Historic Square

This guide to Historic Square in Atlanta opens with the predawn fire that destroyed the antebellum Davis House in November twenty twenty-three, then rewinds to nineteen sixty-three, when the square opened as Stone Acres Plantation, a cluster of relocated Georgia buildings dressed up as one estate to cash in on Gone with the Wind fever. It follows Butterfly McQueen, the actress who played Prissy in that film, hired as the plantation's first hostess and put to work greeting tourists in character inside a plantation kitchen. Look for the Thornton House nearby, hauled here from Union Point and dated to around seventeen ninety, still standing furnished in antebellum detail.