This is "Gone With The Wind" Country

"Gone With The Wind" Country - Henry and Clayton Counties, Georgia

1864 Map by Edgar Rugar - Reproduced in 1895

Note the Mount Carmel area on the map showing Liberty Hill Church and the ("Still") Steele  name near the road, to the right of Lovejoy's Sta.  This was the Steele family home.  Back then, words and names were often written as they sounded.

Look near the top of the map, near the railroad and the Hebron Ch for the name "Fitzgerald" listed twice on what is known today as Tara Road.   (See the post "Civil War Gen. Sherman slept here at the Gunter-Steele house which was located on the right side of the railroad. )

This was Margaret Mitchell’s great grandfather, Philip Fitzgerald’s, plantation.   He emigrated from Tipperary County, Ireland and settled in Fayetteville, GA. in 1831 and began buying land.   In 1861 Fitzgerald  owned 2,527 acres of land and 35 slaves.  Could he have become Gerald O’Hara in the book?

The legend has it that Margaret Mitchell’s grandmother, Annie Fitzgerald Stephens, kept a diary about the Yankees raiding their plantation and told young Margaret stories of “The War of Northern Aggression” which gave Margaret Mitchell the idea to write the book, “Gone With The Wind.”  Mitchell biographer Darden Asbury Pyron in his book "Southern Daughter",  Mitchell wrote the first draft of her book from memory. This was how she past the time while recuperating from a leg injury and had time off from her writing  job at the Atlanta Newspaper. Her Tara had no white columns but was Rural Home a typical  North Georgia Piedmont farm house which the Fitzgeralds enlarged and built guest houses on the property.

These stories would have been about the Yankee battalions approaching Lovejoy Station from the west to destroy the railroad.  Was a Yankee shot on the steps and did they actually  hide a few treasures  in the pig pen.

When the battle was over, the Fitzgerald farm stood raped and silent, fields stripped, its slaves and animals gone and the house emptied of most valuables.  But, Eleanor Fitzgerald's dark velvet drapes still hung defiantly at the windows, as seen in many sketches about Miss Scarlett using them for a dress.  Eleanor Fitzgerald  retrieved a few small treasures that were buried under the pig house in an old tea caddy.  Philip Fitzgerald, then 66, began all over again with no slaves, no food and only 3 of his daughters and an ailing wife at home to help with the work.

The Fitzgerald’s  attended the Hebron Church which is well documented. 

Margaret Mitchell lived in Atlanta and visited her relatives often at the Fitzgerald House on Tara Road which she also called the Rural House.  It was passed down through the Fitzgerald,  Mitchell and Stephens families' generations.   This is thought of to be the "real Tara".  A subdivision now sits on this old house site on the southwest corner of Tara Road and Folsom Road.  Tara Road turns off of Tara Boulevard Hwy 19-41.  Tara country for sure.

Margaret Mitchell always declared her book was totally fiction, but her family history and  civil war knowledge most likely would have been a strong inspiration for the book. 

(Author's personal note:  As a child growing up in the Gunter-Steele, house I remember visiting a playmate of the Stephens family who lived in the Fitzgerald House at the time.  The Stephen's were related by marriage to the Mitchell's. It was a fun playhouse, complete with a secret passage and giant boulders for climbing  in the yard. A separate small building was across the road that was the Fitzgerald children's school house.)

About 1981 when the house had to be moved to make way for the housing development, it was purchased by the wife of Georgia State Senator Herman Talmage, Mrs. Betty Talmage.  She had it moved to the pasture of her home near Lovejoy, GA, known as the Crawford-Talmage House.  Her plan was to have a "Gone With The Wind" museum.  Her plan was never accomplished before her death, but there is The Road to Tara Museum in the Old Train Station and in the Stately Oaks Plantation house in Jonesboro, GA.  The Margaret Mitchell House & Museum in mid-town Atlanta is open for tours where you can visit the small apartment where she lived while writing the book.

Local lore has always been that the  Crawford-Talmage House near Lovejoy was the inspiration for the Hollywood set of Tara.   The Crawford plantation home is shown on the map near the red battle lines.   The Crawford plantation once covered several thousand acres. 

None of the movie was filmed in Henry or Clayton County Georgia except the opening scenes of laborers picking cotton in the fields.  The entire set was built on Hollywood's back lots.  Mrs. Talmage also purchased some of the set pieces which are now in the possession of her heirs and still in storage.  

Shown above and below is the Fitzgerald House 

which Margaret Mitchell referred to as the "Rural House"
Was this the real Tara? 

 Above is the Crawford-Talmage House, a private home, near Lovejoy, GA

 and below is the Hollywood set of Tara.

"Gone With The Wind" is far from gone --
 It lives on forever all over the world.