Holston House in Requiem for a Nun (Location)

The Holston House was Jefferson's first tavern, founded by Alexander Holston, one of the town's original three white inhabitants. As the narrative notes, is "still" exists in Jefferson over a century later, with its "original log walls and puncheon floors and hand-mortised joints . . . still buried somewhere beneath the modern pressed glass and brick veneer and neon tubes" of the mid-20th century "hotel" (7, 167). The kitchen of the Holston House is the site of "the settlement's first municipal meeting," as the settlers debate the right way to dispose of the settlement's first prisoners of note (12). It's likely that "the hotel" mentioned in Act III of the novel is also this one, although Jefferson hotels and boarding houses occur in a number of Faulkner's fictions under a variety of other names (e.g., Jefferson, Beard, Snopes, Commercial).