What was the name of the town in which Miss Emily lived?

William Faulkner's story takes place in Jefferson, Mississippi, one of several towns in Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County that he used in many of his short stories and novels.  

Jefferson is a typical Southern town from the 1930s when Faulkner wrote this story.  Through the character of Miss Emily, the reader can see that Jefferson was once a prosperous town in the late 1800s, with Miss Emily's family living in one of the largest houses...

William Faulkner's story takes place in Jefferson, Mississippi, one of several towns in Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County that he used in many of his short stories and novels.  

Jefferson is a typical Southern town from the 1930s when Faulkner wrote this story.  Through the character of Miss Emily, the reader can see that Jefferson was once a prosperous town in the late 1800s, with Miss Emily's family living in one of the largest houses in town: "a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select street."  However, as generations passed, so too did the industry of the town, and Miss Emily's house is soon in the shadows: "garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood."  

The reader also sees the division of blacks and whites in this town at the time.  Miss Emily still has a black man working for her like a servant, and even after the Civil War, Colonel Sartoris, the leader of the town, had once declared that "no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron."  

There is also a division between the South and the North.  The townspeople are shocked when Miss Emily is courted by Homer Barron, a Yankee.  The townspeople gossip, "'Of course a Grierson would not think seriously of a Northerner, a day laborer.'"  Not only is there a division between North and South, but there is still a classist division between those with money and those without.  

Overall, the town of Jefferson reveals much about the character of the South in the 1930s.