Greenfield Farm

In 1836, Mississippi carved Lafayette County out from land ceded to the federal government by treaty with the Chickasaw, but the region’s hilly farmland was largely uncultivated until after the Civil War. In 1875, F. C. Parks acquired a parcel from land investors and established a farm on Puskus Creek between Oxford and New Albany, where he raised livestock and grew corn, cotton, and vegetables. The farm would remain in his family for sixty-three years.

Nobel Prize–winning author William Faulkner acquired 362.5 acres of Parks’s property in 1938. Faulkner had recently sold the movie rights to The Unvanquished for $25,000, and he used a portion of those funds plus a mortgage from the Federal Land Bank of New Orleans to finance the purchase. He named the place Greenfield Farm.

The farm is seventeen miles outside Oxford, just off State Highway 30. Advised to raise cattle, Faulkner insisted on raising mules, even though farm mechanization was well underway across the South. Shortly after purchasing the farm, William’s younger brother John Faulkner moved with his family to manage operations. Eight tenant families were already living on Greenfield when Faulkner bought the place. Longtime Faulkner family associate Ned Barnett and his common-law wife moved into a cabin on the farm soon after that. From 1938 until he died in 1962, Faulkner’s tenants farmed the land. The property contained a stand of virgin pine timber, which Faulkner partially harvested in 1947. He leased the mineral rights on Greenfield in 1938 and 1942, although the property was never drilled, mined, or quarried. Faulkner also managed a commissary on the grounds to provide staple goods and supplies to the tenants and nearby neighbors.

Greenfield Farm was a source of inspiration for both John Faulkner’s and William Faulkner’s writing. Traces of the tenants, neighbors, and farm landscape were both overt and subliminal in their novels. The map of Yoknapatawpha County in William’s Absalom, Absalom! located the fictional McCallum farm on the corresponding spot of Greenfield Farm in Lafayette County. Puskus Creek, which runs through Greenfield Farm, was the sight of the “quicksand” scene in the movie version of Intruders in the Dust. From 1938 to 1945, when William Faulkner spent most of his time on the farm, he worked on The Hamlet, Go Down, Moses, and A Fable.

While a source of inspiration, the farm was also a burden. John Faulkner and his family moved off the farm to Oxford in 1940, leaving the farm’s management to William. Greenfield never consistently turned a profit and was a chronic drain on Faulkner’s finances. After World War II, his interest waned, and he turned over day-to-day farm operations to his most trusted and able tenant, Lawrence Arenza “Renzi” McJunkins. In 1957, Faulkner became the writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia. He and his wife, Estelle, began spending more and more time in Charlottesville. Their only child, Jill, married a Charlottesville attorney, Paul Summers, in 1954.

Upon Faulkner’s death, Jill Faulkner Summers inherited Greenfield Farm. In 1970 she sold it to her first cousin, Jimmy Faulkner, who lived at Greenfield as a child with his father, John. Jimmy Faulkner sold the property in 1982, and subsequent owners subdivided the land. Through a foreclosure in 1983, the First National Bank of Oxford acquired 160 acres. In a gesture of goodwill, the bank donated 20.43 acres to the University of Mississippi in 1988.

In 1993, the university initiated a project to renovate the dilapidated structures on the property and convert the land into an outdoor historical museum, but the project did not garner the financial support it needed. In 2022, John T. Edge, director of the Mississippi Lab at the University of Mississippi, began working to resurrect Greenfield as a writers’ residency, and in 2024 the university hired Marlon Blackwell Architects to move the project forward.