, Absalom! Louis Grenier brought the first slaves into Yoknapatawpha and is the man behind the name 'Frenchman's Bend'; he does not appear directly in any of the fictions. As Go Down, Moses describes, the Beauchamps who lived in Yoknapatawpha were all biracial: the illegitimate descendants of Old Carothers McCaslin; Faulkner is presumably not thinking of them here, but of the white plantation owners who lived in an adjoining county and who married into the McCaslin family. Goodhue Coldfield is also a character in Absalom, Absalom!; he was a storekeeper whose daughter Ellen married Sutpen.