Margaret Mitchell House and Museum

The Margaret Mitchell House and Museum, located along Peachtree Street in downtown Atlanta, Georgia, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is operated by the Atlanta History Center. While living at the home, Mitchell wrote the bulk of her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Gone with the Wind. Since the home opened to the public on May 17, 1997, it has become a staple of the local community as an important literary center and event venue.

This historic home was built in 1899 and it was one of the first brick homes in Atlanta. As the area changed with the century the house was converted into the Crescent Apartments in the early 1900's. While it was originally a single family residence built for Cornelius Sheehan, Peachtree street was becoming more commercialized and the home was subdivided and remodeled in 1919.

Margaret Mitchell called it the dump when she moved into the apartment in 1925. Mitchell lived here with her husband John Marsh until the fall of 1932. When they lived in it they only owned the first floor, as it was apartment #1 in the Crescent apartments. Her only book, Gone With the Wind, published in 1936 was mostly written in this home. Her original manuscripts and typewriter are located in the home museum today. The legacy of this novel as beloved and condemned persists today as does its film adaptation from 1938. The romantic and seemingly historical perspective about the American Civil War that it provides is not entirely accurate, even though Mitchell was a member of the Atlanta Historical Society. Mitchell and her family moved out of the house in 1932 but they did not leave Atlanta. In fact she moved just a few blocks down the road.

The house had begun to deteriorate after Mitchell and her family left and it was abandoned and boarded up in 1977. The home famously survived several fires, one in the surrounding area in 1946, one in 1994 that gutted most of the interior, and another in 1995 during the restoration of the property. Mary Rose Tyler was the person who led the campaign to preserve the property despite these challenges. The Atlanta History Center helped to open the home as the Margaret Mitchell House Museum in 1997. As well as what had been a branch of a local bank, located across Crescent Avenue from the house which became the Gone With the Wind movie museum.

Margaret Mitchell House and Museum, Atlanta History Center website, accessed 5/28/18 http://www.atlantahistorycenter.com/mmh

Arson at the House, The Margaret Mitchell House. Accessed July 22nd, 2025. https://msa.maryland.gov/megafile/msa/speccol/sc5300/sc5339/000060/000000/000001/restricted/ecp-10-223/mitchell/gwtw-ars.htm.

Jones, Tommy H.. Crescent Apartments Margaret Mitchell’s “Dump”, January 2020, Accessed July 22nd, 2025. https://tomitronics.com/old_buildings/margaretmitchell/sources.html..