The narrative mentions the "tract" of land acquired by "a man named Sutpen" and on which he is "bent on establishing a place on an ever more ambitious and grandiose scale than Grenier's" (30) - a story that Faulkner tells in Absalom, Absalom!. ("Ever" may be a typo for "even.")
For much of Yoknapatawpha's history, the railroad station in Jefferson is the portal through which people came from or departed to the larger world. In this novel it is only mentioned, when the narrator notes how in the "new century" the "entire street between the depot and the hotel" has been paved (189).
"The blacksmith's" shop was one of the settlement's earliest buildings; "a century and a quarter later," it has been replace by or transformed into "a garage" (167).
The "Female Academy" in Jefferson was built a "half-century" after the first courthouse (36), but the same "molds and kilns" for the bricks were used in its construction (177). According to the narrator, "to a young woman of North Mississippi or West Tennessee" a graduation "certificate" from this finishing school would be as valuable as an "invitation . . . signed by Queen Victoria" would be to "a young female from Long Island or Philadelphia" (177).
The "two churches" in Jefferson that were built about the same time as the antebellum courthouse were built out of bricks from the same "molds and kilns" as the courthouse (177). The novel does not specify their denomination, but all the churches in Yoknapatawpha are Protestant. When Temple refers later to the fact that she and Gowan belonged to "the right church" in 20th century Jefferson (124), she is probably referring to the Episcopal church, where upper class characters worship in other Yoknapatawpha fictions.
Like the courthouse at the center of Jefferson's Square, the offices and stores at its circumference were burned by the Union Army during the Civil War, but even before the South's surrender "the gutted walls . . . of the Square had been temporarily roofed and were stores and shops and offices again" (186). The growth of Yoknapatawpha results in new commercial buildings in the town, summed up by the narrative as "the counting-rooms of merchants and bankers and the sanctums of lawyers" (179).
During the building of the original courthouse, Grenier and Sutpen "set up camps beside the creek in Compson's pasture" for their slaves (33). At some point a bridge is built over the creek - now referred to as "Compson's creek" - and at this spot the Chickasaws who are coming to the store stop to "bathe their legs and feet" before putting on their "pants and shoes" (173).
The first Compson in Yoknapatawpha swaps a "race-horse" to the chief of the Chickasaw for "a square mile of what was to be the most valuable land in the future town of Jefferson" (11).
"The courthouse: the center, the focus, the hub" (32). The county courthouse and the Square around it are at the center of Jefferson, and together this site appears more frequently in the fictions than any other location. In Requiem it is a significant location in both the prose and the dramatic sequences. The brief first scene of the play is set in the "Courtroom" (38), represented in stylized fashion as an "intermediate . . . stage" in society's system of "justice" (39).
