Like Atlanta, itself, the house at the corner of 10th and Peachtree streets where Margaret Mitchell wrote most of Gone With the Wind has been battered but has survived.

 The house was built in 1899 for Cornelius J. Sheehan, member of a prominent Atlanta family and the owner of Greer's Almanac. Its address was 806 Peachtree Street in the area known as "Tight Squeeze" because houses were built close together on a section of Peachtree that looped around a 30-foot ravine.

 By 1913, business began spreading up Peachtree Street, invading the previously residential area near 10th Street. The owners of the house hit on a unique solution to the commercial encroachment, according to Franklin Garrett, Atlanta's official historian:

"When the Peachtree and 10th intersection began to develop as a kind of a neighborhood shopping center with some grocery stores and drug stores and so forth, the house was rolled back and the Crescent Avenue facade was now the main entrance."

 

 The house, physically moved from Peachtree Street to the back of its lot, now acquired the address 17 Crescent Avenue. In 1919, it was converted into a ten-unit apartment building, Crescent Apartments, and its address was once again changed, to 979 Crescent Avenue.

 When Margaret Mitchell married John R. Marsh on July 4, 1925, they moved into the Crescent Apartments. They held their wedding reception in the one-bedroom, ground-floor apartment which was to be their home for the next seven years. One of the other noted residents was acclaimed decorator Edith Hills. Margaret affectionately nicknamed the house "the Dump".

 Boyd Lewis, an Atlanta radio personality and the last person to live in the house before it was abandoned, noted, "Margaret Mitchell was a journalist of the 1920s -- of the Ben Hecht, `Front Page' era -- and there was a certain cynical sense of humor that was half-affectionate and half slap-happy. `The Dump' was a perfect name for that tiny, dark, little apartment."

 Friends recalled that the couple taped their calling cards to the door. One read "Mr. John R. Marsh" and the other read "Miss Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell".

 "That used to shock some strangers but her friends all laughed and said, `That's Peggy,' " famed Atlanta journalist Ralph McGill remembered. "She was very much the feminist, the determined free woman."

 It was in 1926, while recuperating from a series of injuries, that she began writing Gone With the Wind.

 In 1932, with the book virtually complete, John and Margaret moved to another apartment on 17th Street. Over the next several decades, the house fell into disrepair, and finally was abandoned and boarded up in 1977.

 It was through the generosity of Daimler-Benz AG, based in Stuttgart, Germany, that funds finally were obtained to restore the house.