Tara (plantation)
Tara is the name of a fictional plantation in the state of Georgia, in the historical novel Gone with the Wind (1936) by Margaret Mitchell. In the story, Tara is located 5 miles (8 km) from Jonesboro (originally spelled Jonesborough), in Clayton County, on the east side of the Flint River about 20 miles (32 km) south of Atlanta.
Mitchell modeled Tara after local plantations and antebellum establishments, particularly the Clayton County plantation on which her maternal grandmother, Annie Fitzgerald Stephens (1844–1934), the daughter of Irish immigrant Philip Fitzgerald (1798–1880) and his American wife, Eleanor Avaline "Ellen" McGhan (1818–1893), was born and raised. However, the original plantation house of the Fitzgeralds, which was known as "Rural Home," a two-story wooden structure, was not as palatial and glamorous as the one described in the novel and/or depicted in the 1939 movie Gone with the Wind.
Twelve Oaks, a neighboring plantation in the novel, is now the name of many businesses and a high school stadium in nearby Lovejoy, Georgia.
In Gone with the Wind, Tara was founded by Irish immigrant Gerald O'Hara after he won 640 acres (2.6 km2) or one square mile of land from its absentee owner during an all-night poker game. An Irish peasant farmer rather than the merchant his elder brothers (whose emigrations to Savannah had brought him to Georgia) wanted him to be, Gerald relished the thought of becoming a planter and gave his mostly wilderness and uncultivated new lands the grandiose name of Tara after the Hill of Tara, once the capital of the High King of ancient Ireland. He borrowed money from his brothers and bankers to buy slaves and turned the farm into a very successful cotton plantation. Gerald realized that the manor house needed a feminine touch and domestic servants. Consulting with his valet, Pork, whom he had won in a card game, he was told, "whut you needs is a wife, and a wife whut has got plen'y of house niggers." So Gerald set off to Savannah to look for a wife meeting this qualification.
...
Wikipedia