Oxford: Central casting
When you see the bronze statue of the Confederate soldier standing guard in Oxford’s Courthouse Square you know you’ve arrived in Faulkner Country, where the past is never past. And in this case, what that means is a beautifully preserved town, filled with charming historic structures and as thick with Faulknerian ambience as a Faulkner sentence is with words. You half expect one of the gang—Colonel Sartoris, Boon Hoggenbeck, Quentin Compson—to stroll up.
Instead, you’ll want to take a stroll of your own through historic downtown and into Oxford’s historic neighborhoods. Rebuilt in 1872, the Courthouse Square has been designated a National Historic District. Cafes, shops and galleries now occupy the carefully restored structures around the square where Faulkner’s closest family and friends, like his grandfather and his mentor Phil Stone, once had offices. One special highlight is
Square Books, one of the finest independent bookstores in the nation. When the world’s greatest writers make their pilgrimage to Faulkner’s home, they always stop here, too.
Beyond the Square, you’ll find more echoes of Faulkner, as well as some lovely historic architecture. At
St. Peter's Episcopal Church, one of Oxford’s many historic churches, the minister refused to marry William and Estelle Faulkner because Estelle was a divorced woman; many scholars believe the Isom Home was the prototype for the house in
A Rose for Emily, and the occupants of the Chandler House may have provided inspiration for
The Sound and the Fury. And there are dozens of other historic homes with stories of their own, like Ammandale, Fiddler’s Folly, Cedar Oaks, and the The Magnolias.
The
L.Q.C. Lamar House, a National Historic Landmark now being converted to a house museum, was once the residence of the noted Mississippi lawmaker and United States Supreme Court Justice. Although he drafted Mississippi’s Ordinance of Secession, Lamar later gave a eulogy for abolitionist Charles Sumner so eloquent it earned a place in John F. Kennedy’s
Profiles in Courage. The quaint Carpenter Gothic style of the home of
Theora Hamblett would seem to have suited the bold colorful strokes that characterized the works of this nationally renowned primitive painter, although the delicate Victorian simplicity of the
Walton-Young House seems an unlikely starting point for writer Stark Young, whose lavish novel of the antebellum South,
So Red the Rose, was a national sensation, and set the stage for the phenomenal success of Margaret Mitchell’s epic only a few years later.
Today, the Walton-Young House is operated by the
University of Mississippi Museum, a pavilion program that also includes five significant collections and one more famous residence. There’s more history at the campus, too; probably the best place to start your tour is at the crossroads of history, where the Old South and the New South stand side by side, and venerable campus institution has preserved its wounds to mark its change.