Started Avent’s Dairy in 1920 and sold his pharmacy, Avent’s Drug Store, to the Leslies in 1951.

Excerpt from the New York TImes:
Faulkner's Mississippi Revisited: Some Change but Much the Same
By Roy Reed
Feb. 22, 1974

“The Mansion

Where the Holiday Inn now stands, at Jefferson Avenue and Lamar Boulevard, there once stood a stately old house. Some scholars think it was Faulkner's model for the house that the rapacious and ruthless Flem Snopes took over from him his wife's lover after he had taken the bank away from him.
The builder of the motel tried to give the old house to the university, but the university declined the offer when it learned that it would cost $8,000 to move the house to a suitable place.

Then a group of women organized a campaign to preserve the old house, and after they had raised a sizable amount of money they had a stroke of good luck. Thomas Edison Avent, who came to Oxford years before with little except a knack for making money and who had founded the town's largest dairy and had become one of its main landowners, offered to give the women a lot for the house in a large, undeveloped area that he owned on the edge of town. He even sponsored a quail supper to raise more money for the moving expense.

A Sprawling Subdivision

The city government then surrendered to the women's pressure and spent thousands of dollars building a street and laying water and sewer pipes to the site. About the time the project was finished, the town realized that Mr. Avent had subdivided the land along the new street and had sold every lot. The sprawling subdivision that now abuts the old mansion is called Avent Acres.

Mr. Avent died in 1967, five years after Faulkner. He is buried in the town cemetery a few yards up the hill from the author, and not far from the grave of L. Q. C. Lamar, the post‐Civil War statesman who was also a citizen of Oxford. The graves of all three overlook Avent Acres.”

Excerpt from Faulkner's County: The Historical Roots of Yoknapatawpha by Don Harrison Doyle, 2001, published by North Carolina Press:
“None of the Avent children was more notable for success than Thomas Edison “T. E." Avent. Born in 1891, he studied pharmacy at the university and opened Avent's Drug Store on the square after graduating in 1914. He married in 1919 and the next year expanded his operations by launching a dairy business. The threat of typhoid and other diseases from contaminated milk had been a constant problem for Oxford residents, and consequently people were beginning to prefer milk provided by commercial dairies instead of taking chances with their milk cow in the back yard. T. E. Avent began with one cow at the end of 1920 and soon had a herd of more than three hundred. When more farmers began shifting from cotton production to cattle raising, Avent sold off his herd and concentrated on processing the milk he now bought from local producers. Avent Dairy grew rapidly at its plant on North Street.

T. E. Avent's philanthropy extended in other directions as well, as a benefactor of the university and the town. When he bought up a lot with an antebellum home named Cedar Oaks on North Lamar, he donated land elsewhere in town to which the house was moved. It became the Heritage House, a club for Oxford women. Shortly before his death, out at Liberty Hill. T. E. Avent, returned some of his philanthropy to his country birthplace by donating money for a new church. Made of metal so it “would not burn down or rot down," the church was dedicated by T. E. Avent at a large and well-publicized ceremony attended by an array of dignitaries, including the university chancellor, a senator, and Oxford's mayor and aldermen.

Beyond the drugstore and dairy were an array of real estate and farming operations that made T. E. Avent one of the richest men in the county. Among his real estate developments was Avent Acres, a subdivision in the northeast quarter of town constructed after World War II. It was Oxford's version of Levittown, tract houses, all similar, on small lots, designed to be affordable for returning veterans and other first-time home buyers.

Thomas Avent had been an active city alderman, and he donated to the city a park adjacent to his subdivision, which was named in honor of him and his wife. This subdivision was surely a model for Faulkner's Eula Acres, one of Flem Snopes's many enterprises. Faulkner scorned this kind of modern housing, "a subdivision of standardized Veterans' Housing matchboxes" with their "minute glass-walled houses set as neat and orderly and antiseptic as cribs in a nursery ward, in new subdivisions ... which had once been the lawn or back yard of kitchen garden of the old residencies." But for young families coming to town and GIs returning from service, these new homes, often financed by government loans, were the American dream.”