The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Directly across the street that runs in front of Mrs. Hait's house is the neighbor's house, which has a gallery and rocking chairs where Mrs. Hait and Het sit watching her house burn down.

This "cowshed" in the corner of Mrs. Hait's back yard is connected by wooden planks to Mrs. Hait's house (248). After her house burns down, Mrs. Hait moves into the shed and shares it with her cow.

This "sharp curve" on the railroad track "below town" provides I.O. Snopes with an extra source of income: since engineers driving the north-south train can't see the mules he has Mr. Hait put on the track in time to stop, he can charge the company for their "accidental" deaths. The scheme works well until Mr. Hait becomes a casualty himself.

Mrs. Hait's house is located on the edge of town near the railroad tracks. It is a "little wooden house painted the same color that the railroad company used on its stations and boxcars" (243). Beside the kitchen door is "the wooden lid of the cellar stairs" (244), "wooden steps at the back door" that lead to "the wooden planks" which form a path to the "wooden shed in the corner of the back yard" where the cow lives (244). After the fire, all that's left of the house are "two blackened chimneys," and all that remains of all this wood is "still-intact cowshed," into which Mrs.

Before the Social Security Act of 1935, many localities in the U.S. had "poor houses" or "poor farms" to give destitute elderly or handicapped people some place to live (at poor farms they were often required to work for their support). The Yoknapatawpha poorhouse where Old Het lives - "That is, she used the poorhouse to sleep in or anyway pass most or at least part of the night in" (241) - is located a mile and a half from Jefferson.

The "Academy" is the Jefferson institution of higher education for women that Linda Snopes attends for a year and a half after graduating from high school. The generic term for it would probably be 'a finishing school.' Gavin Stevens calls it an "anachronistic vacuum" (303): "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" (300).

Bringing together consumer goods that had previously been purchased in more specialized shops, department stores began appearing in the U.S. in the late 19th century. The one in Jefferson has large plate-glass windows displaying merchandise and is big enough that it has a "luggage department" (210). In this novel it is given a name - "Wildermark's" (208).

Sheriff Hampton lives somewhere in Jefferson, but although the narrative says that Matt Levitt's car is taken to the sheriff's home, it does not say where that is.

"Caledonia" is the name of the place where Matt Levitt gets into a fight with Anse McCallum (206). There is a real Caledonia in Mississippi, a town in Lowndes County, north of Columbus and near the Alabama border; this town is mentioned in The Unvanquished. But the "Caledonia" in The Town must be in Yoknapatawpha, since the Yoknapatawpha county sheriff arrests both young men for fighting there.

Ford was the most popular brand of automobile sold in the U.S. through the 1920s. This company "agency," or dealership, may be the same as Jefferson's first car agency, the one opened by Manfred de Spain, but it's just as likely that the town soon has more than one dealership. Having been trained in the "new Ford mechanic's school," Matt Levitt was sent to Jefferson by the Ford company "to be a mechanic in the agency garage" (192).