Northerner's Goat Farm (Location Key)

The "ranch" that "a Northerner" wants to establish in Yoknapatawpha "to breed native goats" - a project that startles the locals who hear about it - is only mentioned in "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" (138-39). In The Hamlet Ratliff provides a bit more detail, facetiously describing it as "two thousand acres of as fine a hill-gully and rabbit-grass land as ever stood on one edge" (87), with "forty-four thousand feet of fence around it" (89); he locates it for us "about fifteen miles west of Jefferson" (87). That the land is cleared but gullied and overgrown suggests it is a former cotton plantation suffering, as was historically the case in much of the cotton South by the early 20th century, from water erosion and soil depletion.