Sartoris Bank|Merchants' and Farmers' Bank in Flags in the Dust (Location)

Although in some other texts the official name of this bank is the Farmrs' and Merchants' Bank, and in some of them it is referred to as 'Sartoris' Bank,' in this first Yoknapatawpha novel it is never called anything but "the bank" (3, etc.). It is a main feature of Jefferson's Courthouse Square.  The novel begins inside it, in the office of old Bayard Sartoris, who founded it some three decades earlier and is still its president.  Bayard's office is where he and old man Will Falls reminisce over the greatness of the Sartoris and the Southern past.  But while Bayard seems firmly in control of the institution - refusing, for example, ever to loan money for buying an automobile, in his mind an alarming symptom of social change - Flem Snopes is already the bank's vice-president and one of his relatives works in it as a "book-keeper" (5).  How Flem manages to become its president is a major narrative element in the Snopes trilogy, but in this novel it is Bryon Snopes, that bookkeeper, who represents the more ominous presence: before the end of the novel instead of keeping the books he robs the bank.