The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

"Virginia" is where V.K. Ratliff's ancestor escaped from captivity as a prisoner of war during the American Revolution, becoming the family's first American. And Virginia, specifically Bristol, is where Miss Vaiden Wyott goes to teach after leaving Jefferson.

"Wyott's Crossing" (over the Tallahatchie River) is mentioned twice in the novel. In the passage describing Vaiden Wyott's origins also provides the early history of the site: her family came from the country, "where they had owned the nearest ford, crossing, ferry before Jefferson even became Jefferson" (154). By the era of The Town it is now the site of a bridge. In his capacity as County Attorney, Gavin is planning to drive up there with Chick, to help resolve the locals' "squabble over a drainage tax suit" (181) - though in the event they don't make the trip.

The "old Bank of Jefferson" (149) is as old as the town itself, having been founded in "1830 or so" (280). As the other bank in town, it is the rival of the newer Sartoris Bank, and the bank into which Flem Snopes (although Vice President of the Sartoris Bank) moves his money in a complicated maneuver directed against his kinsman Wallstreet Panic Snopes.

Bought for "old man Snopes," whom some believe is Flem's father and others his uncle, this is "a little house about a mile from town where he lived with an old maid daughter and the twin sons named Vardaman and Bilbo that belonged to I.O. Snopes's other wife" (136). Because this Snopes refuses to get any closer to Jefferson than this spot, "they bought" this house for him (136); "they" must be other Snopeses, but which ones is not made clear. The "house had a little piece of ground with it, that old man Snopes made into a truck garden and water-melon patch" (137).

According to Chick Mallison, Jefferson's high school is distinct from the grammar school (197). Gowan Stevens attends the high school while he lives in Jefferson (47), and Linda Snopes also attends the high school, which seems to be somewhere on the far side of the Square from her home since she meets Gavin "on her way home from school" for ice cream (197).

Wallstreet Panic enters kindergarten here, where he meets his second grade teacher to whom he later proposes in her classroom, the "empty room itself smelling of chalk and anguished cerebration and the dry inflexibility of facts" (153). All the text says about the location of the building is that it is too "far away" from the Square for Gavin to hear its dismissal bell (217). There is no mention in the novel of the school which the Negro children would have attended.

Opened by Montgomery Ward Snopes after he returns from the First World War, the Atelier Monty transforms a corner store "with a side door on an alley" (127) into what Gavin Stevens calls "a pay-as-you-enter peep show with a set of imported pornographic photographs" (282). The building is owned by the Compson family. The photographs were brought back by Monty from France after World War One. The people of Jefferson are led to believe it is "a photographing studio" (128), and Snopes does take some photographs that can be displayed in the windows.

The De Spains, father and son, appear often enough in Faulkner's fictions and the history of Yoknapatawpha to make the family one of the county's more important ones. In fact, the titular Mansion of the novel that follows The Town in the Snopes trilogy is the "big wooden house" that Manfred de Spain's father built (14) and that he lives in in this novel, until Flem moves in at the end. However, it's not possible to be sure where to put this mansion on a map. Faulkner moves it around quite a bit in the seven texts that include it.

Ohio is where Matt Levitt is from and where he won the Golden Gloves and attended the "new Ford mechanic's school" (192). The novel doesn't say where in Ohio, however. The airfield where young Bayard Sartoris dies testing an experimental "aeroplane" - which elsewhere is located in Dayton, Ohio - has its own entry in the database (125).

The novel briefly recalls the scene, described in detail in Flags in the Dust, where Colonel Bayard Sartoris dies in a car accident. The event occurs when he and his nephew, also called Bayard, "come over a hill at about fifty miles an hour" and have to drive into "the ditch" beside the road to avoid hitting "a Negro family in a wagon" (124).