On their trip from Jefferson to Jackson in Requiem for a Nun, Gavin Stevens and Temple Drake stop at a "filling station" (162), which we would call a gas station. Gavin tells her they need to "change the wheel" - i.e. a tire - but the real purpose of the stop is to give Temple's husband Gowan time to get to Jackson ahead of them (163).
Temple is supposed to be traveling by "special train" from the University of Mississippi to "a baseball game at another college" when she goes off instead with Gowan Stevens (100). The other college is almost certainly Mississippi State, which is in Starkville, about 90 miles away.
Oxford, Mississippi - where Faulkner himself lived most of his life - is the home of the University of Mississippi, which is "the University" that Temple was attending "eight years ago" (100). Temple herself refers to the railroad station "at the University" as the place where Nancy's "journey" began "that morning eight years ago" (164). Faulkner's Jefferson is largely derived from Oxford, but there is no college in his fictional town.
Temple's dark misadventure begins when she gets off the train "at an intermediate stop," where she is met by Gavin Stevens (100). In Sanctuary (1931), where Temple's story is first told, the stop is identified as Taylor, Mississippi, a real town not far from Oxford.
According to the novel, in 1820 Columbia was the temporary location of the Mississippi legislature when the Commission to choose the site of a capital for the new State was authorized (84). Although the novel does not say so, Columbia was named for Columbia, South Carolina, from which many of its early settlers, like many of the inhabitants of Yoknapatawpha, had migrated.
Port Gibson began in the 18th century as part of the French territory "La Louisiane." According to the novel, in 1830 it was considered as a new location for the state capital (86).
Vicksburg, a city on steep bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River, is mentioned in the novel as the port where the marble for the courthouse columns were transferred from a New Orleans steamboat to "a smaller steamboat" that could travel up the "Yazoo and Sunflower and Tallahatchie" rivers (36).
Yalo Busha (as Faulkner's narrator spells Yalobusha, an Indian word meaning "tadpole place") is a real county southwest of Lafayette, the real county on which his Yoknapatawpha is largely based. The Yalobusha River was part of the boundary between Choctaw and Chickasaw nations. In the novel Yalo Busha is mentioned as the site of an Indian agency.
The city of Jackson was founded in 1821 to be the capital of Mississippi, which had achieved statehood in 1817. Its history from aboriginal times to the present is the subject of the prose narrative that begins "Act II" of Requiem. Locations within the area of the city that are mentioned in that section include Le Fleur's Bluff, the site of the trading post on the Natchez Trace that was there when the "three Commissioners" arrived to establish the capital's location (84), and the airport and radio stations of 1950 (88).
Doak's Stand was the site of a tavern established on the Natchez Trace by William Doak in about 1812. The novel's reference to how the "wilderness's dark denizens" were already "dispossessed at Doak's Stand" (84) refers to the treaty that the Choctaw Indians signed on 18 October 1820 with the United States, ceding about half of their homeland in Mississippi in return for land west of the Mississippi River.
