The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Zack Houston - called Jack in The Hamlet - is "a good farmer" who, unlike the many tenant farmers in the Bend, owns his farm outright (82). His wife is killed by there by his stallion.

The "penitentiary at Parchman" (82) to which Mink Snopes is sent for killing Zack Houston is the Mississippi state prison better known as Parchman Farm. It is a maximum-security prison that has been in operation since 1901.

The county jail is where Mink Snopes spends two and a half months before being tried for killing Zack Houston. Because he is a white prisoner, or as V.K. Ratliff facetiously puts it, "a authentic topclass murderer," he is not held in the common room with the black prisoners who "go out and work on the streets" in the chain gang, but by himself "on the top floor of the jail" (85).

"Opera House" was the way playhouses were often referred to in towns where the religious community frowned on play-acting. "Opera" sounded culturally more respectable than plays, though actual operas were seldom staged in them. By the late 1920s the advent of movies had closed or taken over a lot of small town playhouses. In The Town, it is where the Cotillion Ball is held (75). This location includes the "back alley" in which Gavin and Manfred fight.

The flower shop, owned by Mrs. Rouncewell because "she loved funerals" (73), is where all the men in town order flowers for the ladies who attend the Cotillion Ball.

Also referred to the as "Holston Hotel" (88) and in The Reivers as the oldest and finest hotel in Jefferson, it is where many traveling salesmen ("drummers") stay in Jefferson (63).

Referred to as the "picture show," the town's movie theater plays two shows each evening (162).

The "creek" that flows behind the Sartoris place and toward the Tallahatchie River appears in several other texts, but is given a name in the story "My Grandmother Millard and General Bedford Forrest and the Battle of Harrykin Creek.": "Hurricane Creek" is its official designation, but everyone calls it "Harrykin Creek" (697). In The Town, Chick Mallison refers to it as "Harrykin Creek," which is frozen solid, daring Aleck Sander to jump into it. "right through the ice, clothes and all" (56).

Melisandre Backus lives with "her father and a bottle of whiskey" on "a plantation about six miles from town" (52). The text gives no other clue to its location, but almost all Yoknapatawpha's big estates are north of Jefferson.

Only mentioned in the novel - by Maggie Mallison, when she notices that Gavin's hair looks "shaggy" - the town barbershop is busy on Saturdays (52).