Jefferson Railroad Station in The Mansion (Location)

A hub of transportation and commerce, the Jefferson railroad station appears in many of Faulkner's works. When Mink goes there to spend the night at the start of the novel, it is a lively place: lit with "the red and green of the signal lamps," the horse-drawn "hacks" and one "automobile jitney" waiting outside, "the long electric-lighted shed already full of the men and boys come down to see the train pass" (38). After Mink's decades in prison, however, it is in decline: "there had not been a passenger train through Jefferson since 1935," and the railroad itself has become "a fading weed-grown branch line knowing no wheels anymore save two local freight trains more or less every day" (446). In Oxford, the train station was converted into a bus depot in 1937, so we are assuming that "the bus depot" that Charles mentions on page 199 is located here too; when Essie Nightingale goes to meet the bus from Memphis, she is described as "waiting at the station" (372).