Road North from Jefferson in The Mansion (Location)

The unnamed Negro farmer drives Mink Snopes into Yoknapatawpha onto a road that is - for Mink, who always went to town from Frenchman's Bend - "a new approach to Jefferson" (443). Running parallel to the railroad track, this road is the one that runs straight south down the middle of the county. It has changed since the last time Mink was in the county: the narrative notes that in 1908 it was a "winding dirt [road] along which slow mules and wagons . . . followed the arbitrary and random ridges," but now (in 1946) it is a "blacktop" - i.e. paved - and straightened surface "on which automobiles sped" (436). Another sign of the progress of time are the mile markers along the county's roads: "these new iron numbers along the roads were different too from the hand-lettered mile-boards of recollection" (443).