Hitting the Road to Find the True Margaret Mitchell

It was 75 years ago that Rhett Butler first told Scarlett O’Hara, “My dear, I don’t give a damn.” 

Three years later, film producer David O. Selznick had Clark Gable add the word “Frankly” to the line, change the book's scene location from a room in the house to a dramatically framed front door exit into the fog of future uncertainty - and movie history was made.

But it all started with Margaret Mitchell, a native of Atlanta, who, as a kid, often visited relatives at her family’s rural home in Jonesboro - an area that would come to inspire her to write Gone With the Wind. 

Last week marked the 75th anniversary of the release of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that made Mitchell a household name and put Atlanta on the map for the first time since General Sherman’s yankee soldiers burned it off of the map nearly 75 years earlier.

So, what better time to take a road trip into Mitchell’s world? And the best way to start would be early – both with regard to the road trip itself as well as Mitchell’s life and childhood influences.

Jonesboro is about 50 miles from Peachtree Corners and about 15 miles south of Atlanta. Getting down there right after breakfast will give you ample time for the day.

Of course, there really never was a Tara – but there is Stately Oaks, the inspiration for Scarlett O’Hara’s own Tara Plantation. This 1839 Greek Revival antebellum home is located at 100 Carriage Lane in Jonesboro, about a block off of McDonough Street and the Jonesboro Historic District. Docents in period dress will guide you through the mansion where you’ll get a real sense of plantation life in the Old South. 

As a child, Mitchell passed the house every time her family drove to their rural Jonesboro home. The squared pillars that grace Stately Oaks made such an impression on young Margaret, that they not only became a predominate feature in the novel version of the Tara mansion, they were even carried through to the motion picture version of the Tara plantation house.

The Road to Tara Museum should be your next stop.  Located in the historic Jonesboro train depot, The Road to Tara Museum features replica props and costumes from the motion picture – there’s even an exhibit of Mitchell’s personal china. 

Some feel the museum is a bit small and the predominance of “replica” items from the motion picture, when compared to the number of authentic or original items from either the motion picture or Mitchell’s life, makes the experience more “touristy.”  However, most fans of the motion picture will be awestruck, indeed.

Just north of the historic district, at the intersection of McDonough and Johnston Streets, is the location of the Patrick Cleburne Memorial Confederate Cemetery.  Here, several hundred confederate soldiers rest in peace – the men who died defending Jonesboro against Sherman’s Army as it turned toward Savannah and the Georgia coast, having just reduced Atlanta to a pile of smoldering embers.

Now, after spending all morning in Jonesboro, it’s time to head back up I-75 to Atlanta – Midtown to be more precise - and to the home of Mitchell. 

The Dump, as she called it, is located at the corner of 10th and Peachtree streets in Atlanta.  It's where Mitchell actually wrote her one and only novel – keeping her manuscript a secret from everyone but her husband, John Marsh, for the entire 10 years that she worked on it.

She drew from her memories of childhood conversations with elderly family members in Jonesboro, who recalled the war and the period of “reconstruction” that followed as well as old confederate soldiers who had fought the war as young men.

Mitchell died on Aug. 16, 1949, five days after being struck by a car while crossing Peachtree Street just three blocks from the two story apartment house where she had written her masterpiece of American literature.  She is buried at Oakland Cemetery on Oakland Avenue - just off of Memorial Drive and Martin Luther King Jr. Drive in Atlanta.

And as you end your journey through Mitchell’s life, it somehow seems only fitting that - during your walking tour of the cemetery - you’ll also see the monuments and gravesites of some of the confederacy’s heroic military leaders.  The men who made up, in fact, the true sweeping backdrop of Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind.