The "ten-cent store" where Susan Reed gets a job after dropping out of school is more familiarly called a "dimestore," or a "five-and-dime store" (135). The first such stores were opened in Pennsylvania by the Woolworth Brothers in the late 19th century. By the early 20th century they were common in the South. They were known for the variety of low-cost merchandise they stocked, and the way their customers had direct access to the merchandise (instead of having to ask a clerk to get things).
Although this story says nothing about the location of "the picture show" - i.e. Jefferson's movie theater - where Hawkshaw sometimes sees Susan Reed with "some fellow" (134), in other stories it's on the Square. By the 1920s, the local movie theater was a regular feature of the landscape in American towns.
Susan Reed attends school in Jefferson until she reaches adolescence. The story's reference to a "high-school" boy suggests that all the grades, from elementary through high school, are taught in one "building" (135), but the story provides no cue about the location in town of that building, other than that Susan passes the barber shop on the Square "each morning and afternoon" as she walks from home to school and back again (132). (The story gives no other cue about the location of the Burchett house, so the location we chose for both is speculative.)
The house where the Burchetts and Susan Reed live is in Jefferson, though the only cue the story provides about its location is that the Square lies between it and the school, which explains how Hawkshaw can watch the girl pass by the barber shop "each morning and afternoon" (132). (The story gives no other cue about the location of the school either, so the location we chose for both is speculative.)
The narrator of "Hair" says that until his health "broke down" he was "a bookkeeper in Gordonville" (144). There is a real Gordonville in Alabama, but it's too far away from Memphis to make it likely that the narrator, after his health did break down, would be returning there from the hospital "on a Memphis train" (144). We've located this fictional Gordonville, then, in Tennessee, east of Memphis.
The map of Yoknapatawpha that Faulkner drew for Absalom! in 1936 includes an arrow pointing north beyond the county "To Memphis Junction." Typically, a "junction" is a point where several railroad lines meet or cross, and so where one could change trains to travel in a new direction. In the real world Faulkner's derives from, the place where travelers from Oxford changed trains to get to Memphis was Holly Springs, Mississippi. In one text, Sanctuary, Horace Benbow changes trains at a station with that name, and "Holly Springs" has its own entry in this index.
The narrator of "Hair" first sees Hawkshaw working in a barber shop in "Porterfield." There is a real Porterfield in Tennessee, but it's 220 miles away from Oxford, Mississippi, and so cannot be the town in the story, which is "sixty miles away" from Jefferson and presumably a place Faulkner invented (137). Since the narrator is in Porterfield on his travels as a salesman whose territory is "North Mississippi and Alabama" (137), we've located the story's Porterfield in northwestern Alabama, but that is very speculative.
Division - the fictional town where Hawkshaw's fiancee and her family live in "Hair," and perhaps where he himself was born - is a small town on "the State line between Mississippi and Alabama" (137). It consists of "a store and four or five houses and a sawmill" (137). One of the best houses is town belongs to his fiancee's family, the Starneses - though it is heavily mortaged. In the nearby county seat is the bank that holds the mortgage.
According to Absalom, Absalom!, there are at least "three churches" in Yoknapatawpha as early as 1833. That number probably includes the one that Sutpen attends, which is outside Jefferson; it is most likely Episcopalian, the preferred denomination for the planter class. And one of them is the Methodist church in Jefferson in which Goodhue Coldfield is a steward.
In the Yoknapatawpha fictions as a group there are a number of different boarding houses in Jefferson, but "Mrs. Cowan's," where both Hawkshaw and Mitch Ewing live, only appears in the story "Hair" (142). Faulkner's boarding houses are typically run by women, but only provide room and board to single men.
