About: Rural Home

Rural Home, also known as the Fitzgerald House, was a plantation house in Clayton County, Georgia. Built in the 1830s, the house was acquired by Philip Fitzgerald, a planter and Irish immigrant, in 1836. Rural Home was the childhood home of Annie Fitzgerald Stephens, the grandmother of author Margaret Mitchell, and was the center of a large cotton plantation. The plantation served as inspiration for Mitchell's fictional Tara Plantation in her novel Gone With the Wind. It was looted but ultimately withstood Sherman's March to the Sea during the American Civil War and functioned as a family home until the 1970s. In 1982 it was moved to a temporary site near Lovejoy. After being badly damaged in a storm, the house was demolished in 2005.