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Tara, the fictional 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 and its surrounding farmland realized historical significance.

Mitchell modeled Tara after local plantations and antebellum establishments, particularly the Clayton County plantation on which her maternal grandmother, Annie Fitzgerald Stephens, was born and raised, the daughter of an Irish immigrant and his American bride. Twelve Oaks, another 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 the novel Gone with the Wind, the plantation was founded by Irish immigrant Gerald O\'Hara when he won a section (640 acres) 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 Savannah brought him to Georgia) wanted him to be, Gerald relished the thought of being a planter and gave his mostly wilderness and uncultivated new lands the grandiose name of Tara after the hill of Tara, once the capitol of the High King of ancient Ireland. He borrowed money from his brothers and bankers to buy slaves and over several years turned the farm into a very successful cotton plantation.

At 43, Gerald married Ellen Robillard, a Savannah-born French aristocrat twenty-eight years his junior, and received as dowry twenty slaves (including Mammy, Ellen\'s nurse, who will be nurse to Ellen\'s daughters and grandchildren as well). His young bride took a very real interest in the management of the plantation, in some ways more hands on than her husband, and with her dowry money and the rise of cotton prices, Tara grew to a plantation of more than 1,000 acres (4.0 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, their plantation (and the other great plantations in the county) has already suffered major disrepair and deprivation from the war. Shortages caused by the Union blockade and Confederate requisitioning of supplies and slaves have turned the home from a house of plenty to one of subsistence, and the inability to sell their cotton to England has devastated the family\'s once lavish income and lifestyle. The arrival of Sherman\'s troops in Clayton County terrifies the slaves who have not already run away or been taken as labor force by the Confederacy until, by the time Union troops arrive at the plantation home itself, the only slaves remaining are those who worked in the house.

Unlike the mansions and homes of most of the O\'Hara\'s neighbors, Tara is spared the torch during the Union\'s scorched-earth policy. The life-threatening illness of Ellen O\'Hara and her two younger daughters (Suellen and Carreen) from typhoid 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 humanitarian Union officer who orders his surgeon to treat the O\'Hara women with laudanum and quinine (Georgians are unable to get such medications). The officer also commandeers the house for use as Union field headquarters and as courtesy it is spared, but any movable item of value (including rosaries and mattresses) are confiscated (or stolen) and larger items vandalized by the withdrawing Union troops.

The army also chops down all of the trees surrounding the home and destroys all of the plantation outbuildings and much of its furniture for firewood, slaughters the livestock, and pillages the vegetable gardens and fruit orchards for their own use, and destroys what is not yet ripe, and even unearthing graves in the family and slave cemeteries searching for valuables buried under false headstones. The most expensive blow comes when the troops torch more than $100,000 worth of baled cotton warehoused on the plantation. (The O\'Haras had been unable to sell the cotton to English merchants due to the Union blockade and thus it waited for the first opportunity to be transported.) Upon their withdrawal, the family and their loyal remaining slaves are left with a looted and dilapidated house, a ruined farm with no stock or work animals or farm equipment, no food and no means to produce food, indigent and soon starving in the remains of their mansion.

Ellen O\'Hara dies of disease soon after the Union evacuation of Tara 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 and poverty. The loss of his wife combine with hopelessness, poverty, age and an increasing reliance on whiskey (when it is available) in 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 or value left to the family. Scarlett leads her complaining sisters and house slaves, all unaccustomed to hard manual labor, in harvesting the remaining cotton plants through summer and manages to salvage a few hundred pounds of the crop (enough to perhaps trade for some food) but sees her labor made useless when a small detachment of Union troops find it in a slave cabin and set it ablaze. When the soldiers are prevented from taking a gilded sword that once belonged to Scarlett\'s long dead father-in-law by their commanding officer (himself a veteran of the same campaigns as the sword\'s former owner) they express their indignation by secretly setting a wing of the house on fire as they are leaving. The family extinguishes the flames before they can spread and thus the house is spared again but further damaged.

When a Union deserter attempts to rob and rape Scarlett she kills him in self defense and vengeance. With the tiny windfall and the horse stolen from the dead soldier and the aid of Will Benteen, a Confederate private discharged after the battle that cost him a leg and nursed back from near fatal fever by the O\'Haras, the land is planted once again on a tiny subsistence scale and the family is able to eek a very meager living, constantly hungry but at least not homeless or starving.

Peace returns after the war, but not prosperity. Widowed oldest daughter Scarlett manages to save the home from being seized and the family from dispossession only by deceitfully marrying her sister\'s fiance 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\'s business interests, she shares her rising wealth with Tara and though it never achieves anything like its antebellum grandeur it becomes self supporting as a "two horse" farm and though far from rich the O\'Haras are at least in a 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 and as such cotton burned and damages done to the place were not justified. The plan backfires and leads to the accidental death of Gerald O\'Hara. It also leads to the social ostracism of Suellen by her neighbors and even some of her relatives, though ironically it increases her worth in the eyes of her sister Scarlett, who privately believes the plan was brilliant.

Suellen remains at Tara and accepts the marriage proposal of its new manager Will Benteen. Though respected by his neighbors as a kind, intelligent and hard-working farmer whose industry is as responsible as Scarlett\'s money in saving Tara, and though Suellen is despised for her attempt to profit through betraying the south, the marriage is looked down upon by the O\'Hara\'s neighbors because Suellen is the daughter of a once rich planter while Will is the son of poor white farmers. This contempt illustrates much about the refusal of all save the folks at Tara to accept the new reality of the Reconstruction era and explains why Tara survives by adapting.

Though Suellen and Will Benteen and their family are the occupants of the house and though Scarlett resides in Atlanta, Scarlett considers Tara her true home. After Scarlett\'s marriage to Rhett Butler, a multimillionaire from blockade running and speculation, her new husband pays to fully restore Tara to its pre-war state. The house is restored and refurnished, the outbuildings are rebuilt, its fields are again stocked with cattle and turkeys and horses and its grounds are again planted with cotton (worked now by poor white and free black sharecroppers). By the end of the novel, Tara has come to resemble as closely as it possibly can the beautiful red earthed farm and whitewashed mansion it was before the war, and yet Scarlett is not able to find peace or happiness. Though she has come back from defeat and starvation to one of the wealthiest women in the south and is even far richer and more spoiled than she ever expected to be, Scarlett is miserable and empty and though Tara calls to her even there she feels little peace.

Many critics state that Tara ultimately symbolizes Scarlett\'s spirit or character. Initially it is a thing of pompous but crude beauty, then a place of desolation but nevertheless still standing when its neighboring homes are not, and finally a place of adornment and as beautiful as ever but ultimately bereft of life and happiness.

In Rhett Butler\'s People

In the recent novel "Rhett Butler\'s People," 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 soon burns to the ground.

The house

When Gerald first took 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 home, but after his marriage and as his family grows the house undergoes major enlargements and renovations. Nevertheless it is not a pretty house as described in the novel but rather a large rambling structure of whitewashed brick and timber "built according to no architectural plan whatever, with extra rooms added where and when it seemed convenient", its charm coming from Ellen\'s grace and sophistication. From the novel\'s description it is known that there are at least two hallways, a full basement, two staircases and an attic.

A reproduction plantation house, Stately Oaks, can be found just south of the Jonesboro Train Depot, where Civil War reenactments and antebellum historians can be found retelling and modeling Jonesboro\'s authentic and Tara\'s fictional past.

Movie set

In the legendary 1939 motion picture, the home is transformed by art director Lyle Wheeler into a pillared asymmetrical mansion quite inconsistent with the description in the novel in all save size and white-washed brick exterior (the film set does, however, have a rambling quality in line with Mitchell\'s description). Nevertheless, it is the movie\'s depiction of Tara that entered the popular imagination. However at odds with the book\'s description, the work of set designer Joseph B. Platt and interior decorator Edward G. Boyle (among others) was nothing short of outstanding and a gauge for comparison in capturing the home before the war and, more spectacularly, the same structure in its ruined state afterwards.

After filming concluded, the façade of Tara sat on the "Forty Acres" backlot of the former Selznick Studios as it changed ownership to 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.Los Angeles Times, May 17, 1959, p. G10.Jennifer W. Dickey, "A Tough Little Patch of History": Atlanta\'s Marketplace for Gone With the Wind Memory, Ph.D. dissertation, Georgia State University, 2007, pp. 85–89. Producer David O. Selznick 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.Murray Schumach, "Hollywood Gives Tara to Atlanta," New York Times, May 25, 1959, p. 33.

However, the Margaret Mitchell estate refused to license the novel\'s commercial use in connection with the façade, citing Mitchell\'s dismay at how little it resembled her description. In 1979 the dismantled plywood and papier-mâché set, reportedly in "terrible" condition, was purchased for $5,000 by Betty Talmadge, the ex-wife of former Georgia governor and U.S. senator Herman Talmadge.Margalit Fox, "Betty Talmadge, Ex-Wife of Georgia Senator, Dies at 81," New York Times, May 12, 2005. She lent the front door of Tara\'s set to the Margaret Mitchell House and Museum in downtown Atlanta, Georgia where it is on permanent display.Tour Information, Margaret Mitchell House & Museum. The Tara set was bought from Mrs. Talmadge, and sold to K. C. Bassham, an inn owner in Concord, Georgia. She set up her inn to be period with the timeframe of the movie, and decorated it with reproduction mementos from the film. Due to the fact that the plywood and papier-mâché Tara was so deteriorated, she determined that it could never be resurrected again. She then decided to cut up the set and sell 1 by 3-inch (76 mm) rectangles of the set. This will also include a picture of Tara and a certificate of authenticity.Jennifer W. Dickey, "A Tough Little Patch of History": Atlanta\'s Marketplace for Gone With the Wind Memory, Ph.D. dissertation, Georgia State University, 2007, pp. 120–121.

Namesake

The section of U.S. 41 and U.S. 19 through Jonesboro and well north and south is called Tara Boulevard, in honor of the book and movie, and the placement of the fictitious plantation near the town.