Town House on the Yocona
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Town House on the Yocona
1979, Alice Moseley
16” x 12”, acrylic on canvas board
On display at the Alice Moseley Museum
Donated by Tim Moseley
Town House on the Yocona
This painting depicts a line of housing that were referred to as tenant shacks. Miss Alice elegantly renamed them Condominiums on the Yocona River in north Mississippi. William Faulkner created the mythical town of Yocona as a setting for many of his novels. Yocona River runs through Oxford and ends at Enid Reservoir, Miss Alice’s former house at Plum Point Retreat.
— Tim Moseley, 2008
This covered bridge over the Yocona River, photographed in the early 1900s, was one of several covered bridges in Lafayette County. Old maps depict the slow, muddy river as the "Yockney-patafa" River, from which Faulkner derived the name of his fictional county. A mule-drawn team such as the one depicted brings to mind the ill-fated crossing of the flooded Yoknapatawpha River in Faulkner's novel As I Lay Dying.
Yacona River Basin map from the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality
