This icon represents the group that Gavin Stevens refers to, with a mix of cynicism and sentimentality, as the "heroes of our gallant lost irrevocable unreconstructible debacle" - the aging Confederate veterans who "half a century" after the end of the Civil War are revered by "all" the people of Yoknapatawpha (44). As Charles Mallison explains, the descendants of these men are often "called General or Colonel or Major because their fathers or grandfathers had been generals or colonels or majors or maybe just privates" (10).
Byron is the son of "actual schoolmaster" Snopes and the brother of Virgil Snopes. Byron serves for a time as a bookkeeper in the Sartoris bank, "the low last man in that hierarchy," before absconding with as much cash as he can get his hands on (45). By the end of the novel he is somewhere in the American southwest and has fathered four wild children with a Jicarilla Apache woman. Byron sends these children by rail from El Paso to Jefferson, where they cause various threats to the community, at some cost to Byron's cousin Flem.
The potential customers asking for directions to the Snopes Hotel are "country men" - men from the countryside outside Jefferson - who "were told simply to walk in that direction until they came to a woman rocking, and that was it" (42). (The woman is I.O. Snopes' wife.)
Admiral Dewey Snopes is the younger son of Eck Snopes and the brother of Wallstreet Panic Snopes. He begins kindergarten at the age of six with his nine years' older brother as a classmate and assists Wall in his commercial endeavors. (Admiral George Dewey, after whom this Snopes is named, was one of the heroes of the Spanish-American War.)
The all-male transient residents of the Snopes Hotel are described by Gavin as "itinerant cattle drovers and horse- and mule-traders" who are in Jefferson on business and "juries and important witnesses" who stay there "during court term" (41). According to Gavin, these patrons are "incarcerated, boarded and fed" (41).
Byron Societies were originally literary groups that met to read and discuss the works of George Gordon, Lord Byron. By the time of this novel, the Jefferson version of the Byron Society was essentially a social club for aristocratic and middle class women. Like the Cotillion Club, membership in the Society confers social prestige.
Not named in The Town, he is the father of Byron and Virgil Snopes and schoolmaster in Frenchman's Bend. (He is identified as Wesley Snopes in The Mansion.) He also has a presence in the religious life of the community.
