Parsham: Colonel Linscomb's Plantation (Location Key)

Faulkner's last novel, The Reivers, includes this large and prosperous estate. It's owned by Colonel Linscomb, but still known as the "old Parsham place" after the previous owner who gave the town and some of the area's Negro residents their name (274). Lucius calls it a "plantation," and except for the fact that the people who work on it are "tenants" rather than slaves, it is laid out as an antebellum plantation: "big neat fields of sprouting cotton and corn, and pastures with good fences and tenant cabins and cotton houses" (218). The Colonel's residence is "big, with columns and porticoes and formal gardens," and the outbuildings include "stables" and "carriage houses" (274). In fact, the current tenant farmers live in "what used to be slave quarters" (274). It is not in Yoknapatawpha, but not far away either. Faulkner often represents the historical fate of the antebellum slave plantations in his world as a dire one - in a number of cases they are decaying or burned down. The "old" in "old Parsham place," for example, evokes the 'old Frenchman place.' But it's worth noting how the first such plantation to appear in his fiction, the Sartoris place in Flags in the Dust, and the last, this one in The Reivers, are both making their white owners wealthy long after the Civil War.