This icon represents the many cabins that formed the "quarters" in which, before the Civil War, the slaves who worked on Sutpen's plantation lived, and the single cabin in which Charles Etienne Saint-Valery Bon lives in the early 1880s. The novel does not say how many slaves there were at the time that Sutpen's Hundred was the largest, richest plantation in Yoknapatawpha, but "hundred" is probably not a big enough number.
This location represents the two kinds of gardens at Sutpen's Hundred: the decorative, formal gardens laid out by the French architect as one way for the house to assert its status, and the kitchen gardens that produce vegetables for the people who lived at the remote plantation. Rosa Coldfield spends time in both. During a visit in the summer of 1860, she wanders down the "raked and sanded paths" of the formal garden, imagining Bon and Judith's courtship, an image that caused "a child's vacant fairy-tale to come alive in that garden" (117-18).
The gate at the entrance to Sutpen's mansion was "half a mile" up a "tree-arched" drive from the house (292). In 1865 it becomes the scene of a crime that the novel's various storytellers keep trying to solve. When Quentin Compson goes past it in 1909, all that's left are "two huge rotting gate posts" (291).
Like several other Yoknapatawpha families, the Sutpens have their own graveyard. It is "half a mile" from the big house (153), in a "clump of cedars on the crest of the hill" (153). Thomas and Ellen Sutpen are buried there under the big tombstones made from imported marble. Charles Bon and Bon's son and Judith Sutpen are also buried there, under smaller stones - Judith's is "at the opposite side" of the cemetery from the other four (170).
