Gone with the Wind: Atlanta and Jonesboro

Tara, the O'Hara plantation, is the heart of the novel, and it begins here on the eve of the Civil War in April 1861. Sixteen-year-old Scarlett learns that Ashley Wilkes, the neighbor she secretly loves, is about to announce his engagement to his cousin Melanie Hamilton. The book never gives Tara a street address: it was supposed to lie about five miles outside Jonesboro, the closest town. The pin marks Jonesboro itself, because the plantation exists only in the story.

Location precision: Tara is invented; the novel places it about five miles outside Jonesboro, so the pin marks the town.

Atlanta's oldest cemetery appears in the novel as the final resting place of Charles Hamilton, Scarlett's first husband and Melanie's brother, and as the burial ground of many Confederate soldiers who died in the war. It is also a real-world link between page and author: Margaret Mitchell herself is buried here, along with her father Eugene Mitchell and her mother Maybelle Stephens Mitchell, the suffragist.

In Atlanta, Scarlett's life runs along Peachtree Street. Easily flustered Aunt Pittypat lives in the red-brick house at the quiet end of it, half-owned by Scarlett after Charles dies. Years later, married to Rhett Butler, Scarlett has a gaudy mansion built on the same street; Rhett pays for it but calls it an "architectural horror". Neither house is identified with a real building, so the pin marks the street, not an address.

Location precision: Both fictional houses are set on Peachtree Street without an exact address; the pin marks a stretch of the street.

In the summer of 1864 the railroad depot is where Atlanta's war lands. Scarlett rounds the corner of the Atlanta Hotel and halts, appalled: hundreds of wounded men lie along the tracks and sidewalks, in endless rows under the car shed, and she is there to find Dr. Meade. Sherman's troops destroyed the Georgia Railroad freight depot in 1864. Its 1869 replacement, now the oldest building in downtown Atlanta, stands at the entrance of Underground Atlanta.

Location precision: The pin marks Underground Atlanta, beside the surviving 1869 depot; the original depot and car shed were destroyed in 1864.

Visitor guidance: The 1869 Georgia Railroad depot stands at the entrance of Underground Atlanta.

Five Points is where Marietta Street, Edgewood Avenue, Decatur Street and Peachtree Street meet, the heart of the city the novel's Confederate army sets aflame before abandoning it to the Union army. As the fire spreads, Rhett tries to circle around the center of town "to avoid the fire and that drunken mob on Decatur Street", while the streets below Five Points disgorge more sick and wounded. Atlantans still treat Five Points as the center of town, and it is the origin of the city's street addresses.

Visitor guidance: Five Points is the centre of downtown Atlanta, at the meeting of its old main streets.

Epilogue: the story was written in a ground-floor flat. Margaret Mitchell and her husband lived in Apt. 1 of what was then the Crescent Apartments from 1925 to 1932, and here she wrote the bulk of her Pulitzer Prize-winning 1936 novel. The building, originally at 806 Peachtree Street, now stands at 979 Crescent Avenue in Midtown and operates as a historic house museum, a few blocks from the street where Scarlett spends so much of her life.

Visitor guidance: A historic house museum at 979 Crescent Avenue in Midtown Atlanta.