Eula Acres (Location Key)

The Compson place on the edge of Jefferson was originally one of the largest and oldest antebellum slave plantations in Yoknapatawpha, built on a square mile of land "granted to Quentin Compson in 1821" by "Mahataha, the Chickasaw matriarch" (367); it is also a major site in Faulkner's imagination. The Town reminds readers of this earlier history before going on to add a couple ironic new chapters. The Compsons had to sell "a good part of [their land] off back in 1909 for the municipal golf course in order to send the eldest son, Quentin [the great-grandson of the Quentin who acquired the land], to Harvard" (354) - an event that constitutes a major loss for Quentin's brother Benjy in The Sound and the Fury (1929). In 1929, "the golf links" move still further out of town, and the third Compson brother, Jason, buys the property back (355). During World War II, there is speculation that the government plans to locate "an air-training field" on the property (356), and in 1943 Flem Snopes bought it from Jason. The airfield is never built, but soon after the War ends, Flem chops the Compson's "ancestral acres" (363) up "into a subdivision of standardised Veterans' Housing matchboxes" that he names "Eula Acres," an ambiguous tribute to his dead wife (366). Within a few months the property is "dotted over with small brightly painted pristinely new hutches as identical (and about as permanent) as squares of gingerbread or teacakes" (366). In the earlier "Appendix Compson" Faulkner refers to this housing development as "row after row of small crowded jerrybuilt individuallyowned demiurban bunaglows" (331).