I'll throw in a few more comments: 1) I know Illinois quite well, and you'd have to be well south of the Cubs/Cardinals line to match the topography described for Cassionsville. Certainly way down south by Cairo or Carbondale, you could find some of the features. 2) The IMDB (!) bio of Wolfe states that he was working in Cincinnati for P&G from 1956 to 1972, so I don't think the statement that he wrote Peace when he lived in Houston is accurate. Rather, this places Wolfe in the Ohio River valley at just the right time. Following up rshane, certainly Wolfe could have traveled to Jackson as part of the industrialization of the Pringles process machinery, and derived some ideas for Caissonsville from those visits. 3) "Clearly meant to be Florida" in my original post was maybe a bit strong. The association of Florida with citrus that you'd need to have a strong argument from internal evidence that it's somewhere else. I was also basing this on a tenuous association of the events in that part of the novel with the fact that circuses tended to have winter headquarters in Florida. I hope you're not planning to claim it's actually Texas (which, yes, does have a citrus industry) based on some extension of the Caissionsville, KS claim.