Tara Plantation
Encyclopedia
Tara, the fiction
al plantation
found in Margaret Mitchell
's 1936 novel Gone with the Wind
, was located near Jonesborough (now Jonesboro
), Georgia
. As the locale of the final, decisive defeat of the Confederate
defenders in the Battle of Jonesborough
, Jonesboro, with its surrounding farmland, is a location of historical significance.
Mitchell modeled Tara after local plantations and antebellum establishments, particularly the Clayton County
plantation on which her maternal grandmother, Annie Fitzgerald Stephens, the daughter of an Irish immigrant and his American bride, was born and raised. Twelve Oaks
, a neighboring plantation in the novel, is now the name of many businesses and a high school stadium in nearby Lovejoy.
had brought him to Georgia) wanted him to be, Gerald relished the thought of becoming a planter and gave his mostly wilderness and uncultivated new lands the grandiose name of Tara after the hill of Tara
, once the capital of the High King of ancient Ireland. He borrowed money from his brothers and bankers to buy slaves and turned the farm into a very successful cotton plantation.
At 43, Gerald married the 15-year-old Ellen Robillard, a wealthy Savannah-born girl of French descent, receiving as dowry twenty slaves (including Mammy, Ellen's nurse, who became nurse to Ellen's daughters and grandchildren as well). His young bride took a very real interest in the management of the plantation, being in some ways a more hands-on manager than her husband. With the injection of her dowry money and the rise of cotton prices, Tara grew to a plantation of more than 1000 acres (4 km²) and more than 100 slaves by the dawn of the Civil War.
In the first quarter of the novel, the O'Haras are enthusiastically partisan in support of the Confederacy. Nevertheless, even before the tide has turned irreversibly against the Confederacy following Gettysburg
and Vicksburg
, the plantation (along with the other great land-holdings in the county) has already suffered major deprivation because of the war and has descended into disrepair. Shortages caused by the Union blockade
and the Confederate requisitioning of supplies and slaves have turned the home from a house of plenty to one of mere subsistence, while the inability to sell their cotton to England has also greatly diminished the family's once-lavish income and lifestyle. The arrival of Sherman's troops in Clayton County terrifies those slaves who have not already departed or been conscripted into the labor force by the Confederacy. By the time Union troops arrive at Tara, only the house slaves remain.
Unlike the homes of most of the O'Haras' neighbors, Tara is spared the torch during the Union's Scorched Earth Policy
. The life-threatening illness, from typhoid, of Ellen O'Hara and her younger daughters, Suellen and Carreen, causes Gerald to stand firm in the doorway of his house, "as if he had an army behind him rather than before him", and earns the sympathy of a Union officer who orders his surgeon to treat the O'Hara women with laudanum
and quinine
(Georgians are unable to obtain such medications). The officer commandeers the house for use as a Union field headquarters, but as a courtesy, it is spared. However, movable items of value (including Ellen's rosary, pictures, and china) are confiscated (or stolen), and larger items are vandalized by the withdrawing Union troops. Mammy hides the family silver in the well.
The army also chops down the trees surrounding the home, destroys the outbuildings, uses much of the fencing for firewood, slaughters the livestock, and pillages the vegetable gardens and fruit orchards for its own use. Soldiers even destroy what is not yet ripe and unearth graves in the family and slave cemeteries to search for valuables buried under false headstones. The most expensive blow comes when the troops torch more than $150,000 worth of baled cotton (in 2011 currency millions of dollars). (The O'Haras had been unable to sell the cotton to English merchants, owing to the blockade, and thus it was still awaiting transport.) Upon the army's withdrawal, the family and their loyal remaining slaves are left with a looted and dilapidated house, a ruined farm with no stock, work animals, or farm equipment, no food and no means to produce food. They are indigent and soon starving.
Ellen O'Hara dies soon after the Union evacuation, and her widowed oldest daughter Scarlett returns a day later, initial delight at finding the house still standing soon turning to despair at its ruination. The loss of his wife, combined with hopelessness, poverty, age, and an increasing reliance on whiskey (when it is available) is destroying Gerald O'Hara's sanity, leaving him a demented echo of his former self. The plantation and house continue to be visited by both rebel and Union troops throughout the war, both sides taking any remnants of food and items of value left to the family.
Scarlett, however, leads her complaining sister Suellen, and semi-stunned and emotionally numb sister Carreen, and the house slaves (all unaccustomed to hard manual labor), in harvesting the remaining cotton plants. She manages to salvage a few hundred pounds of the crop (enough to trade for food, perhaps) but sees her labor rendered useless when a small detachment of Union troops finds the cotton in a slave cabin and sets it ablaze. When one of the soldiers is prevented, by his commanding officer, from taking a gilded sword that once belonged to Scarlett's long-dead father-in-law and intended for her little boy Wade Hamilton (the officer is himself a veteran of the same campaigns as the sword's former owner), the thwarted Yankee soldier expresses his indignation by secretly setting a wing of the house on fire as the Yankees are leaving. The family (which at this point, includes the convalescent Melanie Wilkes, Scarlett's sister-in-law by her marriage to her first husband-Melanie's dead brother-Charles Hamilton) extinguishes the flames before they can spread, but the mansion is further damaged.
When a Union deserter attempts to rob and rape Scarlett, she kills him in self-defense and vengeance. With the tiny windfall of money he was carrying, and with his horse and the aid of Will Benteen, a Confederate private and amputee nursed through a near-fatal fever by the O'Haras, the land is planted once again, on a subsistence scale. The family is able to eke out a very meager living, leaving them constantly hungry but at least not homeless or starving.
Peace returns after the war, but not prosperity. Scarlett manages to save Tara from being seized and the family from dispossession only by deceitfully marrying her sister Suellen's fiance, Frank Kennedy, and using his savings to pay the $300 in taxes levied on the place. Though Scarlett returns to Atlanta where her fortunes rise as she takes over and expands her second husband Frank's business interests, she shares her new wealth with Tara. Tara never achieves anything like its antebellum grandeur, but it does become self supporting as a "two horse" farm. While far from rich, the O'Haras are at least in better condition than most of their neighbors.
While Scarlett is in Atlanta, Suellen, the sister whom Scarlett's husband truly loved, conspires with the hated carpetbaggers and scalawags to defraud the victorious United States government of $150,000 by having her senile father swear an oath that his family was pro-Union during the war; therefore, the cotton burned and the damages done to the place were not justified. The plan backfires and leads to the accidental death of Gerald. It also leads to the social ostracism of Suellen by her neighbors and even some of her relatives, though ironically it increases her worth (slightly) in the eyes of her pragmatic sister Scarlett, who privately believes the plan was brilliant.
In 1868, Rhett and Scarlett get married. Rhett has Tara restored the way it was before the war. Rhett and Scarlett have a house built in Atlanta. Thought Scarlett resides in Atlanta, she considers Tara her true home. The house is restored and refurnished, the outbuildings are rebuilt, the fields are again stocked with cattle, turkeys,and horses, the land is again planted with cotton (raised now by poor white and free black sharecroppers
). By the end of the novel, Tara has come to resemble, as closely as it can, the beautiful red-earthed plantation it was before the war. Scarlett, however, is unable to find peace or happiness. Though she has come back from defeat and starvation to become one of the wealthiest women in the south and is even far richer and more spoiled than she ever expected to be, she feels miserable and empty. Most of this is due to, first her hopeless love for Ashley Wilkes, later her loss of Rhett's love, and the death of their daughter Bonnie, (and perhaps her loss of Melanie's friendship through her death, as well). After Rhett leaves Scarlett, she returns to Tara.
Many critics state that Tara ultimately symbolizes Scarlett's spirit or character. Initially, it is a thing of pompous but shallow beauty, then a place of desolation but nevertheless still standing when the neighboring homes are not, and finally as beautiful as ever but bereft of life and happiness.
, Tara stays virtually the same as in Gone With the Wind. However, at the end of the novel, the crazed Isaiah Watling sets fire to the main staircase of the mansion, which burns to the ground.
Lyle Wheeler. After filming concluded, the façade
of Tara sat on the Forty Acres
backlot owned by RKO Pictures
and then Desilu Productions
. In 1959, Southern Attractions, Inc. purchased the façade, which was dismantled and shipped to Georgia with plans to relocate it to the Atlanta area as a tourist attraction. Producer David O. Selznick
commented at the time,
However, the Margaret Mitchell estate refused to license anything that sought to capitalize on the novel's fame and popularity, including the movie set, citing Mitchell's dismay at how little it resembled her description in her novel. In 1979, what remained of the set—doorway, windows, shutters, cornice, steps and the breezeway to the kitchen, and elements of the kitchen itself—was purchased for $5,000 by Betty Talmadge, the former wife of former governor
and U.S. Senator Herman Talmadge
. She had the front door of the Tara set restored and, after exhibit at the Atlanta History Center in 1989, lent it for permanent display at the Margaret Mitchell House and Museum in midtown Atlanta, Georgia. A short time later, K. C. Bassham, an inn owner in Concord, Georgia
, agreed to purchase the set from Mrs. Talmadge and actually took possession of a window and shutter from the set. Bassham set up her inn as a period piece and decorated it with reproduction mementos from the film. In spite of the restored front door and fanlight, she believed that the movie set, which she characterized as "plywood and papier-mâché," was so deteriorated that it could never be resurrected again. Her vision was to cut up the set and sell 1 by 3 in (25.4 by 76.2 mm) rectangular sections along with a picture of Tara and a certificate of authenticity
. Talmadge eventually decided to retain the Tara set and it remained in storage at her death in 2005.
Fiction
Fiction is the form of any narrative or informative work that deals, in part or in whole, with information or events that are not factual, but rather, imaginary—that is, invented by the author. Although fiction describes a major branch of literary work, it may also refer to theatrical,...
al plantation
Plantation
A plantation is a long artificially established forest, farm or estate, where crops are grown for sale, often in distant markets rather than for local on-site consumption...
found in Margaret Mitchell
Margaret Mitchell
Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell was an American author and journalist. Mitchell won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937 for her epic American Civil War era novel, Gone with the Wind, which was the only novel by Mitchell published during her lifetime.-Family:Margaret Mitchell was born in Atlanta,...
's 1936 novel Gone with the Wind
Gone with the Wind
The slaves depicted in Gone with the Wind are primarily loyal house servants, such as Mammy, Pork and Uncle Peter, and these slaves stay on with their masters even after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 sets them free...
, was located near Jonesborough (now Jonesboro
Jonesboro, Georgia
Jonesboro is a city in Clayton County, Georgia, United States. The population was 4,724 as of the 2010 census. The city is the county seat of Clayton County....
), Georgia
Georgia (U.S. state)
Georgia is a state located in the southeastern United States. It was established in 1732, the last of the original Thirteen Colonies. The state is named after King George II of Great Britain. Georgia was the fourth state to ratify the United States Constitution, on January 2, 1788...
. As the locale of the final, decisive defeat of the Confederate
Confederate States of America
The Confederate States of America was a government set up from 1861 to 1865 by 11 Southern slave states of the United States of America that had declared their secession from the U.S...
defenders in the Battle of Jonesborough
Battle of Jonesborough
-Further reading:...
, Jonesboro, with its surrounding farmland, is a location of historical significance.
Mitchell modeled Tara after local plantations and antebellum establishments, particularly the Clayton County
Clayton County, Georgia
Clayton County is a county located in the U.S. state of Georgia. As of 2000, the population was 236,517. The 2008 Census estimate placed the population at 273,718. The county seat is Jonesboro...
plantation on which her maternal grandmother, Annie Fitzgerald Stephens, the daughter of an Irish immigrant and his American bride, was born and raised. Twelve Oaks
Twelve Oaks
In Margaret Mitchell's novel Gone with the Wind, Twelve Oaks is the plantation of the Wilkes family in Clayton County, Georgia named for the twelve great oak trees that surround the family mansion in an almost perfect circle, a "beautiful white-columned house that crowned the hill like a Greek...
, a neighboring plantation in the novel, is now the name of many businesses and a high school stadium in nearby Lovejoy.
In Gone with the Wind
In Gone with the Wind, Tara was founded by Irish immigrant Gerald O'Hara after he won 640 acres (2.6 km²) of land from its absentee owner during an all-night poker game. Very much an Irish peasant farmer rather than the merchant his elder brothers (whose emigrations to SavannahSavannah, Georgia
Savannah is the largest city and the county seat of Chatham County, in the U.S. state of Georgia. Established in 1733, the city of Savannah was the colonial capital of the Province of Georgia and later the first state capital of Georgia. Today Savannah is an industrial center and an important...
had brought him to Georgia) wanted him to be, Gerald relished the thought of becoming a planter and gave his mostly wilderness and uncultivated new lands the grandiose name of Tara after the hill of Tara
Hill of Tara
The Hill of Tara , located near the River Boyne, is an archaeological complex that runs between Navan and Dunshaughlin in County Meath, Leinster, Ireland...
, once the capital of the High King of ancient Ireland. He borrowed money from his brothers and bankers to buy slaves and turned the farm into a very successful cotton plantation.
At 43, Gerald married the 15-year-old Ellen Robillard, a wealthy Savannah-born girl of French descent, receiving as dowry twenty slaves (including Mammy, Ellen's nurse, who became nurse to Ellen's daughters and grandchildren as well). His young bride took a very real interest in the management of the plantation, being in some ways a more hands-on manager than her husband. With the injection of her dowry money and the rise of cotton prices, Tara grew to a plantation of more than 1000 acres (4 km²) and more than 100 slaves by the dawn of the Civil War.
In the first quarter of the novel, the O'Haras are enthusiastically partisan in support of the Confederacy. Nevertheless, even before the tide has turned irreversibly against the Confederacy following Gettysburg
Battle of Gettysburg
The Battle of Gettysburg , was fought July 1–3, 1863, in and around the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The battle with the largest number of casualties in the American Civil War, it is often described as the war's turning point. Union Maj. Gen. George Gordon Meade's Army of the Potomac...
and Vicksburg
Battle of Vicksburg
The Siege of Vicksburg was the final major military action in the Vicksburg Campaign of the American Civil War. In a series of maneuvers, Union Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and his Army of the Tennessee crossed the Mississippi River and drove the Confederate army of Lt. Gen. John C...
, the plantation (along with the other great land-holdings in the county) has already suffered major deprivation because of the war and has descended into disrepair. Shortages caused by the Union blockade
Blockade
A blockade is an effort to cut off food, supplies, war material or communications from a particular area by force, either in part or totally. A blockade should not be confused with an embargo or sanctions, which are legal barriers to trade, and is distinct from a siege in that a blockade is usually...
and the Confederate requisitioning of supplies and slaves have turned the home from a house of plenty to one of mere subsistence, while the inability to sell their cotton to England has also greatly diminished the family's once-lavish income and lifestyle. The arrival of Sherman's troops in Clayton County terrifies those slaves who have not already departed or been conscripted into the labor force by the Confederacy. By the time Union troops arrive at Tara, only the house slaves remain.
Unlike the homes of most of the O'Haras' neighbors, Tara is spared the torch during the Union's Scorched Earth Policy
Scorched earth
A scorched earth policy is a military strategy or operational method which involves destroying anything that might be useful to the enemy while advancing through or withdrawing from an area...
. The life-threatening illness, from typhoid, of Ellen O'Hara and her younger daughters, Suellen and Carreen, causes Gerald to stand firm in the doorway of his house, "as if he had an army behind him rather than before him", and earns the sympathy of a Union officer who orders his surgeon to treat the O'Hara women with laudanum
Laudanum
Laudanum , also known as Tincture of Opium, is an alcoholic herbal preparation containing approximately 10% powdered opium by weight ....
and quinine
Quinine
Quinine is a natural white crystalline alkaloid having antipyretic , antimalarial, analgesic , anti-inflammatory properties and a bitter taste. It is a stereoisomer of quinidine which, unlike quinine, is an anti-arrhythmic...
(Georgians are unable to obtain such medications). The officer commandeers the house for use as a Union field headquarters, but as a courtesy, it is spared. However, movable items of value (including Ellen's rosary, pictures, and china) are confiscated (or stolen), and larger items are vandalized by the withdrawing Union troops. Mammy hides the family silver in the well.
The army also chops down the trees surrounding the home, destroys the outbuildings, uses much of the fencing for firewood, slaughters the livestock, and pillages the vegetable gardens and fruit orchards for its own use. Soldiers even destroy what is not yet ripe and unearth graves in the family and slave cemeteries to search for valuables buried under false headstones. The most expensive blow comes when the troops torch more than $150,000 worth of baled cotton (in 2011 currency millions of dollars). (The O'Haras had been unable to sell the cotton to English merchants, owing to the blockade, and thus it was still awaiting transport.) Upon the army's withdrawal, the family and their loyal remaining slaves are left with a looted and dilapidated house, a ruined farm with no stock, work animals, or farm equipment, no food and no means to produce food. They are indigent and soon starving.
Ellen O'Hara dies soon after the Union evacuation, and her widowed oldest daughter Scarlett returns a day later, initial delight at finding the house still standing soon turning to despair at its ruination. The loss of his wife, combined with hopelessness, poverty, age, and an increasing reliance on whiskey (when it is available) is destroying Gerald O'Hara's sanity, leaving him a demented echo of his former self. The plantation and house continue to be visited by both rebel and Union troops throughout the war, both sides taking any remnants of food and items of value left to the family.
Scarlett, however, leads her complaining sister Suellen, and semi-stunned and emotionally numb sister Carreen, and the house slaves (all unaccustomed to hard manual labor), in harvesting the remaining cotton plants. She manages to salvage a few hundred pounds of the crop (enough to trade for food, perhaps) but sees her labor rendered useless when a small detachment of Union troops finds the cotton in a slave cabin and sets it ablaze. When one of the soldiers is prevented, by his commanding officer, from taking a gilded sword that once belonged to Scarlett's long-dead father-in-law and intended for her little boy Wade Hamilton (the officer is himself a veteran of the same campaigns as the sword's former owner), the thwarted Yankee soldier expresses his indignation by secretly setting a wing of the house on fire as the Yankees are leaving. The family (which at this point, includes the convalescent Melanie Wilkes, Scarlett's sister-in-law by her marriage to her first husband-Melanie's dead brother-Charles Hamilton) extinguishes the flames before they can spread, but the mansion is further damaged.
When a Union deserter attempts to rob and rape Scarlett, she kills him in self-defense and vengeance. With the tiny windfall of money he was carrying, and with his horse and the aid of Will Benteen, a Confederate private and amputee nursed through a near-fatal fever by the O'Haras, the land is planted once again, on a subsistence scale. The family is able to eke out a very meager living, leaving them constantly hungry but at least not homeless or starving.
Peace returns after the war, but not prosperity. Scarlett manages to save Tara from being seized and the family from dispossession only by deceitfully marrying her sister Suellen's fiance, Frank Kennedy, and using his savings to pay the $300 in taxes levied on the place. Though Scarlett returns to Atlanta where her fortunes rise as she takes over and expands her second husband Frank's business interests, she shares her new wealth with Tara. Tara never achieves anything like its antebellum grandeur, but it does become self supporting as a "two horse" farm. While far from rich, the O'Haras are at least in better condition than most of their neighbors.
While Scarlett is in Atlanta, Suellen, the sister whom Scarlett's husband truly loved, conspires with the hated carpetbaggers and scalawags to defraud the victorious United States government of $150,000 by having her senile father swear an oath that his family was pro-Union during the war; therefore, the cotton burned and the damages done to the place were not justified. The plan backfires and leads to the accidental death of Gerald. It also leads to the social ostracism of Suellen by her neighbors and even some of her relatives, though ironically it increases her worth (slightly) in the eyes of her pragmatic sister Scarlett, who privately believes the plan was brilliant.
In 1868, Rhett and Scarlett get married. Rhett has Tara restored the way it was before the war. Rhett and Scarlett have a house built in Atlanta. Thought Scarlett resides in Atlanta, she considers Tara her true home. The house is restored and refurnished, the outbuildings are rebuilt, the fields are again stocked with cattle, turkeys,and horses, the land is again planted with cotton (raised now by poor white and free black sharecroppers
Sharecropping
Sharecropping is a system of agriculture in which a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a share of the crop produced on the land . This should not be confused with a crop fixed rent contract, in which a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a fixed amount of...
). By the end of the novel, Tara has come to resemble, as closely as it can, the beautiful red-earthed plantation it was before the war. Scarlett, however, is unable to find peace or happiness. Though she has come back from defeat and starvation to become one of the wealthiest women in the south and is even far richer and more spoiled than she ever expected to be, she feels miserable and empty. Most of this is due to, first her hopeless love for Ashley Wilkes, later her loss of Rhett's love, and the death of their daughter Bonnie, (and perhaps her loss of Melanie's friendship through her death, as well). After Rhett leaves Scarlett, she returns to Tara.
Many critics state that Tara ultimately symbolizes Scarlett's spirit or character. Initially, it is a thing of pompous but shallow beauty, then a place of desolation but nevertheless still standing when the neighboring homes are not, and finally as beautiful as ever but bereft of life and happiness.
In Rhett Butler's People
In the recent novel, Rhett Butler's PeopleRhett Butler's People
Rhett Butler's People by Donald McCaig is an authorized sequel to Gone with the Wind. It was published in November 2007.Fully authorized by the Margaret Mitchell estate, Rhett Butler’s People is a novel that parallels Gone with the Wind from Rhett Butler's perspective. The book was unveiled on...
, Tara stays virtually the same as in Gone With the Wind. However, at the end of the novel, the crazed Isaiah Watling sets fire to the main staircase of the mansion, which burns to the ground.
The house
When Gerald first takes possession of the property, he and his slave valet Pork (also acquired by Gerald in a poker game) inhabit the small, four-room wooden house built when the land was settled. As Gerald's wealth grows, he builds minor additions to the structure, but after his marriage, and as his family grows, the house undergoes major enlargements and renovations. Nevertheless, it is not a pretty building but rather a large, rambling affair of whitewashed brick and timber "built according to no architectural plan whatever, with extra rooms added where and when it seemed convenient". Its charm comes from Ellen's grace and sophistication. According to the description in the novel, the house has at least two hallways, a full basement, front and back stairs, and an attic.Movie set
For the 1939 motion picture, the home was constructed by art directorArt director
The art director is a person who supervise the creative process of a design.The term 'art director' is a blanket title for a variety of similar job functions in advertising, publishing, film and television, the Internet, and video games....
Lyle Wheeler. After filming concluded, the façade
Facade
A facade or façade is generally one exterior side of a building, usually, but not always, the front. The word comes from the French language, literally meaning "frontage" or "face"....
of Tara sat on the Forty Acres
RKO Forty Acres
Forty Acres was a film studio backlot that belonged to RKO Pictures and later Desilu Productions, located in Culver City, California. Best known as Forty Acres, or "the back forty", it had other names such as "Desilu Culver", the "RKO backlot" and "Pathé 40 Acre Ranch" depending on which studio...
backlot owned by RKO Pictures
RKO Pictures
RKO Pictures is an American film production and distribution company. As RKO Radio Pictures Inc., it was one of the Big Five studios of Hollywood's Golden Age. The business was formed after the Keith-Albee-Orpheum theater chains and Joseph P...
and then Desilu Productions
Desilu Productions
Desilu Productions was a Los Angeles, California-based company jointly owned by actors Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball, who were married to each other from 1940 to 1960....
. In 1959, Southern Attractions, Inc. purchased the façade, which was dismantled and shipped to Georgia with plans to relocate it to the Atlanta area as a tourist attraction. Producer David O. Selznick
David O. Selznick
David O. Selznick was an American film producer. He is best known for having produced Gone with the Wind and Rebecca , both of which earned him an Oscar for Best Picture.-Early years:...
commented at the time,
Nothing in Hollywood is permanent. Once photographed, life here is ended. It is almost symbolic of Hollywood. Tara had no rooms inside. It was just a façade. So much of Hollywood is a façade.
However, the Margaret Mitchell estate refused to license anything that sought to capitalize on the novel's fame and popularity, including the movie set, citing Mitchell's dismay at how little it resembled her description in her novel. In 1979, what remained of the set—doorway, windows, shutters, cornice, steps and the breezeway to the kitchen, and elements of the kitchen itself—was purchased for $5,000 by Betty Talmadge, the former wife of former governor
Governor
A governor is a governing official, usually the executive of a non-sovereign level of government, ranking under the head of state...
and U.S. Senator Herman Talmadge
Herman Talmadge
Herman Eugene Talmadge was an American politician from the U.S. state of Georgia. He served as governor of Georgia briefly in 1947 and again from 1948 to 1955. His term was marked by his segregationist policies. After leaving office Talmadge was elected to the U.S...
. She had the front door of the Tara set restored and, after exhibit at the Atlanta History Center in 1989, lent it for permanent display at the Margaret Mitchell House and Museum in midtown Atlanta, Georgia. A short time later, K. C. Bassham, an inn owner in Concord, Georgia
Concord, Georgia
Concord is a town in Pike County, Georgia, United States. The population was 336 at the 2000 census.-Geography:Concord is located at .According to the United States Census Bureau, the town has a total area of , all of it land....
, agreed to purchase the set from Mrs. Talmadge and actually took possession of a window and shutter from the set. Bassham set up her inn as a period piece and decorated it with reproduction mementos from the film. In spite of the restored front door and fanlight, she believed that the movie set, which she characterized as "plywood and papier-mâché," was so deteriorated that it could never be resurrected again. Her vision was to cut up the set and sell 1 by 3 in (25.4 by 76.2 mm) rectangular sections along with a picture of Tara and a certificate of authenticity
Certificate of Authenticity
A certificate of authenticity is a seal or small sticker on a proprietary computer program, t-shirt, jersey, or any other memorabilia or art work, especially in the world of computers and sports, it is commonly a seal on paper authenticating a specific art work which and is made to demonstrate...
. Talmadge eventually decided to retain the Tara set and it remained in storage at her death in 2005.
Namesakes
- The section of US 41 and US 19U.S. Route 19 in GeorgiaU.S. Route 19 in Georgia runs through Georgia from the Florida border south of Thomasville, Georgia—through Atlanta—to the North Carolina border at a point north of Nottely Lake, Georgia.-Route:...
from Interstate 75 south through Jonesboro to the Clayton/Henry county line is called Tara Boulevard, in honor of the book and movie, and the placement of the fictitious plantation near the town. The Tara Field airport (located in Henry but operated by Clayton) is also named for it.
- Country singing legend Dolly PartonDolly PartonDolly Rebecca Parton is an American singer-songwriter, author, multi-instrumentalist, actress and philanthropist, best known for her work in country music. Dolly Parton has appeared in movies like 9 to 5, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Steel Magnolias and Straight Talk...
named her Nashville mansion Tara.
- The Tara TheatreTara TheatreThe Tara Theatre is an art house movie theater located in Atlanta. The theater specializes in the showing of independent films, the only theater in Atlanta to do so.-History:...
, an art house movie theater in Atlanta, memorializes the plantation.