Courthouse and Square in The Town (Location)

Appropriately, among Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fictions The Town contains the most locations inside the town limits; all 57 of these are displayed in the "Jefferson" inset map above right. The purpose of this entry is to locate the town inside the contexts of Yoknapatawpha and Digital Yoknapatawpha.
Jefferson was built at the center of Yoknapatawpha, and at the center of Jefferson is Courthouse Square. At the center of the Square is the county courthouse, topped by the "four identical faces of the courthouse clock" that face "north and east and south and west" (333). Inside the courthouse is posted the ordinance prohibiting motor vehicles within the city, "copied out on a piece of parchment like a diploma or a citation and framed and hung on the wall" by Mayor de Spain in an irreverent mood (14). In front of it stands a "Confederate monument" (118), and back of it sits "the little brick house . . . that Judge Dukinfield calls his chambers" (102). The town's "city hall" may be in the courthouse, or nearby on the Square (31). The town's main places of business surround the courthouse, facing each other from across the four streets that form the "Square." When Gavin and Linda walk around the town in Chapter 15, we get brief cumulative description of its business district in "the late spring": "the hardware and farm-furnish stores cluttered with garden and farm tools and rolls of uncut plowline and sample sacks of slag and fertilizer and even the grocery ones exposing neat cases of seed packets stencilled with gaudy and incredible vegetables and flowers" (227). Gavin also tells us that the population of Jefferson in the 1920s is 3,000 (219).
Throughout Digital Yoknapatawpha we use the Square as the default location for events that are not set in a specific place in Jefferson - for example, we identify the Square as the place from which all three of the novel's narrators tell their parts of the story.