McDonald House

Edward McDonald, the son of Scottish immigrants, moved to Cuthbert, Georgia from North Carolina where he married Eliza Ross in 1843. They had 9 children together. In 1859, he built a cotton warehouse. The business was near a new railroad meaning he became extremely wealthy. According to the census of 1860, McDonald owned 24 enslaved souls.
In the 1800s, couples of wealth would have a separate parlor for the wife and husband. In Pre-Civil War Georgia, highly saturated colors, as shown in these two rooms, were all the rage. They helped reflect light, which made it easier to see by oil lamp at night. Gender roles were very defined during this period of history, becoming more constraining based on a person's wealth.
The majority of Southerners in the Chattahoochee Valley were yeoman farmers or small-scale landed farmers. As the house shows, the McDonald family was wealthier than the average family. Being a member of the merchant middle class was a less common occurrence than what you would find today in the South.

Dinner, or supper, time was much more formal than it is now. Wealthy families had the luxury of a diverse diet. Enslaved people and poorer farmers would have eaten salted pork or bacon, cornbread, corn mush, which is also called hominy, along with what was grown in their gardens. Poorer families would have cooked in a hearth in the main house itself instead of a separate but attached building like what is seen in the McDonald House.