A real town in Lafayette county less than 10 miles south-southwest of Oxford, on the route between that town and Starkville, Taylor is where Temple leaves the train bound for a baseball game between in-state rivals and drives away with Gowan. The railroad station is a very rural setting, deserted except for two wagons and a few lounging men in overalls. In Temple's eyes, at least, it looks "stark and ugly in the fresh morning" (36).
Starkville, Mississippi, is home to Mississippi State University. Faulkner never mentions this university by name, but we assume it is the unnamed "college" and "agricultural college" that is mentioned in four of his fictions. "Starkville" is the site of the baseball game against a rival college that Temple Drake never sees in Sanctuary (37) - a part of her story that is referred to again in Requiem for a Nun, though again without naming the "other college" (100).
Pensacola, best known as the site of the first Naval Air Station, seems to be where Popeye was born, though the synopsis of his life in Chapter 31 does not specifically mention the town except as the place where his mother now lives. But since, after serving time in "a home for incorrigible children" (309), he moves first to Mobile, then New Orleans, then Memphis, Pensacola seems likely to be the place he started from. If so, then he too (like Horace at the beginning of the novel) is trying to go home again when at the novel's end he is arrested while driving to see his mother.
Built at the start of the 20th century, the United States Penitentiary at Leavenworth was among the earliest federal prisons. It is where Lee Goodwin does time for killing another soldier in the Philippines, and where Ruby gets a job as a waitress in a Childs (the real name of a national chain of restaurants) to be close to him.
Kinston - which is referred to simply as a "new town" when Horace moves there with Belle and her daughter Little Belle at the end of Flags in the Dust - is located in the Delta region of Mississippi. At the beginning of Sanctuary Horace is in flight from this place, which he calls "flat and rich and foul" (15); he seeks to go home again to Oxford, where he can find "a hill to lie on for a while" (15).
Jackson is the capital of Mississippi, so Clarence Snopes lives there when the state senate is in session. It is also where Temple Drake is from, and where her father is a judge. At several moments during her ordeal at the Old Frenchman Place, she thinks of "her father sitting on the porch at home, his feet on the rail, watching a negro mow the lawn" (51, 54).
Driving from Frenchman's Bend to Memphis with Temple, Popeye stops at a gas station in "Dumfries." Its "skyline" boasts "roofs and a spire or two" (139), and it is big or prosperous enough to be entered via a paved road, but there is no real town with that name in either Mississippi or Tennessee. The description of Popeye's trip there (north through "woods" that give way to "fields") puts it more or less where the actual Holly Springs is found, but that town appears in the novel under its real name as a stop on Horace's train trip from Jefferson to Memphis.
Birmingham (1930 population 260,000) is the largest city in Alabama. It is while driving through it on his way from Memphis to Florida that Popeye is arrested for a murder he didn't commit. (Birmingham is probably also the Alabama location that Faulkner calls "Mills City" in "Elly.")
Taylor represents an example of how Faulkner's imaginary world intersects with the real one. In Sanctuary the hamlet where Temple Drake jumps off the train bound for a baseball game between in-state rivals to drive away with Gowan Stevens is named Taylor. The real Taylor in Lafayette County is less than ten miles south-southwest of Oxford, and a stop on the route between the University of Mississippi and Mississippi State University in Starkville.
