In 《Gone with the Wind》, Tara was founded by Irish immigrant Gerald O’Hara after he won 2.6 km2 land from its absentee owner during an all-night poker game. An Irish peasant farmer rather than the merchant his elder brothers (whose emigrations to Savannah had brought him to Georgia) wanted him to be, Gerald relished the thought of becoming a planter and gave his mostly wilderness and uncultivated new lands the grandiose name of Tara after the Hill of Tara, once the capital of the High King of ancient Ireland. He borrow money from his brothers and bankers to buy slaves and turned the farm into a very successful cotton plantation.

Gerald realised that the major house needed a feminine touch and domestic Gerald realised that the major house needed a feminine touch and domestic servants. Consulting with his valet, Pork, whom he had won in a card game, he was told, “what you need is a wife, and a who has got plenty of house niggers.” So Gerald set off to Savannah to look for a wife meeting this qualification.

At 43, Gerald married the 15-year-old Ellen Robillard, a wealthy Savannah-born girl of French descent, receiving as dowry twenty slaves (including Mammy, Ellen’s nurse, who became nurse to Ellen’s daughters and grandchildren as well). His young bride took a very real interest in the management of the plantation,  being in some ways a more hands-on manager than her 丈夫. 

arch：拱     a curved symmetrical structure spanning an opening and typically supporting the weight of a bridge, roof, or wall above it. 

Flint River: is a 544km long river in the U.S. state of Georgia. The river drains 21900 km2 of western Georgia, flowing south from the upper Piedmont region south of Atlanta to the wetlands of the Gulf Coastal Plain in the southwestern corner of the state. 

Tara is the name of a fictional plantation in the state of Georgia, in this novel 《Gone withe the Wind》. 

In the story, Tara is located 8 km from 一个地区（打不出来，违禁词），in Clayton County, on the east side of the Flint River about 32km south of Atlanta. 

Mitchell modelled Tara after local plantations and antebellum establishments, particularly the Clayton County plantation on which her maternal grandmother, Annie Fitzgerald Stephens (1844-1934), the daughter of Irish immigrant Philip Fitzgerald (1798 - 1880) and his American wife, Eleanor Avaline “Ellen” McGhan (1818 - 1893), was born and raised. 

Twelve Oaks, a neighbouring plantation in the novel, is now the name of many businesses and a high school stadium in nearby Lovejoy, Georgia. 

Grand Tour: a cultural tour of Europe formerly undertaken, especially in the 18th century, by a young man of the upper classes as a part of his education. 

The custom flourished from about 1660, until the advent of large-scale rail transport in the 1840s, and was associated with a standard itinerary. Through primary associated with the British nobility and wealthy landed gentry, similar trips were made by wealthy young men of other Protestant Northern European nations, and from the second half of the 18th century, by some South and North Americans. The tradition declined with the lapse of neo-classical enthusiasm and after rail and steamship travel made the journeys much easier when Thomas Cook made the “Cook’s Tour” of early mass tourism a byword. 

The typical 18th-centruy sentiment was that of the studious observer travelling through foreign lands reporting his finding on human nature for those unfortunate enough to have stayed home. The Grand Tour offered a liberal education, and the opportunity to acquire things otherwise unavailable at home, lending an air of accomplishment and prestige to the traveller. Grand Tourists would return with crates full of books, works of art, scientific instruments, and cultural artefacts and so on to be displayed in libraries, cabinets, gardens, drawing rooms, and galleries built for that purpose. 

盖茨比里 我记得就是有这个。盖茨比说他去grand tour，和人家说的grand tour根本不是一个意思