Nashville, Tennessee (Location Key)

Nashville was originally founded on the bank of the Ohio River in 1779. As "A Name for the City" and Requiem for a Nun make clear, it is three hundred miles away from the settlement that becomes Jefferson (the real Oxford is about 250 miles from Nashville). Travel between Nashville and the nascent Jefferson was along the Natchez Trace, a 440-mile forest trail between the Mississippi and Cumberland Rivers created and used by the Indians before the coming of European settlers. In their turn, many of those settlers came to the Mississippi Territory along that same trail. When "A Courtship" locates Yoknapatawpha using the phrase "between Natchez and Nashville," it is a reference to this early route through the wilderness (365). "A Name for the City" and Requiem for a Nun also indicate how Nashville was the point of contact between the settlers in Yoknapatawpha and the larger world, including the federal government which pays "a special horseman" to carry the mail "every two weeks" from "the post office in Nashville" (6, 202). Later in the history of Yoknapatawpha, the settlement and then the town are re-oriented toward Memphis instead.