You gonna rebuild Tara?

That…my friends seems to be the daily question I receive via
email from those who found me via some news story and seek to know if it’s
true. So,…once again I explain to them that I am simply displaying the pieces,
(the windows, the doors and the side porches of Tara) rather than putting these
historic pieces into new frame work.

I appreciate the fact that folks want to walk up to Tara and
see its tall windows and stand under its front porch and be dwarfed in its
height but for now I have no place to build something like that. You see the
front columns were over 22 feet tall and the dairy barn is significantly shorter.
Today the tall window that Scarlett and the Tarleton Twins stood in front of
has to lean a bit to fit under the roofline. And today, the “flats” that I
built to hold the original windows and doors have to be strategically stationed
between rafters so that they stand straight. The building that has housed Tara
since it arrived in Betty Talmadge’s barn in 1980 has always been a tight fit
and until someone arrives with the funds and/or ability to build a bigger
building it will remain in cramped quarters.

So since there is no room at present to replicate or rebuilt
Tara in the barn, do I just close the door and leave it for someone else to
work on in a few decades? Or do I continue to pursue a plan to preserve and
present the pieces of the most iconic of all movie sets? Do I close the door
and wait until I get the right amount of funding or do I continue to build the
brand and whether help arrives or not?

In the coming weeks I will again call out my volunteers to
help me reassemble the side porch of Tara and inventory more of the assorted
small pieces of Tara that fill the shelves of our “work space”. No, I’m not
going to shut the door and go away, for in doing so I believe I would be quitting
in the midst of the contest and turning my back on the Talmadge family who
entrusted me with the task,….and letting down all the folks who have given
their support thru their attendance on the tours and their purchasing of the
Official Guide to the Saving Tara Project. This is the time and this is the
place to get the job done and so until the funds arrive I will continue to do
the job with the money in my pocket and the volunteers that have supported the
work since the beginning….we are nowhere near the finish line…but we are a hell
of a long way from the starting blocks.

“….and tomorrow is another day”!

Peter