St. Louis Has Connections To GWTW

Part One Of Two-Part Series

St. Louis, Missouri Has Ties To Gone With The Wind

Who would have thought that a city in Missouri would have anything to do with Margaret Mitchell’s classic novel Gone With The Wind? Well it does. As it turns out, the backdrop for Gone With The Windwas basically built around what happened when General William T. Sherman and his army came ripping through Clayton County where her characters, the O’Hara family, lived. Sherman is buried in Calvary Cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri.

Margaret Mitchell’s real-life family, the Fitzgeralds lived near Jonesboro, Clayton County and had a personal encounter with Sherman himself. According to a recently discovered scrapbook, Mitchell based many things from GWTW on real events and people from her great-grandparents, great aunts, aunts and grandmother’s lives. Mitchell was raised on the stories handed down by her relatives; and none of them had anything favorable to say about Sherman as they were Southerners and he was the commander of the Union Army that swept through their area, killing many of their friends.

Background on Sherman

General Sherman was born Feb. 8, 1820 in Lancaster, Ohio, the son of a State Supreme Court judge who died when he was 9. His dad left him to be raised by Thomas Ewing a wealthy neighbor. Due to Ewing’s influence Sherman went to West Point where he graduated 6^th in his class in 1840. After 13 years in the army he married Thomas Ewing’s daughter, Ellen, and left the service, moving to New Orleans. He failed at several businesses and finally ended up working at the Louisiana Military Academy in1860.

He was a patriotic person, and though he loved the South, he was emotionally upset by the collapse of the Union. Though Sherman has been seen as a vicious man, by the South, he actually sympathized with their cause at first. He always said he wished slavery did not exist but that he “would not abolish or modify it” if he could. The same was said about Margaret Mitchell’s great-grandfather Philip Fitzgerald, that he was against slavery, but he owned slaves.

When South Carolina seceded from the Union, Sherman literally cried, but when the state he was living in, Louisiana, seceded, Sherman headed for Washington, DC. His brother John was a senator from Ohio and he introduced him to Abraham Lincoln. At first Sherman didn’t like Lincoln. He wanted no part of the war and told his brother to use whatever power he had to try and stop it.

Sherman Moves To St. Louis

He moved to St. Louis and became the president of the St. Louis Railroad Streetcar Company where he worked for several months. In the years before the Civil War, St. Louis was a growing city and the railroad was being built through St. Louis. Up to then, the Mississippi River had provided most of the means of transportation with the riverboats. Now they were adding streetcars, and Sherman ran the company for a short while.

(Eventually in 1949 the main St. Louis transportation company became Bi-State Development evolving from the company Sherman had worked with, and eventually in 2003 it became Metro, so the current Metro-link and Metro Bus system has connections to General William Sherman.)

While in St. Louis, Sherman got to know Missouri Congressman Frank Blair who ended up serving under him. Blair was instrumental in blocking Missouri’s possible move to the Confederacy in 1861. Later, both Sherman and General Grant praised Blair for his leadership.

Sherman Suffers Break-down

Near the beginning of the Civil War, Sherman left Missouri for Kentucky and it has been said he had a nervous breakdown around this time.

It is interesting to note that the second Gone With The Wind director Victor Fleming was also reported to have suffered a nervous breakdown, but then both men went on to become rock-solid strong in their respective situations and of course they both had a huge impact in Gone With The Wind history, each in his own way. There were also those who doubted their nervous breakdowns.

Sherman Joins the Army

When Lincoln declared war, Sherman returned to the White House to volunteer but when Lincoln wanted to give him a commission as a brigadier general he refused it. He chose to begin as a colonel of a regular infantry—so he could advance and earn his stars without becoming a “political general” who had to be loyal to Lincoln’s administration.

General Grant Enters The Picture

Of course he eventually served as a General in the Civil War, first serving under Ulysses S. Grant, who also had ties to St. Louis. It was in St. Louis that Grant met his wife, Julia Dent at her family home—which is still standing– called White Haven. Julia was the sister of one of his Army buddies, and he had gone home with him for a visit.

Grant ended up living in St. Louis in a log cabin called Hardscrabble, not far from the Dent family plantation—which is also still standing on the grounds of Grant’s Farm (the estate of the Busch family who used to own Anheuser-Busch.) There is a whole neighborhood in South St. Louis County near where Grant lived where the streets are “General Grant Lane,” “General Sherman Drive,” “Grant Road,” etc.

In November 2010 St. Louis will host “Gateway To The Wind” A Gone With The Wind Festival with events at various venues in St. Louis including the Missouri History Museum and The Saint Louis University Art Museum. Stay tuned for Part 2: Margaret Mitchell’s take on General Sherman.

By Sally Tippett Rains, Author of The Making Of A Masterpiece, The True Story of Margaret Mitchell’s Classic Novel, Gone With The Wind (www.GWTWbook.com)

For Information on the St. Louis Gone With The Wind event, go to www.GWTWbook.wordpress.com

April was a big month in Civil War History and Gone With The Wind History

The month of April was a big month in the life of the book and movie, Gone With The Wind. It was on April 15, 1861 that the fictional O'Hara family attended the Wilkes' Barbecue and Scarlett O'Hara heard the dreaded news that Ashley Wilkes was indeed going to marry his cousin, Melanie Hamilton. It was also at the Wilkes' Barbecue that she first laid eyes on Rhett Butler. Remember that dramatic scene in the movie where Scarlett looks down and notices the dashing, handsome Rhett Butler looking up at her?

Gone With The Wind, the 1,037 page novel penned by Margaret Mitchell was a fictitious story, but as my new book, The Making Of A Masterpiece, The True Story Of Margaret Mitchell's Classic Novel, Gone With The Wind (www.GWTWbook.com) points out, much of it was based on real happenings in either Mitchell's life or the lives of people she knew. Mitchell, who was a brilliantly talented writer, worked hard to write a novel based on real historic events surrounding the Civil War, which started in April and ended in April.

It was April 12, 1861 that the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, beginning the Civil War; and April 9, 1865 that it ended when General Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox. What happened in between and shortly thereafter was the subject of Gone With The Wind, known worldwide simply by the initials, GWTW.

According to new information found in a Mitchell family scrapbook, uncovered for the first time in my book, many of the events that happened to the O'Hara family of Gone With The Wind, actually happened to the Fitzgerald family--ancestors of Margaret Mitchell. The scrapbook featured pictures from the 1800's some of which are displayed in the book.

Union General William T. Sherman, who pulled off the famous "March To The Sea" led his army through Clayton County causing destruction in its path. As described in Gone With The Wind, many Southern families lost their homes and loved ones. The real-life Fitzgerald family had a mother whose name was Ellen, and was catholic. As it turns out, Sherman's wife (who was also catholic) was named Ellen, and according to a Mitchell cousin when he saw a crucifix hanging on the wall inside the door to the Fitzgerald home, he ordered his men to spare the house--just as the O'Hara house had been spared in GWTW. The fictional Ellen O'Hara and her daughters were in bedrooms upstairs, sick--just as Ellen Fitzgerald and her daughters had been in real life.

Real Civil War events were important to the storylines in GWTW, including the Battle of Jonesboro, which was the area of Clayton County that Mitchell knew about. Her great-grandparents and great-aunts had lived through the Civil War and Mitchell had grown up hearing about it from her grandmother and great-aunts.

Jonesboro is a small town just 12 miles south of Atlanta. Margaret Mitchell's relatives lived near there in "the newly formed County" as she described it in her book. Clayton County is so proud of its GWTW heritage that their tourism website is www.visitscarlett.com. In 1969 Margaret Mitchell's brother, Stephens Mitchell gave the area the right to call itself "Home Of Gone With The Wind." The old depot in Jonesboro has been turned into the Road To Tara Museum and houses GWTW memorabilia.

Tourists looking to find memories from Gone With The Wind, either the real Civil War history or the movie and book history, have a haven in the Atlanta area. There is the Margaret Mitchell House, a Mitchell exhibit at the Public Library, and her gravesite all in Atlanta. The Holliday-Dorsey-Fife Museum in Fayetteville provides great history involving the real people behind the book; and in Marietta, GA there is a GWTW museum on the town square called "Scarlett On The Square." Sixty miles north of Atlanta, in Adairsville, GA is a lovely resort made from an old historic plantation called Barnsley Gardens. There is a museum there which tells a story and mentions that Margaret Mitchell used to visit the plantation and may have based some of her descriptions on it.

All of this is written about in detail in The Making Of A Masterpiece, The True Story Of Margaret Mitchell's Classic Novel, Gone With The Wind which is available through the webstie www.GWTWbook.com.

I spent three years doing research and interviewed over 70 people for the book. I found it to be so interesting that I would like to share some of the things I learned in this blog about Gone With The Wind. I hope you will tell your friends about this blog and also the Facebook page with the same name, which I will update whenever I have a new blog entry.

If you like reading about history you might enjoy Tom Barnes' Rock The Tower blog which you can find through Google. He wrote Doc Holliday's Road To Tombstone in which he talks about Jonesboro and the connection to Gone With The Wind.

I encourage you to look at the website dedicated to my book: www.GWTWbook.com and feel free to e-mail me with any questions. Thanks for stopping by!