The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Walter Ewell's house is two miles from Jefferson somewhere between the hunting camp and De Spain's mansion.

The courthouse building sits at the center of the Square at the center of Jefferson. It houses "the Chancery Clerk's books" the record the transfers of land from the Chickasaws to the county's white settlers (204).

Hilltop with impressive view of the night sky from which Sam Fathers and the unnamed narrator release the dogs to hunt red or gray foxes. We have chosen to place the hilltop here as it must be sufficiently close to woodland, the preferred habitat of gray foxes, and open, mesic space, the preferred habitat of red foxes.

Sam Fathers teaches the boy who narrates "The Old People" to hunt in "the big bottom" (205), the "unpathed woods" that surround Major de Spain's hunting camp (208). It is described as primeval wilderness, a mixture of "tremendous gums and cypresses and oaks where no axe had ever sounded" (206), interspersed with brakes of cane and brier, and paw-paw trees. The Big Bottom is situated on the southern bank of the large bend in the river in the northwestern corner of Yoknapatawpha County.

In Faulkner's account, the local tribe of Chickasaw Indians create a large plantation in imitation of the white planters in Yoknapatawpha.

Near Doom's family's plantation is a landing point on a river. Although the story does not name the river, on his maps of Yoknapatawpha Faulkner identifies the river which runs along the northern edge of the county as the Tallahatchie, a real river at the northern edge of the real Lafayette County. In his stories about the Chickasaw Indians, this river serves to connect Yoknapatawpha with the Mississippi River and the larger world.

Doom runs away to New Orleans in his youth but returns to his family's plantation in north Mississippi seven years later. Faulkner lived in New Orleans in 1925 and 1926, and the city provides the setting for a number of his non-Yoknapatawpha novels, including Mosquitoes, Pylon, and The Wild Palms.

The narrator's father's office in Jefferson. Although the story does not make the office's location or the nature of the narrator's father's business explicit, since he is a wealthy landowner we have chosen to place the office close to the Courthouse Square.

Like the cabin that Sam Fathers lives in before he moves out to the big woods, the blacksmith shop where he works is one of the locations that Faulkner moves around to suit his changing imaginative project. Initially, in "A Justice," it's on the Compson farm, but for the hunting stories he wrote Faulkner first attenuates Sam's connection to the white world (the family he works for in "The Old People" is not named), then in Go Down, Moses shifts that connection to the McCaslins, and this blacksmith shop comes with him each time.