Manfred de Spain appears in the novel as "mayor of the town," "president of one of its two banks and a warden of the Episcopal church" (282) - but especially as Eula Varner Snopes' lover for 16 years, which for very different reasons puts him at odds with the puritanical part of the town's population, with Eula's husband Flem (who nonetheless tacitly blackmails De Spain into helping him up the ladder of success), and with Gavin Stevens, the chivalrous champion of Eula's honor.
Joe Buffaloe is the "city electrician" who maintains the town's generators and dynamos and transformers (12). He is also a "genius," who "in 1904 . . . drove out of his backyard into the street in the first automobile we had ever seen, made by hand completely" (12).
Previously a saw mill engineer, Harker is now the engineer in the Jefferson power plant. He enjoys making sarcastic remarks about the principal actors in the maneuverings around the embezzled brass fittings: Tom Tom Bird, Tomey's Turl Beauchamp, and Flem Snopes. For example, Harker says, "'If Turl ever is unlucky enough to get married he would still have to climb in his own back window or he wouldn't even know what he come after" (24). He does, however, actively intervene when he helps the two black firemen recognize their real antagonist.
Eck Snopes, the father of Wallstreet Panic and Admiral Dewey Snopes, is described first as "another Snopes accreted in from Frenchman's Bend into the vacuum behind the first one" (9). But to Gavin, he seems too generous and good-hearted to be a member of the Snopes family.
Ratliff recalls that he and Henry Armstid were tricked into buying the Old Frenchman Place by Flem Snopes, who convinced them that Civil War treasure was buried there.
This "Texas feller," Flem's partner in the sale of the wild spotted ponies (35), is not named in The Town , but he is identified as "Buck" or "Buck Hipps" elsewhere. Unlike Flem, he has scruples about how far he's willing to go to separate the poor whites of Frenchman's Bend from their hard-earned money.
When Ab Snopes moves to Frenchman's Bend, "another Snopes" appears "from somewhere to take over the rented farm" (6). Most of the Snopeses start out as tenant farmers, but there's no indication that this particular "Snopes" is one of the male Snopeses to whom the narrative gives a first name, though that is possible.
Chapter One calls the Confederate soldier who wounds Ab Snopes a "picket" (5); in Chapter Two, he is identified as a Confederate "provost-marshal" (43).
Linda's biological father was a stranger to Yoknapatawpha named McCarron; he became Eula's first lover after he fought off the "five Frenchman's Bend boys" who ambushed them (105) - an event described at more length in The Hamlet. In The Town Gavin describes him to Eula as "that other one, that first one - your child's father" and speculates that this man must have been "the only other one" - besides De Spain - she's ever had sex with (100).
