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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 French 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.

In the first quarter of the novel the O'Haras are enthusiastically partisan in support of the Confederacy. Nevertheless, even before the tide has turned irreversibly against the Confederacy following Gettysburg and Vicksburg their plantation (and the other great plantations in the county) has already suffered major disrepair and deprivation from the war. Shortages caused by the Union blockade and Confederate requisitioning of supplies and slaves have turned the home from a house of plenty to one of subsistence and the inability to sell their cotton to England has devastated the family's once lavish income and lifestyle. The arrival of Sherman's troops in Clayton County terrifies the slaves who have not already run away or been taken as labor force by the Confederacy until by the time Union troops arrive at the plantation home itself the only slaves remaining are those who worked in the house.

Unlike the mansions and homes of most of the O'Hara's neighbors Tara is spared the torch during the Union's scorched earth policy. The life threatening illness of Ellen O'Hara and her two younger daughters (Suellen and Carreen) from typhoid causes Gerald to stand firm in the doorway of his house "as if he had an army behind him rather than before him" and earns the sympathy of a humanitarian Union officer who orders his surgeon to treat the O'Hara women with laudanum and quinine (Georgians are unable to get such medications. The officer also commandeers the house for use as Union field headquarters and as courtesy it is spared, but any movable item of value (including rosaries and mattresses) are confiscated (or stolen) and larger items vandalized by the withdrawing Union troops. The army also chop down all of the trees surrounding the home and destroy all of the plantation outbuildings and much of its furniture for firewood, slaughter the livestock and pillage the vegetable gardens and fruit orchards for their own use and destroy what is not yet ripe and even unearth graves in the family and slave cemeteries searching for valuables buried under false headstones. The most expensive blow comes when the troops torch more than $100,000 worth of baled cotton warehoused on the plantation. (The O'Haras had been unable to sell the cotton to English merchants due to the Union blockade and thus it waited for the first opportunity to be transported.) Upon their withdrawal the family and their loyal remaining slaves are left with a looted and dilapidated house, a ruined farm with no stock or work animals or farm equipment, no food and no means to produce food, indigent and soon starving in the remains of their mansion.

Ellen O'Hara dies of disease soon after the Union evacuation of Tara and her widowed oldest daughter Scarlett returns a day later, initial delight at finding the house still standing soon turning to despair at its ruination and poverty. The loss of his wife combine with hopelessness, poverty, age and an increasing reliance on whiskey (when it is available) in destroying Gerald O'Hara's sanity, leaving him a demented echo of his former self. The plantation and house continue to be visited by both rebel and Union troops throughout the war, both sides taking any remnants of food or value left to the family. Scarlett leads her complaining sisters and house slaves, all unaccustomed to hard manual labor, in harvesting the remaining cotton plants through summer and manages to salvage a few hundred pounds of the crop (enough to perhaps trade for some food) but sees her labor made useless when a small detachment of Union troops find it in a slave cabin and set it ablaze. When the soldiers are prevented from taking a gilded sword that once belonged to Scarlett's long dead father-in-law by their commanding officer (himself a veteran of the same campaigns as the sword's former owner) they express their indignation by secretly setting a wing of the house on fire as they are leaving. The family extinguishes the flames before they can spread and thus the house is spared again but further damaged.

When a Union deserter attempts to rob and rape Scarlett she kills him in self defense and vengeance. With the tiny windfall and the horse stolen from the dead soldier and the aid of Will Benteen, a Confederate private discharged after the battle that cost him a leg and nursed back from near fatal fever by the O'Haras, the land is planted once again on a tiny subsistence scale and the family is able to eek a very meager living, constantly hungry but at least not homeless or starving.

Peace returns after the war, but not prosperity. Widowed oldest daughter Scarlett manages to save the home from being seized and the family from dispossession only by deceiptfully marrying her sister's fiance and using his savings to pay the $300 in taxes levied upon the place. Though Scarlett returns to Atlanta where her fortunes rise as she takes over and expands her second husband's business interests, she shares her rising wealth with Tara and though it never achieves anything like its antebellum grandeur it becomes self supporting as a "two horse" farm and though far from rich the O'Haras are at least in a better condition than most of their neighbors.

While Scarlett is in Atlanta the sister who her husband truly loved, Suellen, conspires with the hated carpetbaggers and scalawags to defraud the victorious United States government of $150,000 by having her senile father swear an oath that his family was pro-Union during the war and as such cotton burned and damages done to the place were not justified. The plan backfires and leads to the accidental death of Gerald O'Hara. It also leads to the social ostracism of Suellen by her neighbors and even some of her relatives, though ironically it increases her worth in the eyes of her sister Scarlett, who privately believes the plan was brilliant.

Suellen remains at Tara and accepts the marriage proposal of its new manager Will Benteen. Though respected by his neighbors as a kind, intelligent and hard-working farmer whose industry is as responsible as Scarlett's money in saving Tara, and though Suellen is despises for her attempt to profit through betraying the south, the marriage is looked down upon by the O'Hara's neighbors because Suellen is the daughter of a once rich planter while Will is the son of poor white farmers. This contempt illustrates much about the refusal of all save the folks at Tara to accept the new reality of the Reconstruction era and explains why Tara survives by adapting.

Though Suellen and Will Benteen and their family are the occupants of the house and though Scarlett resides in Atlanta, Scarlett considers Tara her true home. After Scarlett's marriage to Rhett Butler, a multimillionaire from blockade running and speculation, her new husband pays to fully restore Tara to its pre-war state. The house is restored and refurnished, the outbuildings are rebuilt, its fields are again stocked with cattle and turkeys and horses and its grounds are again planted with cotton (worked now by poor white and free black sharecroppers). By the end of the novel Tara has come to resemble as closely as it possibly can the beautiful red earthed farm and whitewashed mansion it was before the war, and yet Scarlett is not able to find peace or happiness. Though she has come back from defeat and starvation to one of the wealthiest women in the south and is even far richer and more spoiled than she ever expected to be, Scarlett is miserable and empty and though Tara calls to her even there she feels little peace.

Many critics state that Tara ultimately symbolizes Scarlett's spirit or character. Initially it is a thing of pompous but crude beauty, then a place of desolation but nevertheless still standing when its neighboring homes are not, and finally a place of adornment and as beautiful as ever but ultimately bereft of life and happiness.

When Gerald first took possession of the property he and his slave/valet Polk (also acquired by Gerald in a poker game) inhabit the small four room wooden house built when the land was settled. As Gerald's wealth grows he builds minor additions to the home, but after his marriage and as his family grows the house undergoes major enlargements and renovations. Nevertheless it is not a pretty house as described in the novel but rather a large rambling structure of whitewashed brick and timber "built according to no architectural plan whatever, with extra rooms added where and when it seemed convenient", its charm coming from Ellen's grace and sophistication. From the novel's description it is known that there are at least two hallways, a full basement, two staircases and an attic.

In the legendary 1939 motion picture, the home is transformed into a pillared asymmetrical mansion quite inconsistent with the description in the novel in all save size and white-washed brick exterior (the film set does, however, have a rambling quality in line with Mitchell's description). Nevertheless, it is the movie's depiction of Tara that entered the popular imagination. However at odds with the book's description, the work of set designers Edward G. Boyle and Joseph B. Platt (among others) was nothing short of outstanding and a gauge for comparison in capturing the home before the war and, more spectacularly, the same structure in its ruined state afterwards.

A home in the Garden District of New Orleans, LA is modeled after the film set.

A reproduction plantation house, Stately Oaks, can be found just south of the Jonesboro Train Depot--Civil War reenactments and antebellum historians can be found retelling and modeling Jonesboro's authentic and Tara's fictional past.

• Jonesboro History Site