Atlanta: Margaret Mitchell House

The Margaret Mitchell House is a historic house museum located in Atlanta. It was the home of "Gone with the Wind" author Margaret Mitchell. Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell was a Southerner and a lifelong resident and native of Atlanta, Georgia. She was born in 1900 into a wealthy and politically prominent family. Having no sisters to play with, Margaret said she was a boy named Jimmy until she was fourteen. She didn't learn that the South had actually lost the war until she was 10 years of age: "I heard everything in the world except that the Confederates lost the war. When I was ten years old, it was a violent shock to learn that General Lee had been defeated. I didn’t believe it when I first heard it and I was indignant. I still find it hard to believe, so strong are childhood impressions." Upon graduating from Washington Seminary in June 1918, Mitchell fell in love with a Harvard graduate, a young army lieutenant, Clifford West Henry, who was chief bayonet instructor at Camp Gordon. On September 14, while she was enrolled at Smith College, Henry was mortally wounded in action in France and died on October 17. After finishing her freshman year at Smith, Mitchell returned to Atlanta to take over the household for her father and never returned to college. Mitchell was, in her own words, an "unscrupulous flirt". She found herself engaged to five men. In April 1922, Mitchell was seeing two men almost daily; one was Berrien Kinnard Upshaw, and the other, Upshaw's roommate and friend, John Robert Marsh, a copy editor from Kentucky who worked for the Associated Press. Although her family disapproved, Mitchell and Upshaw married on September 2, 1922. The couple resided at the Mitchell home with her father. By December the marriage to Upshaw had dissolved. Mitchell suffered physical and emotional abuse, the result of Upshaw's alcoholism and violent temper. On July 4, 1925, 24-year-old Margaret Mitchell and 29-year-old John Marsh were married. The Marshes made their home at the Crescent Apartments in Atlanta, taking occupancy of Apt. 1, which they affectionately named "The Dump" (now the Margaret Mitchell House and Museum). Mitchell got a job writing feature articles for The Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine. In an article that appeared on July 1, 1923, she interviewed celebrity actor Rudolph Valentino. Mitchell was quite thrilled when Valentino took her in his arms and carried her inside from the rooftop of the Georgian Terrace Hotel. Several months after marrying John Marsh, Mitchell quit due to an ankle injury. For the next three years Mitchell worked exclusively on writing a Civil War-era novel whose heroine was named Pansy O'Hara (prior to publication Pansy was changed to Scarlett). On the evening of August 11, 1949, Margaret Mitchell was struck by a speeding automobile as she crossed Peachtree Street at 13th Street in Atlanta with her husband, John Marsh, while on her way to see the movie A Canterbury Tale. She died at age 48. Margaret Mitchell was buried at Oakland Cemetery (Atlanta). When her husband, John died in 1952, he was buried next to his wife, Margaret.