Sartoris Plantation in Requiem for a Nun (Location)

The Sartoris plantation "four miles to the north" of town is one of the most frequently visited locations in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, but in this novel Faulkner adds a new element to its history. As part of the battle of Jefferson during the Civil War, "a sudden battle centering around Colonel Sartoris's plantation house" erupts (182). There is an invented, comic "Battle of Harrykin Creek" near the plantation in one of Faulkner's short stories, but apparently the fighting along "the line of a creek" here is a real but minor skirmish at Sartoris that ends when the Confederates retreat southward through the town and the Union forces occupy it (182). We are also using this plantation to represent the collected "plantation houses" with their "columned porticoes" that the narrator mentions elsewhere to indicate the way the county grows (179).