The last surviving descendant of Louis Grenier, the French plantation owner from whom Frenchman's Bend got its name, is himself named Lonnie Grinnup. According to the narrator, he has "the mind . . . of a child" (74), and his home suggests a similar pattern of decay: it is "a half-shed half-den [built] of discarded boards and pieces of flattened stovepipe and tin cans on the bank of the river" twenty miles from Jefferson but not far from the elegant mansion his ancestor built before the Civil War (74). (In The Reivers, Grinnup lives in a "tent" on more or less the same spot.)
The hidden moonshine still that Sheriff Hampton investigates "has been supplying Frenchman's Bend with whiskey for years" (227). It is set up in a perfect place for a still, which the narrative describes as "cozy and sheltered yet accessible too" (228). It is not too carefully hidden: the path to it is "knee-deep in places where it had been trodden for years beneath the weight of stopper-full gallon jugs" (228).
This area southeast of Jefferson is one of Faulkner's favorite Yoknapatawpha locations. In this larger context Frenchman's Bend is best known as the site from which Flem Snopes and his kinfolk launch their assault on Jefferson. In this novel it appears by name only as the setting for an anecdote about how well Sheriff Hampton's handles a feud between "a Frenchman's Bend lady" and "another lady"; the larger Faulknerian context reinforces the idea that the use of "lady" here is sarcastic (227) - the "other lady's" husband is a moonshiner.
Vinson Gowrie's killer is caught when he is tricked into trying to ambush the sheriff as he travels through "a lonely midnight creek bottom" while taking Lucas to another jail in the town called Hollymount (227). The narrative refers to the place where the trap is sprung variously as "Whiteleaf bridge" (213), "Whiteleaf bottom" (215) and "the Whiteleaf fill" (216), and the road the sheriff is traveling as "the old Whiteleaf cutoff" (216). All this implies the presence of a Whiteleaf creek.
Over the years some of the antebellum plantation mansions in Yoknapatawpha remain lived in and well-maintained, even enlarged. Some fall into decay and burn down. Faulkner describes the decline and fall of Yoknapatawpha's first big planter, the Old Frenchman after whom Frenchman's Bend is named, in two different ways. His huge house, the Old Frenchman place, begins to fall into decay during or immediately after the Civil War; in Sanctuary it becomes the home of a moonshiner before becoming the site of a series of horrors.
Like the rest of Mississippi during Faulkner's lifetime, Yoknapatawpha County is 'dry' - i.e. it is illegal to sell or possess alcoholic beverages there. But apparently one of the most common uses for the corn that is grown in the hills outside Jefferson is to make moonshine whiskey in the 'stills' that are hidden in various places around the county. This is the still operated by Wilbur Provine, who supplies the residents of Frenchman's Bend.
As explained in Gavin Stevens' reconstruction of the murder, Crawford Gowrie got Lucas to fire his pistol by meeting him at "a stump beside the path" between Lucas' house and Fraser's store, two miles from both places, and then betting him that he couldn't hit the stump from fifteen feet away (221).
