The Golden Book of
Yoknapatawpha County

Farm of the Armstid family near Tull’s Bridge, on the north side of the Yoknapatawpha River.

Boarding house only populated by men. In 1919 owned by W. C. Beard but run by his wife.

Farm of the Bundren family near Frenchman’s Bend, on the south side of the Yoknapatawpha River, four miles from Tull’s, eight miles from Samson’s and forty miles from Jefferson. Placed on a bluff, above a spring and the main path which could be reached through a steep pasture.

Section of Jefferson that for a century was the Compson family domain. Originally a solid square mile of virgin North Mississippi dirt as truly angled as the four corners of a cardtable top, it was obtained by Jason Lycurgus Compson (I) in 1813 (when Jefferson was but a Chickasaw trading post) from Chickasaw chief Ikkemotubbe, in return for his racing mare.

Originally forested, within the next twenty years it was transformed, leaving it still forested though rather a park than a forest. At its heart was built a columned porticoed house furnished by steamboat from France and New Orleans, surrounded by formal lawns and promenades and pavilions laid out by the same architect as well as slavequarters and stables and kitchengardens.

After work began on Jefferson’s town square in 1834, the first formal survey revealed that Compson Place was so large that the new courthouse would have been only another of its outbuildings, and the town corporation bought part of the land off of Jason Lycurgus Compson (I), at Compson’s price.

By 1840, Jefferson began to enclose the Compson Place, known as the Compson Domain then, since now it was fit to breed princes, statesmen and generals and bishops, to avenge the dispossessed Compsons from Culloden and Carolina and Kentucky then known as the Governor’s house because sure enough in time it did produce or at least spawn a governor—Quentin MacLachan Compson (II). And still known as the Old Governor’s by predetermined accord and agreement by the whole town and county, as though they knew even then and beforehand that the old governor was the last Compson who would not fail at everything he touched save longevity or suicide, even after it had spawned (1861) a general—the Brigadier Jason Lycurgus II, who put the first mortgage on the still intact square mile to a New England carpetbagger in 1866, after the old town had been burned by the Federal General Smith and the new little town, in time to be populated mainly by the descendants not of Compsons but of Snopeses, had begun to encroach and then nibble at and into it as the failed brigadier spent the next forty years selling fragments of it off to keep up the mortgage on the remainder.

And even the old governor was forgotten in 1900; what was left of the old square mile was now known merely as the Compson place—the weedchoked traces of the old ruined lawns and promenades, the house which had needed painting too long already, the scaling columns of the portico where Jason Richmond Compson (III) sat all day long with a decanter of whiskey and a litter of dogeared Horaces and Livys and Catulluses, composing (it was said) caustic and satiric eulogies on both his dead and his living fellowtownsmen, who sold the last of the property, except that fragment containing the house and the kitchengarden and the collapsing stables and one servant’s cabin in which Dilsey Gibson’s family lived, to a golfclub for the ready money with which his daughter Candace could have her fine wedding in April and his son Quentin (III) could finish one year at Harvard , already known as the Old Compson place even while Compsons were still living in it in 1928 and still known as the Old Compson place long after all traces of Compsons were gone from it: after Jason (IV) sold the house to a countryman who operated it as a boarding house for juries and horse- and muletraders, and still known as the Old Compson place even after the boardinghouse (and presently the golfcourse too) had vanished and the old square mile was even intact again in row after row of small crowded jerrybuilt individuallyowned demiurban bungalows.

Village between Old Frenchman Place and Memphis.

Jefferson subdivision built in the 1940s.

Neighbourhood twenty miles from Jefferson. Originally Louis Grenier’s plantation, one of Yoknapatawpha County’s three original white settlers, so vast that half of it lay outside of Yoknapatawpha County. Known as Frenchman’s Bend by 1833. A hundred years later, the plantation was gone and Frenchman’s Bend was a section of country surrounding a little lost paintless crossroads store. Grenier’s main residence had become known as the Old Frenchman Place. Original home of the Snopes family.

Memphis hotel a mile and a half away from the train station, charging a dollar a night in May 1929.

County in Alabama, roughly one hundred miles from Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi.

Farm of the Gillespie family between Mottstown and Jefferson. The shed burned down in July 1927, after Darl Bundren set fire to it in a failed attempt to destroy the coffin holding the rotting corpse of his mother, stored there for the night.

Jefferson subdivision built in the 1940s.

The levee through Haley Bottom broke for two miles following heavy rains in July 1927, making it so that the only way to get to Jefferson would be to go around by Mottstown.

Plantation in Gihon County, Alabama, roughly one hundred miles (or six days of slow wagon driving) from Jefferson. The main house was burnt down by a Federate troop in early Summer of 1863 after Drusilla Hawk managed to avoid handing over her horse Bobolink by holding it ransom and escaping with it. In the months thereafter, the family lived in Jingus’s cabin, divided into two by a quilt. A railway line passed nearby which was destroyed at around the same time.

Near Mottstown.

First tavern of Jefferson, established in the early nineteenth century by Alexander Holston, one of Jefferson’s original residents. Consisting at first of log walls and puncheon floors and hand-morticed joints, by 1951, these were buried somewhere beneath the modern pressed glass and brick veneer and neon tubes.

Early nineteenth century swamp four miles from Jefferson.

Tributory of the Yoknapatawpha River.

Seat of Yoknapatawpha County in northern Mississippi, about midway between the Natchez Trace and the river, a few miles north of Yalo Busha, forty miles from Oxford and 300 miles from Nashville. The settlement developed from Samuel Habersham’s Chickasaw trading post, one long rambling onestorey mudchinked log building, which he, as one of Yoknapatawpha’s first three white settlers, established in what was then Okataba County somewhere under the turn of the nineteenth century. Its other original residents were Habersham’s eight-year-old son and their half groom half bodyguard and half nurse half tutor Alexander Holston.

For a time, before it was named, the settlement was known as Doctor Habersham’s, then Habersham’s, then simply Habersham. Within thirty years, new names appeared in the settlement: Sartoris and Stevens, Compson and McCaslin and Sutpen and Coldfield. Compson Place was established on the edge of the settlement in 1813.

Since 1831, a mail pouch containing letters and newspapers was brought from Nashville by Thomas Jefferson Pettigrew as frequently as every two weeks. Pettigrew later ran a private pony express and was eventually replaced by a monthly stage coach from Memphis.

By 1833, the settlement had its first two male slaves and you no longer shot a bear or deer or wild turkey simply by standing for a while in your kitchen door. It consisted of the Holston House, six stores, a blacksmith and livery stable, a saloon frequented by drovers and peddlers, three churches and perhaps thirty residences.

The settlement became a town without having been a village at around 5 o’clock in the morning of 9 July 1833, when it was named Jefferson, after Pettigrew’s second name.. Within the next 31 hours, its courthouse was built by expanding the jail building with three additional walls, through the collective effort of its residents and the labour of twenty to thirty slaves of Thomas Sutpen, who had arrived in the settlement the previous month.

In the following years, after plans drafted by Thomas Sutpen’s architect, construction started on Jefferson’s town square, a new courthouse building in the centre of the square (finished in 1842), the refurbished jail (finished by 1839), as well as two churches (under construction in 1839). After work began on the town square, the first formal survey revealed that Compson Place was so large that the new courthouse would have been only another of its outbuildings, and the town corporation bought part of the land off of Jason (I) Lycurgus Compson, at Compson’s price. By 1850, Jefferson had also gained an academy and a female institute, and by the time of the Civil War, Jefferson had twenty stores.

Jefferson was occupied by Federal troops led by General Andrew Jackson Smith in late 1864, and burned down in the third night. Reconstruction started right away, earlier than in the rest of the south and before the end of the war, financed in large part by the carpet-bagger Ben J Redmond. Already by 1840, Jefferson had started to enclose the Compson Place, and now the new little town, in time to be populated mainly by the descendants not of Compsons but of Snopeses, had begun to encroach and then nibble at and into it as Jason (II) Lycurgus Compson spent the next forty years selling fragments of it off to keep up the mortgage on the remainder.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, there were electric lights and running water in almost every house in town except the cabins of Negroes; and now the town bought and brought from a great distance a kind of grey crushed ballast-stone called macadam, and paved the entire street between the depot and the hotel, so that no more would the train-meeting hacks filled with drummers and lawyers and court-witnesses need to lurch and heave and strain through the winter mud-holes; every morning a wagon came to your very door with artificial ice and put it in your icebox on the back gallery for you and that summer a specially-built sprinkling-cart began to make the round of the streets each day; a new time, a new age: there were screens in windows now against dust and bugs

A Methodist Church had been constructed by 1928.

One day around 1933, Jefferson woke frantically from its communal slumber into a rash of Rotary and Lion Clubs and Chambers of Commerce and City Beautifuls: a furious beating of hollow drums toward nowhere, but merely to sound louder than the next little human clotting to its north or south or east or west, dubbing itself a city as Napoleon dubbed himself emperor and defending the expedient by padding its census rolls — a fever, a delirium in which it would confound forever seething with motion and motion with progress

In the 1940s, Jefferson expanded through a number of new subdivisions, including Fairfield, Longwood and Halcyon Acres, which had once been the lawn or back yard or kitchen garden of the old residences (the old obsolete columned houses still standing among them like old horses surged suddenly out of slumber in the middle of a flock of sheep), now consisting of minute glass-walled houses set as neat and orderly and antiseptic as cribs in a nursery ward with automatic stoves and furnaces and milk deliveries and lawns the size of instalment-plan rugs.

Construction on Jefferson’s first courthouse building was started at around 5 o’clock in the morning of 9 July 1833, coinciding with Jefferson’s establishment as a town, and finished within 31 hours, around noon the following day, through the collective effort of Jefferson’s residents and the labour of twenty to thirty slaves of Thomas Sutpen, who had arrived the previous month. It was a small lean-to room like a wood- or tool-shed built two against one outside wall of the morticed-log mud-chinked shake-down jail. Into the courthouse was moved the chest containing the town’s archive, which had been kept in the post-office-trading-post-store the previous ten years.

As soon as construction was completed, plans for a larger, more permanent building were drafted with the help of Thomas Sutpen’s architect, in the simplest Georgian colonial style, since, as the architect told them, the residents had no money to buy bad taste with nor even anything from which to copy what bad taste might still have been within their compass. Construction took nine years and was completed in 1842. The new courthouse was a square building in the centre of Jefferson’s central square, laid out at the same time. On its north and south ends it had identical four-column porticoes, the columns transported from Italy, each with its balcony of wrought-iron New Orleans grillwork. It housed four offices on the ground floor — sheriff and tax assessor and circuit- and chancery-clerk, the last containing the boxes and booths for voting — and the courtroom and jury-room and the judge’s chambers on the first. Pigeons and English sparrows took possession of the gutters and eave-boxes almost before the last hammer was withdrawn, uxorious and interminable the one, garrulous and myriad the other. From the porticoes, for a hundred years, bailiffs in their orderly appointive almost hereditary succession would cry without inflection or punctuation either ‘oyes oyes honourable circuit court of Yoknapatawpha County come all and ye shall be heard’.

The courthouse was damaged when Federal troops burned down Jefferson in 1864, but it survived, gutted and roofless. Reconstruction works to put in new floors and a new roof and to add a cupola with a four-faced clock and a bell had begun by New Year’s Day 1866 but took 25 years to complete.

In the late nineteenth century, there was a continuous iron chain looping from wooden post to post along the circumference of the courthouse yard, for the farmers to hitch their teams to. It was gone by the 1920s, and the last forest tree in the courthouse yard had then been replaced by formal synthetic shrubs contrived and schooled in Wisconsin greenhouses.

Originally a log building. Following the transformation of Jefferson into a town in 1833, was refurbished in the simplest Georgian colonial style and extended with a second storey after plans from Thomas Sutpen’s architect. Its first storey thenceforth housed the jailor and his family. Construction was financed by Louis Grenier, Thomas Sutpen and John (I) Sartoris and was completed by 1839. At the same time, Jefferson’s Square was laid out on one side of the Jail, the Jail ending up facing a side alley.

When Jefferson was burned down by Federal troops in late 1864, the Jail escaped the fire due to its windless location.

In the late nineteenth century, the Jail had a meagre flower beds along the edge of the veranda in which not one of the long succession of jailer’s wives had ever managed to make anything grow, as well as a picket fence, which even when fresh painted seemed neither alive nor dead, which did not carry out the motif of the barred windows which frowned above it, rather, it was as tho fence and window bars had been subtly colored and shaped over a long time by something which emanated from behind them both. It was as tho fence, windows, and the flower beds had been not blighted exactly but mesmerised rather into a suspension not alive and not dead, just as the anonymous and bodiless hands and faces which clung and peered to and thru the window bars.

In 1937, the common room, or ‘bullpen’ was located on the second floor. A heavy barred door was the entry to it, to the entire cell-block, which — the cells — located behind a row of steel doors, each with its own individual small barred window. A narrow passage lead to more cells.

Laid out in the years following Jefferson’s transformation into a town in 1833 after plans designed by Thomas Sutpen’s Architect, in the simplest Georgian colonial style, since, as the architect told them, the residents had no money to buy bad taste with nor even anything from which to copy what bad taste might still have been within their compass. At its centre stood the courthouse, its edges were lined with shops. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, the fronts of the stores and the walkway beneath were shaded by an unbroken second-storey balcony with a wrought-iron balustrade, and there remained forest trees which also followed the shape of the Square and in turn shaded the balcony.

The Square was burned down along with large parts of Jefferson after Federal troops led by General Andrew Jackson Smith occupied the town in late 1864. Reconstruction started right away, and by New Year’s Day of 1866, the gutted walls of the Square had been temporarily roofed and were stores and shops and offices again.

In the late nineteenth century, lawyers’ and doctors’ offices had opened onto the square’s balcony, on which in the long summer afternoons the lawyers would prop their feet to talk. Farmers’ wagons would stand on the Square during the spring and summer and fall Saturdays and trading-days and there was a public watering trough on the square for the horses.

The trough, the wagons, the trees and even the balcony were gone by the 1920s, and the square was paved then. By 1951, the brick store fronts had been replaced by glass sheets pressed in Pittsburgh.

On Confederate Decoration Day 1900, Virginia Sartoris Du Pre unveiled a marble war monument on the square depicting a Confederate infantryman, initiated and financed by the United Daughters of the Confederation. After WWI, a French 75 field gun was placed on its one side, and following WWII, an anti-tank howitzer on its other, captured from a regiment of Germans in an African desert by a regiment of Japanese in American uniforms.

Three quarters of a mile outside the central square. After John (I) Sartoris conceived the idea of a railroad for Jefferson, he partnered with Ben J Redmond and Jason (II) Lycurgus Compson, and started construction in 1869. Following a quarrel, Compson was bought out. The following year, the relation between Sartoris and Redmond also deteriorated to the point that a buy-out by Sartoris was arranged through the help of Judge Benbow. The first engine, named after Sartoris’s younger sister Virginia du Pre (her name was engraved on a silver oil can in the cab), ran into Jefferson on 9 August 1872.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, you could go to bed in a train in Jefferson and wake up tomorrow morning in New Orleans or Chicago.

Logging boom-town around 1920. Forty-four miles outside Jefferson.

Jefferson subdivision built in the 1940s.

Six miles from Mount Vernon and a good fourteen miles outside of Jefferson. Built by Virginius (I) MacCallum in 1866, who lived there with his family until after 1919.

Big bottom-land plantation about fifteen miles outside Jefferson. The manor was a big colonial house built by Mr McCaslin. Following his death, his twin sons Amadeus and Theophilus McCaslin moved into a two-room log house with about a dozen dogs, and let their slaves live in the manor, which they locked, even though by 1863, it didn’t have any windows and a child with a hairpin could unlock any lock in it, there existing an unspoken agreement that the slaves could only escape during the locking, in such a way as not to be seen even by unavoidable accident, while neither McCaslin would peep round the corner. The McCaslin brothers also convinced a lot of dirt farmers to pool their plots with the plantation, for their betterment.

Also Mottson. A few miles outside Oxford, less than two days removed from Jefferson by mule and a couple of hours by car. Visited in the week of 8 April 1928 by the travelling show that had visited Jefferson the week before.

Small hamlet at six miles distance from MacCallum’s and eighteen miles from Jefferson.

Church near Frenchman’s Bend, between Tull’s and Samson’s, three miles south from the river path.

Section of Jefferson.

Town which the Chickasaw trading post that spawned Jefferson originally belonged to. Still called Old Jefferson in 1860.

Twelve miles outside Jefferson. Main residence of Louis Grenier’s pre-civil-war plantation Frenchman’s Bend.

In the 1920s, there was a local rumour that its owner at the time had buried gold on the premises when General Grant passed through on his Vicksburg campaign.

Between 1925 and 1929 inhabited by Lee Goodwin, his common wife Ruby Lamar, their son (born 1928), his father and his associates Tommy, Van and Popeye Vitelli. Its cotton fields and gardens and lawns long since gone back to jungle, by 1929 it was a gutted ruin of a place set in a cedar grove. On 12 May 1929, the Old Frenchman Place witnessed the murder of Tommy and the rape of accidental guest Temple Drake by Popeye; Lee Goodwin was subsequently arrested, wrongfully convicted and lynched, his stills destroyed.

Farm of the Samson family near the southern end of Samson’s Bridge, eight miles from Bundren’s.

Bridge accross the Yoknapatawpha River near Samson’s, forty miles from Jefferson. Swept away by the river following heavy rains in July 1927.

Four miles outside Jefferson. The main house was burned down by a Federate troop in early Summer of 1863 that, alerted by Lucius Strother, had come for John (I) Sartoris, who narrowly managed to escape. In the months thereafter, Rosa Millard, Bayard Sartoris (II) and Marengo Strother lived in Joby Strother’s cabin, divided into two by a red quilt, while Joby and Louvinia Strother moved to the other cabin. After Rosa Millard’s death in December 1864, Louvinia moved in with Bayard and Marengo, but she moved back with Marengo when John Sartoris (I) returned with Drusilla Hawk in February 1864, and when Louisa Hawk also arrived later that Spring, Bayard and John in turn moved in with Joby and Marengo.

The main house was rebuilt on a much grander scale during the Spring of 1865. Virginia du Pre moved to the Sartoris Place from Carolina in January 1867 and started the gardens, which included verbena, fox grape, sassafras, larkspur, sweet william, hollyhocks, tulips, syringa, cape jasmine, calycanthus and jasmine, the last two of which at the least she had brought with her from Carolina.

Hundred square miles of land (ten by ten), twelve miles from Jefferson, forty miles from Oxford. Originally Chickasaw land, which, in 1833 upon his arrival to Yoknapatawpha County along with thirty-odd male Caribbean slaves and a captive Parisian architect, Thomas Sutpen took nobody knows how to establish his plantation, with seeds lent from Jason (II) Lycurgus Compson.

Sutpen had his architect construct a residence for him in a grove of cedar and oak, the size of a courthouse, which the latter designed as something like a wing of Versailles glimpsed in a Lilliput’s gothic nightmare, in revenge for his captivity. By the summer of 1934, they had finished all the brick and had the foundations laid and most of the big timbers cut and trimmed. The residence was completed in 1835 save for the windowglass and the ironware which they could not make by hand.

The residence was surrounded by its formal gardens and promenades, its slave quarters and stables and smokehouses; wild turkey ranged within a mile of the house and deer left delicate prints in the formal beds. The first flowers grew in the beds in 1839.

Thomas Sutpen invited parties of men for hunting, playing cards, drinking and organised fights between his slaves, in which he himself would occasionally participate at the end of an evening. Otherwise, its residents followed the same routine as at other plantation houses, the same hunting and cockfighting, the same amateur racing of horses on crude homemade tracks, horses sound enough in blood and lineage yet not bred to race and perhaps not even thirty minutes out of the shafts of a trap or perhaps even a carriage; the same square dancing with identical and also interchangeable provincial virgins, to music exactly like at other houses, the same champagne, the best doubtless yet crudely dispensed out of the burlesqued pantomime elegance of negro butlers who (and likewise the drinkers who gulped it down like neat whiskey between flowery and unsubtle toasts) would have treated lemonade the same way. It was a milieu where the other sex is separated into three sharp divisions, separated (two of them) by a chasm which could be crossed but one time and in but one direction — ladies, women, females — the virgins whom gentlemen someday married, the courtesans to whom they went while on sabbaticals to the cities, the slave girls and women upon whom that first caste rested and to whom in certain cases it doubtless owed the very fact of its virginity.

In 1850, the squatter Wash Jones and his daughter Melicent Jones moved into an abandoned fishing camp.

Following the outbreak of the Civil War and Thomas Sutpen’s absence on the front, all of his slaves deserted to follow the Yankee troops away. On 23 January 1863, Thomas Sutpen’s wife Ellen died and she became the first person to be buried in the graveyard, in a cedar grove on the crest of a hill half a mile from the main building. After Thomas Sutpen got word of her death, he ordered a pair of tombstones from Italy, the best, the finest to be had — his wife’s complete and his with the date left blank, which he carried with through the war until in the late fall of 1864 he arrived home for twenty-four hours and put one of the stones over his wife’s grave and set the other upright in the hall of the house. Upon their return from the war, Thomas Sutpen’s son Henry shot dead at the gates his sister’s fiancé Charles (I) Bon, who was also their mixed-race half-brother, and who became the second person to be buried in the graveyard.

During the course of the war the plantation was destroyed. After his own return from the war, Thomas Sutpen attempted to rebuild the plantation without help from anyone but had to relinquish most of it, as he realised that what he had left of it would never support him and his family and so running his little crossroads store with a stock of plowshares and hame strings and calico and kerosene and cheap beads and ribbons and a clientele of freed niggers and white trash.

On 12 August 1869, Thomas Sutpen, Wash Jones, his granddaughter Milly Jones and the child she had born by Thomas Sutpen were all killed following a row between Wash Jones and Thomas Sutpen over the birth of the child and an attempt to arrest him. Thomas Jones’s daughter Judith continued the crossroads store until, in 1870, she managed to sell it with the help of Jason (II) Lycurgus Compson.

In 1884, both Judith and Charles’s son Charles (II) Etienne Saint-Valery Bon died of yellow fever and became the fourth and fifth people to be buried in the graveyard. Whoever buried Judith must have been afraid that the other dead would contract the disease from her, since her grave was at the opposite side of the enclosure, as far from the other four as the enclosure would permit

In late 1905, Henry Sutpen returned to die. He hid in the main building, looked after by his half-sister Clytemnestra. In December 1909, when Rosa Coldfield came to pick Henry up with an ambulance, Clytemnestra started a fire that burned down the building and killed Henry and herself.

The domain then reverted to the state and was bought and sold and bought and sold again and again and again.

Farm of the Tull family, near the southern end of Tull’s Bridge. Two miles from Old Frenchman Place, four miles from Bundren’s.

Bridge accross the Yoknapatawpha River near Tull’s. Built in 1888. Prior to that, a nearby ford was used to cross the river which was less than a hundred yards across. At high water, it could be lined up by two big whiteoaks, which were eventually cut down by Vernon Tull in 1925. The first person to cross the bridge was Lucius (I) Quintus Peabody, on his way to attending the birth of Jody Varner.

The bridge became submerged during heavy rains in July 1927.

Creek near Frenchman’s Bend and New Hope Church, south of the Yoknapatawpha River.

Originally inhabited by Chickasaw. First settled by white people in the late eighteenth century when Louis Grenier, Samuel Habersham, his eight-year-old son and Alexander Holston came riding across Tennessee from the Cumberland Gap. Habersham established a Chickasaw trading post that grew to become Jefferson, the county’s principal settlement. Grenier introduced slaves and cotton planting.

Within thirty years, new names appeared in Jefferson in particular: Sartoris and Stevens, Compson and McCaslin and Sutpen and Coldfield, and Beauchamp too was one of the oldest names in the county.

In the 1830s, Yoknapatawpha’s Chickasaw were forced to emigrate to Oklahoma under the Indian removal. Not long after 1840, the county was entirely white those remaining living not as warriors and hunters but as white men—as shiftless farmers or, here and there, the masters of what they too called plantations and the owners of shiftless slaves, a little dirtier than the white man, a little lazier, a little crueller—until at last even the wild blood itself had vanished, to be seen only occasionally in the noseshape of a Negro on a cottonwagon or a white sawmill hand or trapper or locomotive fireman.

River on the southern edge of Yoknapatawpha County. Flooded in July 1927.