While building a house for himself and Essie in Eula Acres, McKinley Smith grows cotton as a tenant farmer on "a small piece of land two miles from town" (374).
The one house in Eula Acres that appears in the novel is built by a World War II veteran named McKinley Smith, with occasional help from "one professional carpenter," on a site picked out by his fiancee Essie Meadowfill "not even very far from where she had lived most of her life" (374).
While building a house for himself and Essie in Eula Acres, McKinley Smith grows cotton as a tenant farmer on "a small piece of land two miles from town" (374). He works there from "sunrise" to "nightfall" (375). The Mansion does not identify his landlord.
McKinley and Essie Smith live in Eula Acres, the post-World-War-II housing development constructed by Flem Snopes on the site of the Compson plantation. It is the only house among the development's rows of "small brightly painted pristinely new hutches as identical (and about as permanent) as squares of gingerbread or teacakes" that is singled out in The Mansion (366).
When he retires, Meadowfill buys a "little corner of the Compson place" (361) located on a strip of land "south to the road known as Freedom Springs Road then east along said Road" (367). On this site he builds a "little unwired un-plumbing-ed house" (361). The property is also unfenced, which creates a long-standing feud between him and the local boys "who had a game of raiding the few sorry untended fruit trees which he called his orchard" (362), and later a more serious conflict between him and Res Snopes, who builds "a hog-lot along the boundary of old Meadowfill's orchard" (363).
Already in decay in 1928 (see The Sound and the Fury, where it is a major location), sometime in the mid-1930s the Compson mansion is "completely destroyed" by the fire that Benjy Compson starts.
The Compson place on the edge of Jefferson was originally one of the largest and oldest antebellum slave plantations in Yoknapatawpha, built on land "granted to Quentin Compson in 1821" by "Mahataha, the Chickasaw matriarch" (367); it is also a major site in Faulkner's imagination. The Town reminds readers of these earlier histories before going on to add a couple ironic new chapters to its story.
After graduating from high school, Melisandre Backus is driven into town to attend "the Female Academy" (217). The Mansion simply mentions the institution, but when Linda Snopes attends it in The Town, the narrator describes it this way: "one of the last of those gentle and stubbornly fading anachronisms called Miss So-and-So's or The So-and-So Female Academy or Institute whose curriculum included deportment and china-painting, which continue to dot the South though the rest of the United States knows them no more."
This novel mentions both "Old Wyliesport on the river" (228) and "Wylie's Crossing" (244), place names which only appear in the last two Yoknapatawpha fictions. It's likely that they are basically the same place, and that the place is the one Faulkner refers to elsewhere as Wyott's Crossing. In "Red Leaves" this place is the furthest steamboats once came up the Tallahatchie River (therefore a "port"), and where later a man named Wyott ran a ferry across the River (hence "crossing"). Later still, the Tallahatchie at this point was crossed by both a car and a railroad bridge.
Meadowfill owns and runs one of the many sawmills in the various Yoknapatawpha fictions; along with raising and ginning cotton, turning trees into lumber for export outside the county employs a lot of the local population. When The Mansion says that Mr. Meadowfill "was so mean [i.e. tight with money] 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.
