Sartoris Plantation in Flags in the Dust (Location)

The first time this mansion appears in Flags, the narrator calls it "the house that John Sartoris built and rebuilt" (8).  His first mansion was burned by Yankee soldiers during the Civil War; his post-war reconstruction of it, on an even grander scale, is described briefly in The Unvanquished. In this first appearance, the house standing "among ancient sunshot trees" and roses and wisteria seems outside the fortunes of war or time; it strikes the Colonel's son Bayard, as he gazes at it when he comes home from Jefferson, as "serenely benignant" (8). "Four miles away" from Jefferson (76), it has a "colonnaded veranda," extensive grounds, and features a window made up of "vari-colored" panes of glass that John's youngest sister, Virginia, "had brought from Carolina in a straw-filled hamper in '69" (10).