Odes to Downtown Atlanta · Track 8 · middle

Margaret Mitchell's Crow's Nest

The Margaret Mitchell House on Peachtree — the small apartment where she wrote Gone with the Wind in the 1920s, called "The Dump" by Mitchell, now a museum. The way one window in downtown produced a 20th-c American novel. Lydia performs the museum guide.

Lyrics

[Intro]
Right this way.
Watch your head on the doorframe.
Mind the threshold.
Welcome to Apartment 1.
979 Peachtree Street.

[Verse 1]
It doesn't look like much, does it?
Margaret and her husband, John Marsh, moved in around 1925.
She wrote to a friend... she said...
"We call it 'The Dump' because that's what it looks like."
Her words.
Just these three small rooms.
This is where she recovered from the ankle injury that ended her journalism career.
This is where she got bored.
And this... is where she started writing.

[Chorus]
From this one window, overlooking Peachtree.
From this little table, with that Remington portable.
A whole world was built.
Plantations and battlefields,
Scarlett and Rhett,
all born right here, in 'The Dump.'
A story bigger than this whole city block,
typed out in a room you could cross in ten paces.

[Verse 2]
Look over here. This is a replica of the desk, of course.
The original is at the Atlanta History Center.
But this is where it sat.
Imagine the sound of the keys, day after day.
July 1929.
The air thick with heat, the smell of paper and ribbon ink.
And under the bed, a stack of manila envelopes.
Each one a chapter.
Hidden away. She didn't want anyone to know.
This was her secret history.

[Chorus]
From this one window, overlooking Peachtree.
From this little table, with that Remington portable.
A whole world was built.
Plantations and battlefields,
Scarlett and Rhett,
all born right here, in 'The Dump.'
A story bigger than this whole city block,
typed out in a room you could cross in ten paces.

[Bridge]
The walls were thin.
She could hear the clatter of dishes from the neighbor's kitchen.
The streetcar rumbling by on Peachtree.
The dust motes dancing in the afternoon light from that window.
Just an ordinary life.
In an ordinary apartment.
But the pages kept piling up in those envelopes.
A flood rising in secret.

[Outro]
She finished it in 1932.
It was published in 1936.
And the world changed.
But it all started here.
In the quiet.
In 'The Dump.'