When Stevens presents his petition for Mink's parole in The Mansion, the foreman of the grand jury that is convened in Jefferson is described as a man who "runs a small electric-driven corn-mill" (407). This is in the late 1940s, but no other details are given - neither the size nor location of the mill, for example - so we can't be sure what this mill tells us about progress in northern Mississippi.
The road between Jefferson and Frenchman's Bend is well-traveled in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, especially by Snopeses moving into town. Near the beginning of this novel Mink is traveling this road as part of his plan to kill one man when he sees "Jefferson in sight across the last valley" (33), and at the end, after Mink has killed another man, Stevens and Ratliff travel the same "highway" to find Mink (469).
In both The Town and The Mansion V.K. Ratliff visits a customer named Mrs. Ledbetter in a place called Rockyford (308, 158). Neither narrative goes with him, but the first novel does say that Rockyford is six miles from the road between Jefferson and Frenchman's Bend, and in the second novel Ratliff offers to give Flem Snopes a lift to Varner's store on his way to Rockyford. The name Rockyford itself suggests that the place is on a river, and the proximity to the Bend suggests the river is the Yoknapatawpha.
In the last two volumes of the Snopes trilogy Faulkner creates an institution of higher learning in Yoknapatawpha. Both The Town and The Mansion mention "the Seminary," which in the earlier novel Charles Mallison calls "a college" (367). There is the usual inconsistency in what Faulkner says about this school. In The Town Melisandre Backus and Maggie Mallison both go there after high school (52), while in The Mansion they go to the Academy (217) and it's Linda Snopes who enrolls in the Seminary after high school (156).
The three different presidents of the Merchants' and Farmers' Bank - Old Bayard Sartoris, Major de Spain and Flem Snopes - are depicted driving about Yoknapatawpha over the decades between the horse-drawn carriage and the 1940s looking at "the cotton farms they represented the mortgages on" (174) or were "in process of foreclosure" on (243). This icon represents those farms, which in turn can represent the economic struggles of most of the county's inhabitants for most of the history that Faulkner's fictions describe.
This is the stretch of track on which in The Mansion Mink Snopes finishes his pedestrian trip into Jefferson down the railroad tracks. The part of town he arrives at is described as a "quiet edge-of-town back street beneath the rigid arms of the semaphore arms of the crossing warning and a single lonely street light" (448). Since the first person he sees is a Negro boy, this may be the black district in town.
The unnamed Negro farmer drives Mink Snopes into Yoknapatawpha onto a road that is - for Mink, who always went to town from Frenchman's Bend - "a new approach to Jefferson" (443). Running parallel to the railroad track, this road is the one that runs straight south down the middle of the county. It has changed since the last time Mink was in the county: the narrative notes that in 1908 it was a "winding dirt [road] along which slow mules and wagons . . . followed the arbitrary and random ridges," but now (in 1946) it is a "blacktop" - i.e.
In addition to the many small farms identified with specific farmers (like the Bundrens or the Griers among others in Frenchman's Bend), in three later fictions Faulkner refers more generally to Yoknapatawpha's smaller farms, such as the "forty- and fifty- and sixty-acre hill farms inaccessible from unmarked dirt roads" mentioned in Requiem for a Nun (193) and the "remote back-country dog-trot cabins" that Ratliff visits on his salesman's trips around the county in "By the People" (86).
There are many sawmills in the various Yoknapatawpha fictions; along with raising cotton, turning trees into lumber for export outside the county is the most important local business. When the narrative says that Mr. Meadowfill "was so mean as to be solvent and retired even from the savings of a sawmill" (361), it implies how little money there is even in one of the biggest sectors of Yoknapatawpha's economy.
When Flem Snopes buys the Compson property from Jason, he hires Wat Snopes to convert the unburned "carriage house . . . into a small two-storey residence" for another Snopes - Orestes (361). Res "fences up the adjacent ground into lots" on which he raises "scrubby cattle and hogs" (361). The hogs who stray onto Mr. Meadowfill's property next door become the source of "an active kind of guerilla feud" between the two neighbors (361).
