Frenchman's Bend in The Hamlet (Location)

Frenchman's Bend - the hamlet of the title - is a very rural community twenty miles southeast of Jefferson. Its population is almost entirely white. The local landowner is Will Varner, and many of the other residents are tenant farmers on land he owns, but a number of the other small farms around the Bend are owned by the families that work them. The narrative describes the hamlet itself this way: "Besides Varner's store and cotton gin and the combined grist mill and blacksmith shop which they rented to the actual smith, and the schoolhouse and the church and the perhaps three dozen dwellings within sound of both bells, the village consisted of a livery barn and lot and a contiguous shady grassless yard in which sat a sprawling rambling edifice . . . known as Littlejohn's hotel" (31). See the novel's 28 locations in and around Frenchman's Bend on the inset map.