Mount Vernon in As I Lay Dying (Location)

There is a real Mount Vernon in northeast Mississippi. Measured from Oxford, the original of Jefferson, it is eighteen miles to the southeast. In Flags in the Dust (1929) Mount Vernon is referred to as a "hamlet" six miles away from the MacCallum place, and outside Yoknapatawpha county. In this novel the place is mentioned by Samson, who thinks that on their journey to Jefferson the Bundrens "could have gone around up by Mount Vernon, like MacCallum did" on his way home (119). In the Yoknapatawpha fictions, the MacCallums live northeast of Jefferson, so the route MacCallum takes in this novel suggests Faulkner imagines Mount Vernon to lie in that direction too.