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TARA (TAR-uh)
Fictional
plantation of Gone
with the Wind
Common
clues:
Scarlett's
place, Gone with the Wind plantation; Mitchell mansion; O'Hara
home; Neighbor of Twelve Oaks; Where one might catch Scarlett
fever?
Crossword
puzzle frequency:
7 times a year
Frequency
in English language:
13521 / 86800
News:
When
'Gone with the Wind' premiered in Atlanta
Video:
Carol
Burnett – Gone With The Wind
Land
is the only thing in the world that amounts to anything, for 'Tis
the only thing in this world that lasts, 'Tis the only thing
worth working for, worth fighting for - worth dying for. ~
Margaret Mitchell
Tara,
the fictional plantation found in Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel
Gone with the Wind, is actually located in Jonesboro, Georgia. As
the locale of the final, decisive defeat of the Confederate
defenders in the Battle of Atlanta, Jonesboro and its surrounding
farmland realized historical significance.
Mitchell
modeled Tara after local plantations and antebellum
establishments. Twelve Oaks, another neighboring plantation in
the novel, is now the name of many businesses and one high school
stadium in nearby Lovejoy.
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 Huguenot
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
too 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 and more than 100 slaves by the dawn of the
Civil War.
This
article is licensed under the GNU
Free Documentation License.
It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Tara
Plantation".
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