Doane's Mill (Location Key)

Doane's Mill is the fictional Alabama town in Light in August where Lena Grove's brother McKinley lives. According to the furniture dealer who narrates much of the novel's concluding chapter, it is in "south Alabama" (500). Lena moves there to live with McKinley's family after her parents die when she is twelve. A village built around a lumber mill, Doane's Mill is younger than she is: the narrator says it came into existence seven years earlier, "and in seven years more it would destroy all the timber within its reach" (4). At that time its small population will move away, leaving behind only the stumps of the pine trees (like headstones in a cemetery) and the least valuable parts of the mill's machinery.