The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Over the course of Faulkner's career he imaginatively revisits Frenchman's Bend and the small farms around the hamlet many times. It is dark when he visits the first one of those farms, the Turpin place where Byron Snopes spends his last minutes in Yoknapatawpha with Minnie Sue in Flags in the Dust, but Faulkner already has a clear image such a place.

Our assumption that the creek where the bodies are re-buried in Intruder in the Dust, published in 1948, is probably the same as the creek into which Bayard Sartoris crashes his car two decades earlier, in Flags in the Dust, is an interpretive opinion. In the later novel there's no ambiguity about the location of the bridge over the Nine-Mile Branch: it's name measures its distance from Jefferson and Lucas Beauchamp gives Chick Mallison very specific directions to get to it.

In Flags in the Dust the small "weathered" house and barn of the farmer (or tenant farmer) named Hub is reached by driving "out of town on the valley road," up a faint, rutted wagon road . . . straight into the [setting] sun" (132). It's a poverty-stricken setting; the barn doors, for example, "sag drunkenly from broken hinges" (133). The barn itself seems almost completely empty, except for "the cow" and the jug of moonshine Hub keeps in the loft.

Faulkner's first Yoknapatawpha fiction, Flags in the Dust, calls the road that heads north from Jefferson the "valley road" (132). It is often traveled in Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fictions, as the way to Oxford (in Flags), Memphis (in The Reivers) and the large estates on the rich land north of Jefferson, like the Sartoris and Backus-Harriss plantations. The narrator of Flags describes it as "smooth . . .

The Beard Hotel is actually a boarding house, one of several in Jefferson that appear in the Yoknapatawpha fictions. In Flags in the Dust it is owned by W.C. Beard, though run by his unnamed wife. In Light in August there's no sign of Mr. Beard. Descriptions of other boarding houses in other texts make it clear that the residents of the town's boarding houses were all male - Byron Snopes lives at Beard's in Flags and Byron Bunch lives there in August - but in that latter novel Mrs.

The doctor's office in Jefferson is on the second floor of one of the buildings on the Courthouse Square. In the first Yoknapatawpha fiction, Flags in the Dust, Doctor Peabody shares it with a new-comer, Doctor Alford, and the narrative uses the difference between Alford's antiseptic examination room and the warm clutter of Peabody's office as another marker of the distance between the Old and New Souths.

The map Faulkner drew for Malcolm Cowley's 1946 collection of his work, The Portable Faulkner, includes a caption (but not an actual location) in the southeast corner of Yoknapatawpha for "OLD MAN Here was born the convict & grew a man & sinned & was transported for the rest of his life to pay for it." Faulkner knew Cowley's selection of texts included the "Old Man" chapters from The Wild Palms.

This airfield became a Yoknapatawpha location when Malcolm Cowley decided to include the story "Death Drag" in his 1946 Viking Portable collection of Faulkner's works, and recruited Faulkner to prepare a map like the one he had drawn ten years earlier for Absalom, Absalom! for inclusion in the book. The text of the story itself gives no hint that it takes place in the county. On his 1946 map, Faulkner places the "Airport," as he labels it, slightly south and east of Jefferson alongside the road that runs to Mottstown.

The popularity of "A Rose for Emily" among anthologists and educators has made the Grierson house one of the most frequently visited sites in Yoknapatawpha. The story describes the house where Emily spends her whole life as "a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies [i.e. the 1870s], set on what had once been our most select street.

Some seventeen miles northeast of Jefferson stands the McCaslin-Edmonds house, which has the longest history of any of the structures in Yoknapatawpha, although its exact age varies in different texts. According to Faulkner's last novel, The Reivers, the house was built in 1813 by Old Carothers McCaslin, and it is still there at the center of a working plantation in 1961, though the enslaved people who once lived in the slave quarters have been replaced Negro domestics and sharecroppers who live in the "servant and tenant quarters" (Intruder in the Dust, 8).