“Gone With the Wind” expert and author Jennifer W. Dickey will speak in Newnan this month about the plywood set created as Tara for the movie and the struggle to create a Margaret Mitchell House in Atlanta.
Dickey will be the speaker at a Newnan-Coweta Historical Society program at the McRitchie-Hollis Museum, 74 Jackson Street in Newnan, at 7:30 p.m. on Jan. 27. The presentation is free and open to the public.
Dickey, an assistant professor and coordinator of the Public History Certificate Program at Kennesaw State University, is the author of “A Tough Little Patch of History: Gone with the Wind and the Politics of Memory,” published in April 2014. Copies of the book will be available for purchase at the presentation.
She will discuss the plywood Tara set constructed for the movie’s filming and its journey, especially as it relates to Coweta and Dunaway Gardens. The plywood front used to create Tara for the movie was brought to Atlanta many years ago and at one point, plans called for it to be placed in Coweta County. Those plans never materialized, however.
She will also discuss the struggle to create the Margaret Mitchell House in Atlanta where Mitchell wrote the novel.
The novel and subsequent film produced by David O. Selznick have melded with the broader forces of southern history, southern mythology, and marketing to become, and remain, a cultural phenomenon. “A Tough Little Patch of History” (the phrase was coined by a journalist in 1996 to describe the Margaret Mitchell home after it was spared from destruction by fire) explores how “Gone With the Wind” has remained an important component of public memory in Atlanta through an analysis of museums and historic sites that focus on that famous work of fiction.
Dickey also explores how the book and film threw a spotlight on Atlanta, which found itself simultaneously presented as an emblem of both the Old South and the New South.
Dickey is also author of “A History of the Berry Schools on the Mountain Campus.” Prior to joining the staff at Kennesaw State, Dickey served as the campus preservation specialist and the director and curator of Historic Berry at Berry College in Rome. She has also worked as a historian for the National Park Service and for the Historic Preservation Division of the State of Georgia.
She is co-author, along with Dr. Catherine Lewis and First Lady Sandra Deal, of “Memories of the Mansion: A History of the Georgia Governor’s Mansion,” which is forthcoming from UGA Press in September 2015.
Dickey, who also served as co-editor of “Museums in a Global Context: National Identity, International Understanding,” has a master’s degree in heritage preservation and a Ph.D. in public history from Georgia State University.
