Jefferson Telegraph Office (Location Key)

Characters send telegrams in three texts, including The Sound and the Fury, but in that novel Jefferson's "Western Union" telegraph office also serves as a place where residents who want to speculate on the commodities market congregate (226). In that era the telegraph was one of the country's fastest forms of communication, and telegraph offices around the country typically posted and updated the prices of commodities and stocks from the markets in Chicago or New York; in his complaint about losing money on the cotton market, Jason Compson tells a telegraph operator that "in Memphis" Western Union posts market reports "on a black-board every ten seconds" (244-45). These days he would blame his bad decisions on the internet.