Local artist brings Tara to life in miniature

Since he first saw “Gone With the Wind” on the big screen, Sterling Everett has wanted to build a scaled replica of the storied O’Hara plantation around which much of the activity in the movie revolved. Last year, he finally had the chance when he badly needed a diversion from the concern for a family member who was seriously ill. “It was a distraction for me to focus on something I could control,” he said about the ambitious project he completed in less than a year.

His curiosity about the architecture of the house and about the complexity of building a period house as part of a movie set led Everett to the internet and to the Tom Jones site. On this site, he found not only the blueprints for the house, but the specifications for every piece of material used in its construction.

Using a 1/12 scale, he built the shell of the house from the ground up; the framing material is built from 1-inch by 1-inch posts, sheathed in 1/8-inch finely finished plywood. The same plywood has been used for all of the siding, roofing, flooring and brickwork. The texture of wood roofing shingles, of brick and of other surfaces was created with sheetrock mud.

Everett is a popular painter who is best known for his paintings of historic houses, old railroad cars, bucolic rural scenes and of cherry trees in bloom. He translates the three dimensional on a flat surface, so his perspective and his perception of proportions was an asset in determining the gradation of colors and special effects to accurately age the finishes on the house.

Following Tara’s history to Jonesboro

In his research on the final disposition of Tara, after the movie wrapped, Everett discovered the remains of the set were stored in a dairy barn in Jonesboro, after having been brought there through the efforts of the late Betty Talmadge, wife of the late Herman Talmadge, who served as Georgia’s governor from 1948-1955 and as Georgia’s United States senator from 1957-1981. Betty Talmadge wanted to build a museum to house Tara and for memorabilia about Margaret Mitchell, the Atlanta native who wrote the blockbuster “Gone With the Wind.”

Unfortunately, Betty Talmadge died before seeing her plan for the museum come to fruition and the remains of Tara are still in the dairy barn where Peter Bonner takes limited tour groups to see the famous house.

Mitchell’s great-grandfather, Philip Fitzgerald, lived in Jonesboro in the 1800s on a plantation that might have been the model for the fictional Tara. As a little girl, the author visited aunts and cousins at the house, and in her biographical information there is mention of her keen interest in the history of the Civil War and of the Reconstruction period that followed. In an era when children were seen and not heard, if they were well behaved, she did a lot of listening to the folklore.

Everett has built his model of the plantation house to reflect its appearance before it was ravaged by fire and by plundering during Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s March to The Sea, a campaign that cut a wide swath of destruction from north to south Georgia. What is left of the full scale Tara is the damaged structure. However, on a visit to the storage barn, Everett could see the actual height of the facade of the house and could appreciate the integrity of the model built for the movie.

The replicated Tara includes the outbuildings which were semi-attached to the house with breezeways or were defined by walkways. Everett houses his model in a sunroom in the home he shares with Jack Schellenberg, his partner and business agent, in one of Macon’s historic districts. They have lived in their Neel Reid-designed house for 27 years, in a neighborhood that boasts several houses designed by the same architect at the beginning of the 20th century.

Taking some license with special effects

There is one wing of Tara which Everett could not include in the model due to space constraints. “Our neighbor would not allow us to extend our sunroom over her property line,” he said, in mock surprise. However, the structure is imposing and it is built exactly to scale. Even the shutters and sash windows are operable; one of the upper story windows is open. When asked what he used for the tiny slats in the shutters or for the muntins and mullions of the windows, Everett said he used wooden coffee stirrers and Popsicle sticks, really sophisticated building materials.

The windows, built without glazing, do not detract from the house’s appearance; in the fanlight over the front door and in the side lights, there is a reflective material that makes them appear to have glass panes. Everett explained that the matte finished foil he used to dress the windows was made from the vacuum seal of a coffee can – not the kind of thing you can pick up at the building supply store.

All of the foliage and trees are made from preserved natural materials, with one exception. The dark waxy green leaves on the trees and on the jasmine that climbs up the columns and over the fascia of the porch, is fashioned from sponges, ground up in a blender and then dyed. Don’t try this at home – it will ruin the daiquiris! Considering some of the imaginative solutions to the decorating problems, Schellenberg has been remarkably long suffering.

The only model made of the interior is that of the kitchen, also part of the original scenery for the movie. The expansive fireplace, which was used for heating and for cooking, has iron pots hanging inside in front of a fire that is generated by a small electric bulb. On the mantle above the fireplace is a Quimper platter, one of a set of miniatures that Everett has in his collection. Furniture in the kitchen – the table and chairs – and on the porch – the benches – is more readily available for scale models than building materials. People who collect and build doll houses use the same sources.

Over the years since its premier in 1939, “Gone With the Wind” has generated controversy and has garnered the highest honors in the film industry. In 1989, the film was deemed important enough “historically, culturally and aesthetically,” to be preserved in the National Film Registry of the United States Library of Congress. Mitchell, the renegade author, died after being hit by an automobile on Peachtree Street in Atlanta in 1949; however, her legacy includes a social conscience that inspired her to generously endow the new medical college of Morehouse University in Atlanta.

For Everett, the fictional Tara was an architectural gem that intrigued him as a son of the South, where antebellum houses of the period surrounded him when he was growing up in Georgia. He had built only one model of a house before, one that was much less complicated, with no outbuildings. A client asked if he could paint the ancestral home of a friend in Greece, from a photograph. The small, faded image was hard to reproduce on canvas so Everett built the house in small components, much like prefabricated houses are built today, and gave the pieces to his client to arrange in a configuration that best depicted the house. Like Tara, the house, arranged from component parts, was true enough to the original that its architectural importance could be recognized.

This story was originally published March 19, 2018 at 8:57 PM with the headline "Local artist brings Tara to life in miniature."