The Flint River: Home to Tara and Twelve Oaks
After being told by the Tarleton twins that Ashley Wilkes was to marry his cousin Melanie Hamilton, Scarlett O’Hara stood on the road to Tara awaiting her father, Gerald O’Hara’s, return from Twelve Oaks, the plantation across the Flint River where Ashley lived.
“Her eyes followed the winding road, blood-red now after the morning rain. In her thought she traced its course as it ran down the hill to the sluggish Flint River, through the tangled swampy bottoms and up the next hill to Twelve Oaks where Ashley lived. That was all the road meant now—a road to Ashley and the beautiful white-columned house that crowned the hill like a Greek temple.”
The Flint is only a 20-foot wide, winding stream between Fayette and Clayton counties, but this portion of it has played an integral part in literary history. Here, is where it flows along the western edge of Tara, the fictional home of Scarlett O’Hara—and perhaps the most famous home in all of American literature.
In reality, these Flint River bottomlands were part of a 2,527-acre cotton plantation owned by author Margaret Mitchell’s Irish great-grandfather, Phillip Fitzgerald. Margaret roamed the land as a child, and when she sat down to write Gone With the Wind, the Flint and her grandfather’s plantation, named Rural Home, evolved into Tara.