The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

There is a real Mount Vernon in northeast Mississippi. Measured from Oxford, the original of Jefferson, it is eighteen miles to the southeast. In Flags in the Dust (1929) Mount Vernon is referred to as a "hamlet" six miles away from the MacCallum place, and outside Yoknapatawpha county. In this novel the place is mentioned by Samson, who thinks that on their journey to Jefferson the Bundrens "could have gone around up by Mount Vernon, like MacCallum did" on his way home (119).

Samson lives next to the river. His place seems to include both a farm and a store. The porch of the store is where Samson, MacCallum and Quick watch the Bundrens pass by in their wagon before they realize the bridge there is out. The barn on the farm is where the Bundrens stay the night. There is also a house up the hill from the barn.

Because Tull's bridge is impassable, Anse directs the wagon to Samson's Bridge further west. But the high water has also destroyed this bridge.

In his section, Jason goes "on back to the garage" to get his car before picking up his niece "standing by the drive" (187). The building almost certainly was built as the mansion's carriage house, and presumably is also where the "surrey" in which Mrs. Compson takes her weekly pilgrimages to the cemetery is also kept. In The Mansion it becomes the home of a member of the Snopes family.

"Whiteleaf" seems to refer to a creek that the Bundren's cross over between their farm and Samson's, where "the willows leaning near enough" to the road allow Cash to reach out of the wagon and break off a branch (109).

At the edge of the cotton field, the woods with its "secret shade" is where Dewey Dell loses her virginity to Lafe (27). It is probably also the location where Addie waits for Whitfield, "coming swift and secret to me in the woods" (175).

The unseen character Miss Lawington lives somewhere in Jefferson, and it is probably at her house that she tells Cora that "the lady" who ordered the cakes for a party has changed her mind (7).

It's not certain that the Burgess family lives so close to the Compson property, but when Jason thinks about what happened to Benjy the time he got outside the gate and tried "to say" something to the Burgess girl as she walked past on her way home from school (53), he notes that "her own father [was] looking at" Benjy when he did that (263). If Mr. Burgess was in his own yard at the time, then the "fence picket" with which he knocks Benjy out would have been pulled from his own fence (263).