Atlanta History Center Reopens Margaret Mitchell House with Reimagined ‘Gone With the Wind’ Exhibit

The Atlanta History Center reopens the Margaret Mitchell House museum in Midtown today, July 10, with a new exhibit that takes a closer look at the popularity of “Gone With the Wind” — the novel and the film — and the influence they continue to have on American culture.

Telling Stories: Gone With the Wind and American Memory is the museum’s first exhibition since it closed at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. The museum, located at the corner of 10th and Peachtree streets, includes Margaret Mitchell’s apartment — nicknamed “The Dump” — where she wrote most of the novel.

The apartment houses Mitchell’s office, where she wrote about 90 percent of the 1,000-plus-page novel first published in 1936. Photos of her grandparents now hang on the wall, alongside each of their biographies. All had close ties to the Confederacy during the Civil War; both grandfathers fought for the South.

In that environment, surrounded by supporters of the Confederacy, Mitchell learned what the Civil War meant, said Claire Haley, vice president of special projects at the Atlanta History Center. What Mitchell learned, however, is not historically accurate, as the exhibit points out.

For example, Mitchell wrote extensively about the “Lost Cause” ideology, the idea that the Civil War was unrelated to slavery, which became popular in the South, Haley said.

“She crossed that line a little bit in the book and acknowledged at times that slavery was a major cause of the Civil War, but she also really contributed to the view that glorifies the supposedly romantic and benign institution of slavery, a view that paints Reconstruction as this great evil that was unjust to white Southerners,” Haley said.

“What we’re trying to do with this exhibit is show you who Margaret Mitchell was and where she drew these different ideas and stories that come out of ‘Gone With the Wind,’ to better understand how ‘Gone With the Wind’ influenced what people thought about the Civil War and Reconstruction for decades and continues to do so today,” she said.

What’s so “crazy” about this time, said Sheffield Hale, president and CEO of the Atlanta History Center, is that while Mitchell was writing his novel on Peachtree Street, just a few miles away at Atlanta University, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote and published “Black Reconstruction” in 1935.

The goal of the exhibit is to show what was happening in the world that Margaret Mitchell lived in because of segregation and she was exposed politically, culturally and intellectually “in this very specific sphere,” Haley said. At the same time, the exhibit shows what’s happening outside of Mitchell’s sphere to make it part of the same story.

Haley said the Atlanta History Center hopes that when people walk through this exhibit, whether they love or hate “Gone With the Wind,” they will walk away with more knowledge about history, about history or about Margaret Mitchell.

“And maybe they have a little more perspective on why this book and this film continue to be so influential…how and why they continue to be relevant in our discussions that we’re having,” she said.