Jefferson Episcopal Church (Location Key)

Yoknapatawpha's upper class is mainly Episcopalian. The antebellum 'church that Sutpen rides fast to' in Absalom! is presumably Episcopalian; the church where Granny distributes the spoils of her campaign against the Yankees during the Civil War in The Unvanquished is explicitly Episcopalian - we assume those are the same church, and that it is (as Faulkner puts it on his 1936 map) in the county northwest of Jefferson. But two late fictions - "Knight's Gambit" and The Town - also refer to an Episcopalian church in Jefferson. In the story Charles Mallison sees "above the trees" of the town the "gold cross on the spire of the Episcopal church" from the window of the train on which he's riding as a sign of "home" (253). According to the novel, the small Episcopal church is "the oldest extant building in town"; it was "built by slaves" (321). In that novel, it is referred to by Charles, who notes that the "Northern tourists" who see it consider it "the best, the finest" building too (321). (Other texts identify other buildings - in particular the jail - as the town's oldest.)