Doctor Habersham

Doctor Habersham is one of the original three white settlers in Yoknapatawpha, or as it's put in Intruder in the Dust, the first text to mention him, one of the men "who had ridden horseback into the county before its boundaries had ever been surveyed and located and named" (73). According to Requiem for a Nun, in fact, with his "worn black bag of pills and knives" he was so important to the settlement that for a time the place that became Jefferson was known as "Doctor Habersham's" (202). In that novel and the earlier "A Name for the City," Habersham is a widower with one son, a son who moves west with the Chickasaws during the 'Removal,' but somehow the Habersham name continues in Yoknapatawpha County well into the 20th century, and other descendants of his appear other texts. He himself plays a role in the story of how Jefferson got its name in "A Name for the City" and Requiem, the only works in which he appears.